Shades of ‘Ginger Snaps’ and ‘Mean Girls’ in the impressive feature debut from Malaysian writer-director Amanda Nell Eu. Zaffan (Zairizal) is the free-spirited and popular twelve-year-old girl at a conservative Islamic religious girls’ school. We are intr…
Sprinklings of magic realism enliven this slightly staid drama from writer-director Soudade Kaadan. The title in Arabic means ‘the displacement of souls, water and people’. It revolves around a family who have remained in their family home in a Damascus t…
As well as a faithful follower and advocate of the British/Hungarian filmmaking duo, director and film scholar Martin Scorsese also has a personal stake in Powell’s life. As a young director, Scorsese sought Powell, who was then a virtual recluse after hi…
Alice Rohrwacher’s latest is a typically freewheeling and lyrical tale set in 80s Tuscany. It’s also her most enjoyable picture to date. Josh O’Connor is Arthur, a shabby, disreputable-looking English archaeological scholar, just released from prison. He …
Writer-director Naverriani’s picture is a slow-burning but deeply affecting feminist portrait of a middle-aged woman living life to her own rules. Forty-eight-year old Etero runs a drab supermarket in a small Georgian village. Most of her adult life was s…
Echoes of Hirokazu Koreeda’s ‘Nobody Knows’ in its depiction of children left to their own devices in this occasionally harrowing but hopeful semi-autobiographical picture from Mongolian writer-director Purevdash. Ulzii (Uurtsaikh) is a gifted fourtee…
While it has its moments and boasts striking visuals, writer-director Alex Garland’s latest, an episodic wartime road movie, feels like a missed opportunity. It’s set in a dystopian future where Florida and Texas, the ‘Western Forces’ have seceded from th…
Sam Taylor-Johnson’s already controversial biopic of late singer Amy Whitehouse (the director’s second Brit biopic after Lennon picture 2009’s ‘Nowhere Boy’) more or less succeeds despite some flaws and an extended running time. It starts like fairly stan…
This prequel to the 1976 horror classic ‘The Omen’ feels substantially more than mere franchise-milking thanks to some strong performances and muscular direction from first-time feature helmer Arkasha Stevenson. ‘Game of Throne’s’ Nell Tiger Free is Marga…
Directed by the artist’s son Neo Sara, this solo concert performance, the final, from the late, great Ryiuichi Sakamoto is a fitting farewell to the Japanese musician who died a year ago of cancer. It’s an austere affair rendered in pristine black, white …
The debut feature from writer-director Milena Aboyan is an impressive and commendably nuanced feminist drama. Bayan Layla is the titular character, a modern twenty-two-year-old German-Kurdish woman who is about to be married to the more traditional Nasim …
Veteran director Marco Bellocchio's historical drama has a solid, based-on-a-true-story premise, but the execution is middlebrow. It’s 1858 and Jewish man Solomone Mortara (Alesi) lives with his wife Marianna (Ronchi) and several children in Bologna. Thei…
British director Samuel’s stoner biblical comedy, the follow-up to his supremely confident Western ‘The Harder They Fall’, feels less sure-footed. Stanfield is Clarence, the opportunistic twin brother of apostle Thomas. A frantic scene-setting opening see…
Fifty years into a career which debuted with the astonishing, poetic ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’, Spanish director Victor Erice’s fourth feature, his first in thirty years, is a typically lyrical and semi-autobiographical examination of memory, identity, …
Garrone’s best film since the classic ‘Gomorra’ follows two Senegalese teens as they embark on a perilous journey to Italy. Excellent newcomer Sarr is Seydou a sixteen-year-old who lives just outside of Dakar in a one-bedroom house with his mother and lit…
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow up to his sublime Haruki Murakami adaptation ‘Drive My Car’ is a more oblique, but endlessly compelling affair. The setting is Mizubiki, a small woodland village just outside of Tokyo. Woodcutter Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) lives wit…
Shades of Abbas Kiarostami's 'Close-Up' in director Ben Hania's audacious experimental picture, a documentary come dramatization come therapy session that blurs the boundaries between realism and drama while investigating a family's complex history. It fo…
The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 science fiction novel picks up the pace and lightens the tone a little following its ponderous predecessor. Like David Lynch’s inspired/bonkers/incomprehensible 1984 version,…
A top-flight cast are wasted in this misfiring period Britpic, based on the true story of a 20s coastal town scandalised by an obscene letter campaign conducted by a mystery writer. The strait-laced and pious Edith (Colman) lives with her spiteful father …
This riveting German drama begins as a social realist-style tale before shifting to intense psychological thriller. Benesch is Carla, a liberal and committed Polish maths and PE teacher working at a German high school. A series of thefts has occurred at t…
Director Koreeda returns to his native Japan after five years for this typically affecting if distractingly complex ‘Rashomon’-style triptych scripted by Sakamoto Yuji. It begins with an eleven-year-old boy Minato (Soya) observing a fire at a hos…
Adapted from Sara Varon’s graphic novel, Spanish director Pablo Berger’s picture is a charming and affecting portrait of loneliness and companionship in the big city. It’s the 80s and Dog, a dog, is tired of rattling around his apartment and eating TV din…
Zar Amir Ebrahami, star of the excellent Iran-set thriller ‘Holy Spider’, shifts to more low-key fare with this affecting 90s set Australian drama, a semi-autobiographical tale from writer-director Noora Niasari. Ebrahami is the titular character, an Iran…
Romanian writer-director Jude’s follow-up to ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ is a typically anarchic, discursive, sprawling satire on workplace culture and vulture capitalism, dotted with moments of insight and brilliance, and soundtracked to a combinati…
Argentinian writer-director Moreno’s wildly ambitious film begins like a larky heist picture before transforming into an existential meditation on loneliness, freedom, and desire. Morán (Elias) is a meek single bank clerk tired of his wage slave routine i…
Writer-director Franco’s film is a touching story of two troubled souls finding a connection. Chastain is Sylvia, a care home employee. A single mother and recovering alcoholic Sylvia broadly avoids socialising and lives in a small Brooklyn apartment with…
Writer and Director Leo Leigh’s debut fiction feature, Sweet Sue, is a bleakly comic story about lives imperfectly lived, complicated relationships and, at times, abject misery, lifted from lasting gloom by lashings of absurdity, dark humour, and strong c…
Despite their huge influence on soul, jazz and hip-hop on both sides of the Atlantic, British band Cymande are presently still best known mainly to seasoned crate diggers and rare groove aficionados. This documentary should introduce them to a bigger audi…
Septuagenarian German director Wenders shows no sign of slowing down with this, his second release in under four months, following ‘Anselm’ his haunting profile documentary of artist Anselm Kiefer. Co-written by Takuma Takasaki, his latest profiles Hiraya…
DuVernay’s time-juggling, globe-straddling picture, based on the nonfiction book ‘Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents’ by Isabel Wilkerson is ambitious but flawed. Ellis-Taylor plays Black author Wilkerson. It begins in the aftermath of the shooting of …
This multi-layered comedy drama, the debut feature of Cord Jefferson, adapted from the book ‘Erasure’ by Percival Everett, plays like a literary and more artful take on 'Bamboozled'. Jeffrey Wright is Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison a writer and disaffected lec…
Like his previous book adaptation ‘Under the Skin’, director Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of the 2014 Martin Amis novel strips away most of the narrative, as well as Amis’s dark humour, for a stark and rigidly formalist depiction of the life of concentrat…
This history of the London repertory cinema, famous for its eclectic programming, is suitably rambunctious and freewheeling, even if the self-mythologizing is occasionally a bit much. Formed from a defunct Socialist collective, The Other Cinema, The Scala…
The first home-grown Godzilla film since 2016’s ‘Shin Godzilla’ winds the clock back to the aftermath of WWII to immensely satisfying and thematically rich effect. A 1944 prologue on Pacific island Odo has kamikaze pilot Kōichi (Kamiki) feigning a mechani…
This Paul ‘Paddington’ King-helmed prequel to the 1971 Gene Wilder-starring ‘Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’ has its moments but suffers from an undercooked, overly sugared narrative and lack of momentum. A rousing opening has Wonka (Chalamet) saili…
This impressively assured feature debut from writers-directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping is a consistently compelling erotic thriller fronted by excellent performances from the lead duo. Stewart-Jarrett is Londoner Jules aka fearsome drag queen div…
Stirring and genuinely enlightening and frank, the latest documentary from Julie ‘RBG’ Cohen profiles three American intersex persons, while charting the troubled history of how intersex folk, until shockingly recently, were regarded and treated by the me…
Septuagenarian director Wenders’ restless spirit shows no signs of abating with this visually beautiful and meditative portrait of German painter and sculpture Anselm Kiefer, presented in immersive 3D. Born shortly before the end of WWII, making him a con…
The latest from venerable Studio Ghibli director Miyazaki, based on the WWII set novel, feels very much like a valedictory effort with its thematic call-backs to earlier pictures. It’s 1944 and twelve-year-old boy Mahito (Soma Santoki) and his father Shoh…
The Scorsese influence hangs heavy over this 60s-set biker movie, inspired by the photography book of the same name by Danny Lyon. The picture uses Danny’s interviews with his subjects as a framing device. In a singsong gossipy voice, Kathy (Comer), a chi…
British director Oldroyd follows up his austere feature debut, the Durham set-period drama ‘Lady Macbeth’, with this stylish noir set in 60s Massachusetts. Eileen (McKenzie) is a secretary at a prison and a dowdy, listless loner who dislikes her fellow wo…
Filmed in Russia just prior to the invasion of Ukraine, this illuminating and visually striking documentary profiles Gennadiy aka Gena Marvin, a male-born Russian drag queen and artist provocateur. We meet Gena in her hometown of Magadan where she lives w…
Small but perfectly formed, Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismäki’s first film in six years is a sweetly melancholy and tentatively hopeful depiction of a will-they won’t-they romance between two downtrodden Helsinki residents. Ansa (Pöysti) is a lonely,…
The second solo-ish outing for Brie Larson’s powerful superheroine busts a gut to be breezy, light and propulsive, but is undone by scrappy execution. The frantic introduction has New Jersey teen Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel (Vellani) being zapped from her …
Justine Triet's masterfully-executed procedural thriller works both as a tense courtroom drama and an endlessly fascinating character study. Hüller is Sandra Voyter, a successful German writer living in a secluded but smart chalet in the French Alps with …
This gripping documentary about North Koreans trying to flee the oppressive regime is as disturbing and harrowing as any horror film. It focuses on the fascinating South Korean Christian Pastor, Seungeun Kim, who, partly motivated by the death of his youn…
Australian director-co-writer Kitty Green’s follow-up to her deeply unsettling me-too drama ‘The Assistant’ is a well-acted and nuanced study of sexual politics, but ultimately feels less than the sum of its parts. Garner (who also starred in ‘The Assista…
The ever-daring Tilda Swinton doubles up here playing a daughter and her mother in this atmospheric chiller from collaborator writer-director Joanna Hogg. Filmmaker Julia Hart and elderly mother Rosalind (both Swinton) and Rosalind’s dog Louis (Louis) hav…
This impressive feature debut from writer-director Adura Onashile charts the experiences of a pair of refugees. The troubled Grace (French actor Lukumuena from ‘Divines’) has recently arrived in the UK from West Africa with her eleven-year-old daughter Am…
French documentarian Philibert is best known here for his celebrated documentary about a village school ‘Être et Avoir’. His latest is an equally thoughtful, humane and leisurely-paced profile of the disparate visitors who visit the L’Adamant Day Centre, …
Molly Manning-Walker’s impressively assured feature debut charts an exhaustingly hedonistic week’s holiday for a trio of sixteen-year-old Brit women and its sour comedown. Their A-levels just out of the way, Skye (Peake), Em (Lewis) and the ebullient Tara…
Following his last picture, the illuminating Polly Styrene documentary ‘Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché’, director Paul Sng profiles another pioneering female artist, once again drawing on the testimony of friends and family. Patricia ‘Tish' Murtha was born i…
Todd Haynes reunites with Julianne Moore to deliver his best film since ‘Carol’. Moore is Gracie, a middle-class housewife and part-time cake maker, who is married to the handsome and much younger Korean American Joe (Melton). They have twins who are abou…
Scorsese’s long-awaited adaption of David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book ‘Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI’ is immaculately-rendered, but unruly and overlong. A pacey opening illustrates via fake newsreel footage how…
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