This blistering debut from Belgian writer-director Laura Wandel is a wholly immersive and riveting depiction of a child’s first few days at school. When we first meet seven-year-old Nora (the remarkable Vanderbeque) she is hanging on to the leg of her fat…

The moving and visually striking fiction feature debut from documentary filmmaker Tatania Huezo is a disturbing but eerily beautiful portrait of a group of young girls in a mountain community in a small mountain village in Mexico. Eight-year-old Ana (Gonz…

This reality-bending portrait of an intensely competitive rower marks a fantastic debut for writer-director Hadaway. Isabelle ‘Orphan’ Fuhrman is Alex Dall, a queer young woman who, on starting at the foreboding-looking Wellington College, signs up for th…

This bewitching fable-like tale traces a young woman’s desperate odyssey through early 20th century Italy. Agata (Cescutti) lives in a small coastal town in North Eastern Italy. She is distraught when she gives birth to a stillborn baby and no comfort is …

Paul Verhoeven brings his usual lurid, subtlety-phobic approach to this story of a nun’s sexual awakening, an adaption of Judith Brown’s admittedly already lurid-sounding book ‘Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy’. A prologue sho…

Adapting from a 2011 novel, Finnish co-writer-director Kuosmanen imbues a rugged energy into a familiar odd couple narrative. Laura (Haarla) is a lovelorn Finnish archaeology student leaving Moscow after an affair with one of her lecturers, and taking a t…

This supremely assured feature debut from Croatian-born director/co-writer Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic works as a psychological thriller and a feminist coming-of-age tale. Filipović is Julija, a teenage girl living with her mother Nela (Curcic) and domine…

Committed performances from a top-flight cast aren’t enough to rescue this uncharacteristically soapy drama from Italian writer-director Nanni Moretti. Split into three parts that are separated by five years, it chronicles the travails of three neighbouri…

Director: Craig Roberts Another week, another Britfilm about an eccentric underdog, based on a true story. Rylance is Maurice Flitcroft a forty-six-year-old crane driver from Barrow-in-Furness. When it looks like redundancy is pending, Flitcroft decides,…

Shades of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Mirror’ in this, the feature debut of writer-director Catarina Vasconcelos, an affecting and lyrical memoir of a Portuguese family’s history. Henrique, the director’s grandfather married Beatriz or ‘Triz’ on her 21st birthday…

Few would have expected this, the Dark Knight’s first standalone picture in ten years, to revisit the spooky whimsy of the Tim Burton era, or the camp maximalist onslaught of Joel Schumacher’s run, but this latest incarnation so is so relentlessly grim an…

Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier’s third instalment of his loose ‘Oslo trilogy’ is a masterful character study that is likely to strike a rich chord with millennials – and everyone else. We first encounter Julie (Reinsve), a twenty-nine-year-old si…

This bittersweet look at the lives, loves and ambitions of three Parisian twentysomethings, adapted by Céline Sciamma from the graphic novels of US cartoonist Adrian Tomine, signals a slight change of gear for the normally intense drama-inclined Audiard. …

This rousing debut feature from writer-director Blerta Basholli skilfully melds an inspirational feminist tale, based on a true story, to a realistically knotty depiction of the aftermath of war. During the 1998-1999 Kosovo war many women lost their husba…

Based on real accounts and mainly captured in severe, immediate close-ups with minimal dialogue, this gripping, harrowing and all-too timely picture charts a young Iraqi refugee's fraught journey on the 'Balkan route' to Europe. Introductory title cards s…

Writer-director Barnard sticks to the council estate setting of previous films, experimental debut ‘The Arbor’ and the poetic realist ‘The Selfish Giant’, for this comparatively mainstream Bradford-set story of two disparate souls finding common ground. T…

Unfolding over three time periods, this deftly-executed drama revolves around the relationship between an imprisoned, unapologetically gay man, and a fellow con. It start with whirring projector footage of some gay men cottaging in a German bathroom. It i…

A washed-out porn star tries to rebuild his life in Sean Baker’s fantastic and cheekily subversive satire. Covered in bruises and with seemingly no possessions, Mikey Saber (Baker) is riding the bus back to his Texas Gulf Coast hometown after an absence o…

A transgender New Zealander attempts to re-establish relationships with his widowed father and friends after a decade away in this eloquent, affecting and timely examination of identity, acceptance and forgiveness. Caz (Carrad) is the Trans activist retur…

Writer-director Russell Owen’s feature debut, now out on DVD and Blu-ray, is a flawed but strikingly-mounted horror. Tom Hughes is the portentously named Eric Black, a recent widower who, determined to be alone, takes a job as a shepherd on a remote islan…

This thematically-rich fantasy from Japanese writer-director Mamoru ‘Mirai’ Hosoda mixes an awe-inspiring array of anime styles to often beautiful effect. Suzu (voiced by Nakamura) is an awkward seventeen-year-old high-schooler living in a rural village w…

This bold and original animation documents the refugee experience via the experience of one Afghan immigrant. It’s based on (and features in voiceover) recorded interviews the Danish director Rasmussen conducted with an academic called Amin (the name has …

The simple fable-like story and brief running time belie a complex and thematically rich portrait of a mother and daughter in contemporary Chad. Amina (Souleymane) is a practicing Muslim and single mother living on the outskirts of the Chad capital N’Djam…

The second part of writer-director Joanna Hogg’s cinematic bildungsroman picks up where the last one left off. Film student Julie (Swinton Byrne), still numbed after the death of her upper-class junkie boyfriend, Anthony, is staying with her upper-middle …

So extraordinary are the details of this wildly enjoyable Benwell-set tale, based on real events, it seems unbelievable it is not better know. It’s 1961 and the magnificently-named Kempton Bunton (Broadbent) is a sixty-something working class bloke of no …

While there may not be too much that is new here to fans, this documentary about the comedic polymath, one of the major figures of the first half of the 20th century, is exceptionally-well assembled and features a range of fascinating archive footage. Cha…

Swiss writer-director Fred Baillif’s vérité-style Swiss drama is an unvarnished but empathetic portrait of the residents and social workers in a residential care home for teenage girls in Geneva - La Mif means ‘the fam’ or ‘the family’. The narrative is b…

Part one of Dennis Villeneuve’s long-anticipated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi opus Dune, the second version of the ‘unfilmable’ book to make it to the screen, doesn’t quite do justice to the classic novel, but it comes pretty close, and unlike Dav…

Tilda Swinton in airy, slightly distracted mode proves the perfect vessel for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s brand of wryly surreal, haunting and meditative cinema in this, his first picture outside his native Thailand. She is Jessica, an English botanist …

Director: Romola Garai Stars: Alec Secăreanu, Carla Juri, Imelda Staunton Actor Romala Garai’s debut directorial feature is an ambitious and technically accomplished but flawed horror picture. Tomas (Secăreanu from ‘God’s Own Country’) i…

Iranian writer-director Asghar 'The Separation' Farhadi's latest is another richly complex and quietly engrossing moral fable in which a small deception snowballs into a full-blown social media-enabled crisis. Amiable, soft spoken sign maker Rahim (Jadidi…

A middle-class family in meltdown (in New York) might not sound like the most promisingly original proposition, but director Karam’s adaptation of his own play distinguishes itself via fine performances and some unsettling atmospherics. Young couple Brigi…

Guillermo del Toro’s strengths often feel like weaknesses in this immaculately-realised but fussy and overlong remake of the classic 1947 film noir picture. Cooper is Stan Carlisle, a lowlife leading an itinerant lifestyle after torching a house in myster…

Shades of John Boorman’s wartime memoir ‘Hope and Glory’ and Woody Allen’s paean to family life ‘Radio Days’ in Kenneth Branagh’s shamelessly crowd-pleasing, but genuinely charming, funny and poignant semi-autobiographical tale of growing up in the titula…

Penélope Cruz always does her best work with Pedro Almodóvar, and her performance here, as a woman coming to terms with life-changing revelations, is possibly her best to date. She is Janis, a Madrid-based photographer having an affair with a married man,…

Those looking for insights into what made genius African-American choreographer Alvin Ailey tick may be disappointed, but Jamila Wignot’s documentary works beautifully as an almost impressionistic representation of the poetic and thrilling newness of the …

Director: Julia Docournau Stars: Agatha Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier French writer-director Julia Docournau’s follow-up to teen cannibal picture ‘Raw’ is an unapologetically extreme slice of pure cinema likely to inspire …

When it was announced that Stephen Spielberg was to direct a new cinematic adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s musical masterpiece ‘West Side Story, itself an NYC-set update of Romeo and Juliet playing out between the Latino and white c…

Cracking performances from Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem are pretty much the sole reason for seeing this underwhelming biopic from wordy wordsmith Aaron Sorkin about comedienne and ‘I Love Lucy’ star Lucille Ball and her Cuban-American band leader husba…

Co-written with Icelandic author Sjón, director Jóhannsson’s almost unquanitifiably strange feature debut, some twelve years in the planning, is a bizarre and unsettling but weirdly affecting dark fable that is likely to divide and/or just plain baffle au…

This lean, keenly-paced but substantive and compelling profile of US tennis legend Arthur Ashe, charts his career from comparatively conformist sporting figure to his political awakening and subsequent activism. Born in segregated Richmond Virginia in 194…

An eighteen-year-old transgender woman has a stormy reunion with her estranged dad in this sensitive and handsomely-rendered Belgian family drama meets road movie. Lola (Bollaers) lives in the city with her best friend Samir (Outalbali from ‘Sex Education…

Shot almost guerrilla-style then smuggled out of Iran after the writer-director was banned from filmmaking, Mohammad Rasoulof’s meditative picture consists of four separate segments revolving around the theme of capital punishment. The first titular episo…

Bickering, blind panic and being stuck in a confined space with people you don’t care for: all the seasonal traditions are honoured in this thrilling one-shot picture set in a high-end London restaurant on a busy night in December. Graham is Andy, a troub…

A schoolteacher finds her reputation and career in deep trouble after her husband uploads their sex tape to the internet during the COVID epidemic in writer-director Radu Jude’s almost unquantifiable picture, a pornographic satirical absurdist sitcom meet…

Artfully shot in black and white, graphic novelist and filmmaker Nine Antico’s Playlist is a hip and personal study of a Parisian twentysomething’s quest for fulfilment in love and work. Sophie, excellently portrayed by Sara Forestier, is a graphic artist…

It goes off the rails in the last act, but this sequel to 1984’s ‘Ghostbusters’ (but not its 1989 sequel evidently), helmed by the son of the original’s director, is at least superior to the grimly unfunny 2016 reboot. A brief prologue shows a familiar fa…

Adapted from the short story ‘Sleeping at the Foot of the Mountain’ by Sudanese writer Hammour Ziada, director Amjad Abu Alala’s feature debut is a gorgeously-rendered if oblique fable of a young man haunted by a prophecy. Muzamil lives in a small Sufi v…

Starkly beautiful but a challenging watch, director Dénes Nagy’s accomplished debut, a WWII inaction picture, focuses mainly on the experience of one Hungarian officer in a unit charged with hunting down partisans for the Nazis while occupying a village …

Save for the odd scene there’s disappointingly little evidence of director Chloé ‘Nomadland’ Zhao’s rugged, soulful humanism in this bloated and muddled Marvel adaption. A scrolling text prologue, the first of several hefty exposition dumps, lays out how…

This adaptation of the Graham Swift novel tries hard but is never quite able to break the bonds of staid middlebrow period piece. It opens in 1920s Henley with Jane (Young) working for the Nivens, an upper-class couple devastated by the loss of both of th…

Set on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the millennium, actor-presenter Reggie Yates' affable but busy debut directorial feature plays like a very British take on ‘American Graffiti’ as it charts one night in 1999 for a trio of eighteen-year old pals and gar…

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams returns to the scuzzy crime world of his feature debut, ‘London to Brighton’ for this grisly violent revenge thriller with horror elements. Maskell is the titular character, an ex-hired heavy returning home after a ten…

High on style but running on empty for substance, Wright’s horror thriller is so derivative it feels more like curation than filmmaking, but crucially without the idiosyncratic tweak that a Tarantino would bring to the table. Jojo Rabbit’s Thomasin McKenz…