This timely and impassioned U.S. documentary charts the experiences of a beleaguered group of librarians and their efforts to maintain independence under an increasingly authoritarian and reactionary government who are attempting to ban books that promote…

Inspired by true events, French director Millet’s film works both as a gripping slow-burning thriller, and as a study of alienation, loneliness and trauma. We first encounter Syrian man Hamid (Bessa) in the back of a dark, frighteningly cramped truck with…

Sam Riley gets his best role since his star-making turn as Ian Curtis in 2007’s ‘Control’ in this compelling if slightly overlong noir drama. He is Tom, a rangy good-looking middle-aged tennis coach at a luxury hotel in Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands…

As the title suggests, British-French writer-director Jethro Massey’s debut feature aims for Nouvelle Vague discursive whimsy a la Jacques Rivette, but there is something affected and ill-judged about its execution. Galiana is Paul, an American ex-pat pho…

Australian director Justin ‘Snowtown’ Kurzel’s ‘Ellis Park’ is an unorthodox documentary: part profile of Dirty Three violinist and Nick Cave collaborator Warren Ellis, part depiction of the musician’s attempts to open a wildlife sanctuary. The early sequ…

A troubled Irish boy on the cusp of adulthood makes a new start in this touching and amusing Cork-set Irish drama. Power is the titular boy, a brooding, short-tempered seventeen-year-old recently ejected from his latest foster home. The authorities have t…

Swiss-American director Jasmin Gordon’s feature debut is a challenging study of unconventional motherhood. Call My Agent’s Ophélia Kolb is Jule, a single mother to three young children: Claire, Loic and Sami (Saurer, Besnier and Devaux). In the film’s ope…

Following her cracking turn as the stressed-out educator in school drama 'The Teacher's Lounge', Leonie Benesch is equally as impressive as an extremely taxed nurse at a short-staffed Swiss hospital in this gripping thriller. She is Floria, a kindly but p…

Australian writer-director siblings Danny and Michael Philippou’s follow-up to their scary addiction allegory debut 'Talk to Me’ is a genuinely unnerving, at times horrifying picture, with indelible images and a supremely creepy performance from Sally Haw…

Writer-director Ari Aster’s follow-up to the bold but self-indulgent and patience testing ‘Beau is Afraid’ is a state-of-the-nation COVID-era set satire/Western that aims high but feels too sprawling and unfocussed. A typically committed Joaquin Phoenix i…

Swiss animator Claude Barras widens his canvas following the small but perfectly formed 2016 orphanage-set classic ‘My Life as a Courgette’ for a gorgeously rendered eco fable set in Borneo. It begins, harrowingly, with the murder of a female orangutan wh…

Inspired by a striking black and white portrait photograph that co-director and photographer Alys Tomlinson took six years ago while documenting Christian pilgrimage sites in Eastern Europe, this meditative and deeply humane documentary is an intimate, in…

Taking its title from a Sonic Youth song, which also features in the film, Slovenian director Urška Djukić’s debut is a swooning and intense study of a sixteen-year-old Slovenian girl struggling with her burgeoning sexuality. Lucia (Ostan) is the latest a…

This mockumentary/ rockumentary (if you will) charts the 90s U.S. alt rock band’s career, their legacy, and reunion in a non-linear, freewheeling, and highly fanciful manner, while spoofing trad music biopics. Along with archive and contemporary actual fo…

Adapted from the stage play and set over three days in the life of the painter, Johnny Depp’s unruly study of the Italian artist, is a frustrating, at times baffling biopic. We first encounter Modigliani (Scamarcio). in WW1 Paris where he is sketching s…

Screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut, an adaption of Deborah Levy’s novel ‘Hot Milk’ feels oddly and unnecessarily elliptical, particularly coming from the writer of interesting and nuanced dramas ‘Ida’ and ‘Collette’. It takes place in Al…

Madeline Hunt Elrich’s dreamy and languid documentary profiles a woman ‘who didn’t want to be remembered’, the writer, feminist and anti-colonial activist Suzanne Césaire. Césaire was also a leading figure in the Surrealist movement in the Caribbean in th…

‘I always thought it could be a good idea for a film’ ponders a character at the beginning of this playful and sexy ‘anti-romantic’ comedy from director-co-writer Jonas Trueba. After a decade and a half together, middle-aged Madrid hipster couple – filmm…

An already dysfunctional family is shaken by news that both of their parents are about to die in the sprawling but richly-themed German drama from writer-director Matthias Glasner, split into five separate chapters. In the first, ageing mother Lissy Lunie…

The John Wick series gets a much-needed shot in the arm with this fun and frantic spinoff, set between episodes three and four. It opens with ballet-loving child Eve Macarro (Victoria Comte) witnessing her father being gunned down by the loathsome Cha…

This episodic big screen adaptation of Raynor Winn’s memoir 'The Salt Path' is in turns lyrical and harrowing. After losing their house after a bad investment and subsequent legal problems, Raynor (Anderson) and her husband Moth (Winn), decide to hit the …

Ben Rivers’ elusive and lyrical documentary sees the director once again profiling the reclusive Scotsman Jake Williams following Rivers’ 2011 picture ‘Two Years at Sea’. That film chronicled Williams achieving his dream of moving to the forest after his …

Set somewhere in Britain in the in late 18th century, writer-director (and founding member of the Beta Band) John McLean’s follow up to his revisionist Western ‘Slow West’, is a frustratingly unfocused affair. It begins with a sequence in which a young Ja…

Despite its jaunty title, French-writer Katell Quillévéré’s film is a maudlin and middlebrow decade-spanning drama. It begins effectively enough with archive footage of victory parades in France, as GIs and locals celebrate the end of the war, before jarr…

Graham Fellows, partly channelling his John Shuttleworth persona, is the best reason to watch this underwhelming British comedy. He is Kev Maddams, a green-fingered gardening enthusiast Grandad in Norfolk’s Fens district. When two school friends Jayce (Da…

French-Tunisian-Moroccan journalist and filmmaker Meddeb’s vital and rousing documentary examines the troubled situation in Sudan from ground level, while nodding to the country’s rich literary history. In 2019 Meddeb embedded herself with young Sudanese …

The darkly humorous horror Final Destination series proves surprisingly durable with this, the sixth, does-what-it-says-on the-rusty-tetanus-spiked-tin entry. It begins in 1968 as young woman Iris Campbell (Bassinger) and her fiancé Paul (Lloyd-Jones)…

More than a regular Nicolas Cage gurning session, thankfully, Irish director Finnegan’s film is a lurid and feverish phycological thriller that looks to 70s Australian and U.S. cinema for inspiration. Cage is The Surfer, a middle-aged man returning to…

Ostensibly a documentary about locating the real person behind the image of Mavis Beacon, the African American woman who fronted the widely used educational typing software program, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, director Jazmin Jones’s freewheeling film sp…

Not quite the knockabout lark mooted by the trailers, the latest Marvel outing admirably strives for something deeper but is undone by structural issues. When we catch up with assassin Yelena Belova (Pugh) she is still mourning the death of her adopti…

Part wry epistolary character sketch, and part song and dance performance piece, Forsyth and Pollard’s film ingeniously and catchily profiles the titular woman via songs by Icelandic singer-songwriter Emilíana Torrini, as well as readings of letters Flowe…

A big hit in its native France, this slightly rote inspirational feelgood film is elevated by a pair of endearing central performances. Thibault (Lavernhe) is a globe-trotting feted orchestra conductor based in Lille. Thibault’s seemingly charmed life is …

Shades of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ in this deliriously erotic but flawed Brazilian noir-tinged thriller. It opens with handsome twenty-one-year-old Heraldo (Xavier) frolicking about on the beach with his older brother Jorge (Capivara). Heraldo is …

This documentary about the second-generation Detroit techno artist, producer and label owner is disappointingly, and ironically given his dancefloor-oriented work, inert. Craig was born in a rundown Detroit, to supportive middle-class parents (interviewed…

Mining a wealth of material that became available from the estate of the controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, following her death at the age of 102 in 2003, Veiel’s film is an attempt to discover whether the artist was an active Nazi collaborator or …

Sympathy for inheritance taxpayers in this handsomely rendered documentary profile of a trio of siblings as they prepare to sell their late mother’s grand but shabby pile, Cumnor Place in Oxfordshire. The house was acquired, it is revealed, after the disc…

Ryan Coogler’s bizarre, overstuffed picture, a horror flick and commentary on race in America, which structurally and thematically looks to ‘From Dusk to Dawn’ may have worked as a persuasively blunt ninety-minute B-movie, but at two-and-a-quarter hours, …

Alex Garland’s vivid and harrowing war picture is based upon the experiences of communications officer Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza and focuses on one specific incident during the Iraq war in 2006. Mendoza also co-directed the film, and the script is taken from …

In a climate of overlong films, sequels, and IP abuse, horror aces Blumhouse can normally be relied upon to turn in standalone, brisk genre pieces. Their latest film to, ahem, drop, a high-concept thriller with horror elements is no exception. Meghann…

Writer-director Louise Courvoisier’s feature debut is an appealing coming-of-age tale set in rural France. Totone (Faveau) is an eighteen-year-old who spends his days hanging out with this friends Jean Yves (Bernard) and Francis (Baudry), drinking and occ…

Belgian director-co-writer Van Dijl’s film is a slow burning and nuanced but gripping drama thriller. Remarkable newcomer Tessa Van den Broeck is Julie, a sixteen-year-old intensely focused tennis ace from a working class background, who, thanks to a scho…

Revolving around the 1972 John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band’s ‘One to One’ concert at Madison Square Garden, this fascinating and keenly paced documentary charts John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s arrival in New York City at a turbulent time in US history, and…

This loose Irish remake of Gianni Di Gregorio’s 2008 Italian picture ‘Mid-August Lunch’ loses some of the gentle melancholy of the original but features some amusing and affecting moments. Edward (McArdle) is a queer up-and-coming novelist who lives with …

Drawing on archive clips of Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, illuminating interviews with contemporaries and friends, and readings from her letters by actor Jessie Buckley, this documentary is an impressively rounded portrait of a charismatic and complex figu…

Finnish London based filmmaker Mikko Mäkelä’s film is an undercooked charter study elevated by an impressive central performance from Ruaridh Mollica. He is Max, a young Scottish journalist and aspiring novelist, working in London. Max is impatient for hi…

Shades of Chabrol but with a more absurdist streak in the latest from French genre tweaker Guiraudie, writer-director of singular thriller, ‘Stranger by the Lake’. It begins with Jérémie (Kysyl) a soft-spoken, good-looking thirtysomething arriving in Sain…

British Indian writer-director Suri’s picture works both as a slow-burning thriller and as a blistering expose of corruption, misogyny, and prejudice. Goswami is the titular character, a recently widowed middle class Indian woman whose police officer husb…

Gia Coppola’s film feels like an obvious attempt to do for star Pamela Anderson what ‘The Wrestler’ did for Mickey Rourke. It feels heartfelt enough but underwhelms on the script front. Anderson is Shelly Gardner, a fifty-seven-year-old dancer who has per…

Ozon’s latest, a far more restrained and nuanced offering than the enjoyably broad ‘The Crime is Mine’, begins as a fairly standard middlebrow drama before switching to something far more slippery and compelling midway. Michelle (Vincent) is enjoying her …

Portuguese Scotland-based filmmaker Carreira makes an impressive directorial debut with this unsettling exploration of modern work culture. Aurora (Santos, excellent) is a young Portuguese woman working at a vast online delivery warehouse or wryl…

The influence of Wes Anderson hangs heavy over this misfiring Indian comedy horror, which is almost redeemed by a great turn from Radhika Apte. Following her arranged marriage to heavy-drinking schlub, Pathak (Gopal), Uma (Apte) moves into her husband’s s…

Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis’ gorgeously rendered, dialogue-free animation is part riveting adventure a la Disney’s ‘The Incredible Journey’ and part ecological fable. It opens with black cat, Cat, stealing a fish from a pack of dogs who give chase. …

This artful but frank documentary depicts the loving but turbulent relationship between successful American photographer Joel Meyerowitz and his British partner Maggie Barrett. Maggie is an author but has only produced one self-published book. Joel is a t…

Documentarian Shulman’s cine-portrait of British photographer Martin Parr is as bracing and enjoyable as a 99 in a coastal sea breeze. The picture charts the career of the photographer from his early black and white, more reportage style, pictures of work…