This undemanding and fairly rote but nonetheless breezy French odd couple comedy drama is elevated by its central performances.…

A psychological thriller that also serves as a political allegory, Iranian-born, Montreal- based filmmaker Foroughi’s striking debut feature, chronicles a troubled teenage schoolgirl in present-day Tehran.…

Matteo Garrone’s live-action adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 much-loved book takes the tale back to its dark folksy roots.…

Gail-Nina Anderson draws the curtains on the world.…

Director Nicholas Ray’s debut feature film was 1948’s ‘They Live by Night’, which detailed the doomed romance of two twenty-somethings. It’s being released on Blu-ray this month.…

First shown in 1968 ‘The Year of the Sex Olympics’ is one of the most original pieces of television drama ever broadcast and it’s getting released on DVD in April.…

The third foreign language masterpiece of recent months alongside ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ and ‘Parasite’, writer-director Wang ‘Beijing Bicycle’ Xiaoshuai’s panoramic and deeply affecting film...…

Writer-director Nora Fingscheidt’s feature length fiction debut, and Germany’s entry for best foreign picture at this year’s Oscars, is an intense, bruising realist drama.…

For his first picture outside of Japan, Koreeda, moves away from his trademark engagingly wistful depictions of outsiders, for this rather ill-fitting tale of an ageing French acting legend and her extended family. …

Shades of ‘Before Sunrise’ and Andrew Haigh’s ‘Weekend’ in this touching and lyrical romantic drama, the debut picture from Argentinian menswear designer turned director Lucio Castro.…

This chilly and unsettling sci-fi allegory has been given an added prescience due to recent events. Teacher Gemma (Poots) and gardener Tom (Eisenberg), are a young couple looking to buy their first house.…

Director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma has had a remarkable track record since her 2007 debut ‘Water Lilies’. This sweeping period romance is her finest and richest work to date. It’s 1770 and Héloïse (Haenel), daughter of a French countess, is returnin…

Adapted from the novella by Colin Barrett, this very impressive debut from director Rowland is a gripping and bruising drama. Set in a scuzzy rural West Ireland it tracks the downward spiral of the brutish but broadly well-intentioned ‘Arm’ (Jarvis from ‘…

Swedish-Georgian director Akin’s picture, which charts the romance between two traditional Georgian dancers, hits all the rote narrative beats, but is elevated by the novel setting and soulful central performance. Merab (Gelbakhiani) is a talented dance s…

Czech director Marhoul’s first film in twelve years (his third film in all) is a harrowing and relentlessly grim three-hour long adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s controversial 1965 novel. Non-professional lead Kotlár is impressive as ‘The Boy’ who, after be…

This genre-juggling Brazilian curio begins with a young woman Teresa (Colen) returning home for the funeral of her grandmother, the matriarch of the titular town which seems to be populated exclusively by misfits and eccentrics. There Teresa discovers tha…

Director Todd Haynes tones down the sumptuous visuals for this stirring profile of the tenacious attorney Robert Bilott who pursued chemical company DuPont for malpractice over several years. It begins in 1998 with Bilott (Ruffalo), working as a corporate…

Not quite the masterpiece mooted, but South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho’s latest genre juggler is a nimble and cheeky melange of social commentary, dark satire and horror movie. The beginning is redolent of Hirokazu Kora-Eda's ‘Shoplifting’ as we …

Writer-director Robert Eggers’ follow-up to the chilling ‘The Witch’ is an almost unquantifiably strange combination of psychodrama, bleak comedy, period bromance and hallucinatory nightmarish mood piece. It’s the 1890s and Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson) has…

Director Heller’s follow-up to the excellent ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’ dramatizes and embellishes a real-life meeting between US children’s TV star Fred Rogers and a cynical, world-weary journalist. For the uninitiated (which will be most UK viewers who …

Austrian writer-director Hausner’s oblique and elusive if stylish English language debut uses sci-fi tropes to explore themes of alienation, familial estrangement, and medicated happiness. Beecham is Alice, a single mother and senior plant breeder at a co…

Despite the all-too timely theme of how news is managed and disseminated by the authorities, Polish director Holland’s biopic of Gareth Jones, the crusading Welsh journalist, whose investigations altered the rose-tinted view of Stalinist Soviet Union, fee…

This elegiac, funny, meditative, but ultimately rousing documentary charts the efforts of a quartet of indefatigable ex-filmmakers - veteran members of the Sudanese Film Club - to set up a cinema in a small village in order to kickstart the industry. This…

Greta Gerwig’s adaptation honours Louisa May Alcott’s much-loved book while boasting a vital and contemporary feel. Ronan is first among equals as wannabe writer Jo, one of four teenage girl siblings living with their kindly mother Marmee (Dern) in a gent…

Satirist Iannucci’s latest is a fun and frantic take on the Dickens classic. Patel, leading a multi-racial cast, is the titular hero making his way through Victorian England, encountering the virtuous and not-so-virtuous poor and the capricious rich, whil…

Taika Waititi’s follow up to the larky ‘Thor Ragnarok’ is a bold-ish but flawed comedy, adapted from the novel ‘Caging Skies’ by Christine Leunens, and charts the experiences of a young boy growing up in Nazi Germany in the closing stages of WW2. Jojo Bet…

Malick returns to the WW2 period of ‘The Thin Red Line’ to chronicle the real life story of an Austrian conscientious objector. Franz Jagerstatter (Diehl) is a devout young farmer living in a high altitude Alpine paradise with his doughty and beautiful wi…

Writer-director Shults aims high with this South Florida-set drama but struggles in vain for universalism and profundity. The first half profiles Tyler (Harrison Jnr), a school wrestling star and all-round popular pupil from a solid upwardly mobile Africa…

More likely to be remembered for its technical prowess than thematic power, Sam Mendes’ WWI picture, based on stories from his grandfather Alfred, nevertheless boasts a series of thrilling and horrifying if episodic sequences, alongside the occasional nar…

Writer-director Wang ‘Beijing Bicycle’ Xiaoshuai’s panoramic and deeply affecting film charts the lives of a married couple and their friends over four tumultuous decades of change and upheaval in China from the 1980s to the present day. We are introduced…

After the messy and extremely contentious sequel ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ writer-director Johnson regains a considerable amount of ground with this enjoyable murder mystery yarn which sports a top flight cast, and is his best picture since teen noir deb…

Not the feminist reimagining of ‘Aquaman’ the title suggests, Russian director Kossakovsky’s globe-spanning documentary is as visually stunning as it is hard to quantify, being part travelogue, part abstract tone poem, and part disaster movie. There’s no …

Written by and starring troubled actor Shia LaBeouf, this semi-autobiographical picture about a child star and his relationship with his irresponsible and volatile father initially sounds like another one of the actor’s narcissistic and pretentious art ‘p…

Documentarian Greenwood has already profiled the lifestyles of the rich and careless in films such as ‘The Queen of Versailles’ and ‘Generation Wealth’. She’s hunting even bigger game here with this horribly compelling profile of Imelda Marcos, the famous…

Director: Martin Scorsese Stars: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Anna Paquin Harvey Keitel, Stephen Graham…

Rendered in the suitably blue and grey palette of a 70s conspiracy thriller, this involving drama documents the investigation into the post-9/11 torture programme conducted by the CIA. Driver is Daniel Jones, a member of the U.S. Select Committee on Intel…

‘Theory of Everything’ stars Jones and Redmayne reunite for this visually gorgeous if fanciful slice of plucky posho porn. It begins at a London exhibition in 1862 where mild-mannered scientist James Glaisher (Redmayne) sits in a hot air balloon waiting i…

Age has not mellowed eighty-three-year-old director Loach as he returns to the Newcastle of ‘I, Daniel Blake’ for this passionate and all too necessary critique of the gig economy. Kris Hitchen in his feature debut is Ricky, a former building worker Mancu…

This fun if slightly overlong racing drama outlines the efforts of the Ford Company to break Ferrari’s winning streak at the titular twenty-four hour race. Damon is Carroll Shelby a Stetson-sporting former champion racer who had to quit for health reasons…

Shades of Monty Python in this ambitious but flawed Australian-made live action ‘origin story’ of the 16thCentury-spawned Punch and Judy puppet show. The setting is the small village of Seaside, where local entertainments consist mainly of stonings of wom…

The 2019 London Film Festival gets off to a rousing start with this fun and frantic (almost too frantic) take on the Charles Dickens classic. Patel, leading a multi-racial cast, is the titular hero making his way through Victorian England, encountering th…

A dramatization of the recent Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in Lyon may seem an unlikely departure for such a playful genre-juggler as French director Ozon, but this is a sensitive and empathetic account. The story focuses on four semi-fictionalised d…

Following the disappointingly just okay prehistoric football pic ‘Early Man’ Aardman Animation regain their mojo with the second big screen solo outing for the rascally quadruped. It’s business as usual for Shaun and co as we catch up with them at Mossy B…

From the producers of ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ this endearing but flawed picture echoes the earlier film’s cast of eccentrics and precision-tooled quirk. Zak (Gottsagen) is a twenty-two-year-old with Downs Syndrome frustrated with his incarceration in a nur…

This biopic, which charts Garland’s final series of London concerts the year before her death in 1969, shares the same structure and setting (and even a character) as last year’s Laurel and Hardy pic ‘Stan and Ollie’. Following a brief prologue on the set…

‘Farming’ was the name given to the practice of Nigerian parents in the 60s and 70s, who were working or studying in England, of paying white working class parents to foster their children. This gruelling semi-autobiographical picture from actor turned wr…

Three crisscrossing disparate Iranian singletons look for love and affection in contemporary Iran in this wistful but winning comedy drama. Mina (Ghajabegli) is an overweight receptionist at a beauty clinic who passes the time eating ice cream and catfish…

British writer-director Joanna Hogg’s latest tartly amusing take on middle-class angst, a semi-autobiographical dysfunctional love story, is her best picture to date. Byrne is Julie, an idealistic but naïve film student in early 80s London. Determined to …

Set in 1975 Argentina, just prior to the military coup, writer-director Benjamín Naishtat’s picture is an allegorically rich and palpably clammy study of corruption and corrosive apathy. Grandinetti, probably best known here for his role in Almodóvar’s ‘T…

This very broad comedy about a gay water polo team hoping to make a splash at the Gay Olympics in Croatia was a surprise smash in France. Belgian actor Gob is Matthias, a French a champion swimmer who, after making homophobic remarks to a TV interviewer a…

Directed by a member of hip band Nouvelle Vague, starring the granddaughter of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alma, and set in a 70s French apartment that looks like Hoxton circa now, this affectionate but undercooked picture sports an almost painfully hip pedigre…

Writer-director Mark Jenkin’s visually audacious and timely picture chronicles the tensions between struggling locals and middle class recent arrivals as gentrification encroaches on a small Cornish fishing village. Comedian Edward Rowe is Martin, a gruff…

Norwegian writer-director Camilla Strom-Henriksen’s striking debut is a deft weaving together of kitchen sink realism and psychological drama with fantasy and horror elements. Jill (Thedin) is a girl approaching her fourteenth birthday, but due to the men…

Semi-autobiographical but never self-indulgent, the latest from Almodóvar is an uncharacteristically low-key and autumnal meditation on love, ageing, family and the creative process which nods to Fellini’s ‘8½’. A grizzled Banderas is Almodovar surrogate …