Writer-director Batra revisits the Mumbai of his lovely 2013 epistolary picture, ‘The Lunchbox’ for another affecting tale of lonely souls making a connection in the big city. Thankfully it’s more of a refinement than a rehash. Rafi (Nawazudin) is a mild-…

German writer-director Petzold’s adaptation of Anna Seghers’ 1942 wartime novel transposes the story to a modern day setting but, audaciously, the plot details remains broadly unchanged. Georg (Rogowski) is a German Jewish radio operator fleeing occupied …

The directorial debut from Daniel Graham is a frustratingly elusive meditation on music and absence. Dafoe is Paul, a composer who has travelled to a small Mexican village where his father died. During his visit, in which he becomes fixated on the disappe…

Completed by Russian director Serebrennikov while under house arrest, this striking and singular picture, about the rivalry between rival musicians in the early 80s Leningrad is part jukebox musical (featuring songs by David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and…

Director Penny Lane’s irreverent & thought-provoking film profiles the burgeoning Satanist Temple movement in the USA. Headed by the sinister-looking but wry and erudite Lucien Greaves (not real name), they first garner media attention with their campaign…

Released to coincide with the 50thanniversary of the Moon landing, this stirring documentary broadly eschews chronicling the socio-political backdrop of the mission, or profiling of the major players, focusing instead on the herculean collective effort it…

Adapted from the novel by actor Fiona Shaw this over-earnest middlebrow romance feels more suited to cosy Sunday night TV viewing than the big screen. Paquin, revisiting the lilting Scottish accent from ‘The Piano’, is Dr Jean Markham, returning to her sm…

Set in Snowdonia during the Industrial Revolution, writer-director McGregor’s feature debut is a social realist period drama with a supernatural undertow. Worthington-Cox is the titular teenager, struggling to get by on the plot of farmland she lives on w…

This adaptation of actor-screenwriter Eileen Atkins’ 1992 play from UK writer-director Chanya Button charts the passionate relationship between aristocrat and poet Vita Sackville-West and middle-class writer Virginia Woolf. It begins in 1922 with the fear…

His previous music-related pictures, ‘Kurt and Courtney’ and ‘Whitney Can I Be Me’ have seen documentarian Nick Broomfield displaying little interest in the actual music, concentrating instead on lurid muckraking and unreliable tittle-tattle. Here at leas…

This Glasgow-set relationship drama begins like a mainstream romance, albeit one with tastefully autumnal-hued trappings, then seems to be gearing up for a psychological thriller, before settling on maudlin drama. Costa, from one-take German thriller ‘Vic…

Chilean writer-director Leila continues to impress with this very faithful, but nonetheless essential remake of his own 2013 picture ‘Gloria’. Julianne Moore is the titular character this time around, a fiftysomething divorcee looking for love in Los Ange…

The Hooters bar-style setting and innuendo-laden title of erstwhile mumblecore auteur Andrew Bujalski’s latest belies a sympathetic and big-hearted study of workers in the workplace. It chronicles one day in the life of Lisa (Hall), the beleaguered genera…

Set in 1913 on the eve of WW1 in the closing days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Laszlo Nemes’ follow-up to his debut feature masterpiece ‘Son of Saul’ is a wilfully oblique and overlong disappointment. Jakab is Írisz Leiter, a milliner returning to Buda…

The influence of Terrence Malick and David Gordon Green’s ‘George Washington’ hang very heavily over the debut fiction feature from US Documentary filmmaker Zagar, a coming-of-age tale adapted from the novel by Justin Torres. Manny, Joel and Jonah (newcom…

In 1972 queen of soul Aretha Franklin, at the height of her commercial success, went back to her roots to record the gospel album ‘Amazing Grace’ over two nights at LA’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church. Feature director Sydney Pollack, fresh from his…

This passable-ish romantic comedy is a slightly unwieldy combination of Apatow-era raunch, Capraesque fable, and 90s high concept swooners like ‘Dave’ and ‘Pretty Woman’. Rogen is scruffy left-wing journalist and activist Fred Flarksy, laid off from the c…

Actor turned director Brady Corbet’s audacious but flawed second picture is a pop fable that feels like a mutant riff on ‘A Star is Born’. A chilling 1999-set opening depicts a school shooting incident in Staten Island NY, in which several pupils lose the…

Septuagenarian French writer-director Denis’ English language debut picture is a singularly strange but visually drab, and muddled, science fiction picture, its philosophical musings reaching for the profundity of ‘2001’ or ‘Solaris’. Pattinson is Monte, …

Co-helmed by his partner Christina Gallego, Ciro Guerra’s follow-up to the striking, hallucinatory debut ‘Embrace of the Serpent’ chronicles the nascent Columbian drugs trade through the eyes of the indigenous Wayuu people. It begins with a colourful cere…

Writer-director Erlingsson’s follow-up to the striking ‘Of Horses and Men’ is an appealing mix of heartfelt protest picture, deadpan mildly surreal humanism a lafellow Icelander Aki Kaurismäki, and environmentally conscious-hued adventure. Geirharðsdóttir…

Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s third picture is a bewitching surrealist fable. The first half takes place in Inviolata, a small rural village that serves the neighbouring tobacco plantation presided over by the ‘Queen of Cigarettes’ Marchesa A…

The feature directorial debut from actor Johah Hill is an appealingly heartfelt but unsentimental study of growing up in LA in the titular period. Suljic is Stevie, a thirteen-year-old who lives in LA with his single mother Dabney (Waterson) and troubled,…

Despite the twenty-year ban on filmmaking from the Iranian authorities, writer-director Jafar Panahi remains, thankfully, pretty prolific. His follow-up to 2015’s ‘Taxi Tehran’ is a haunting drama with a feminist slant. The first of the female titular ‘3 …

Adapted from Jennie Rooney’s 2014 novel, which was in turn inspired by the fascinating true story of ‘granny spy’ Melita Norwood, this lacklustre picture squanders a promising premise with poor execution. It begins in 2000 with octogenarian Joan Stanley (…

YouTube star Bo Burnham’s directorial feature debut is a surprisingly perceptive, unvarnished & queasily funny portrait of teen angst. The excellent Elsie Fisher is the socially anxious thirteen-year-old Vlogger Kayla, whose peppy motivational videos she …

Scripted by long-time Ken Loach collaborator, Paul Laverty, this biopic about the Cuban dancer attempts to enliven the genre via some meta touches and time-juggling chronology, but for a picture about ballet, it feels disappointingly flat-footed & gracele…

Borders both personal and geographical, real and fantastical, are examined in this engrossing modern folk tale from Iranian-Swedish director Abbassi. Tina (Mallander) is a dedicated Swedish coastal border guard who resembles a troglodyte and possesses the…

The debut picture from Belgian writer-director Lukas Dhont is a deeply affecting and intimate study of identity that revolves around a troubled teen. Fifteen-year-old Lara (Polster) is transitioning from boy to girl, undergoing hormone therapy treatment a…

The bad old days of noughties Britfilm are revisited in this disappointingly rote comedy drama, directed by Stephen Merchant and based on the 2012 documentary ‘The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family’ about Norfolk-born female wrestler Saraya-Jade Bevis, s…

Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to the excellent teen horror ‘It Follows’ plays like a rambling stoner take on Hitchcock in David Lynch trappings. Garfield, turning the gawk up to eleven, is Sam, a slacker who lives in a slightly rundown…

This tonally audacious anti-war triptych from Israeli writer-director Samul Moaz was inspired by his experiences in the army. The first part is a harrowing depiction of grief as Tel Aviv husband and wife Michael (Ashkenazi) and Dafna (Adler) receive a vis…

Writer-comedian Simon Amstell’s debut feature plays like a mumblecore take on Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ relocated to hipster Hoxton. Morgan is the titular character (and presumably Amstell surrogate), a rising filmmaker whose first picture was a commercia…

South Korean director Lee Chang-Dong’s latest picture is an oblique but bewitching thriller adapted loosely from a short story by Japanese writer Haruki Murakmi. Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) is a callow aspiring writer making ends meet by working as a delivery boy…

Adapted from writer Lee Israel’s memoir of the same name, this wildly enjoyable and intelligent comedy drama showcases a wondrous straight acting debut from Melissa McCarthy. When we first encounter McCarthy’s dowdy New York-dwelling writer, Israel alread…

This amiable comedy drama about the unlikely friendship that develops between a racist Italian American bouncer and an African American musician, based on a true story, may sound like a departure for Peter Farrelly (of gross-out comedy Farrelly brothers’ …

This rote and drearily dutiful biopic focuses on the formative years of liberal hero and Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from her enrolment as a young Jewish woman to the elite but stuffy and sexist Harvard Law School in the late 50s, to her r…

The animated Dragon trilogy wraps up with this dramatically satisfying and disarmingly stirring conclusion. Norse nerdy hero Hiccup has succeeded his father as ruler of the Viking town of Berk and is resolved to free all the captive dragons and transport …

For the follow-up to his melancholy masterpiece ‘Moonlight’, writer-director Barry Jenkins adapts James Baldwin’s ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’, but what should be an ideal match turns out a disappointment. Set in 1970s Harlem, it charts the troubled roman…

Australian actor-turned-director Edgerton’s second film is a heartfelt but uninvolving adaptation of gay writer Garrard Conley’s memoir of growing up in a conservative Christian family in Arkansas. ‘Manchester by the Sea’s’ Lucas Hedges is Jared Eamons, t…

Greek director Lanthimos’s third English-language picture, a rollicking and bawdy period piece set in the early 18thcentury, sports more than a whiff of Peter Greenaway’s poised surrealism. The ever estimable Colman is Queen Anne. Partially, due to the pr…

This hard-hitting but clumsily didactic Brooklyn-set drama takes its inspiration from two real life incidents that occurred in 2014: one, the shooting of young man Eric Garner by an overzealous police officer; and the subsequent gunning down of two NYPD c…

After all the glitz and flash of the festive season, this undemanding but appealingly heartfelt biopic, which traces the twilight career of much-loved comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, feels like sinking into a warm bath of nostalgia. An ingeniously assembled …

Adapted from two memoirs by San Francisco journalist David Sheff, this earnest and slightly dull drama chronicles the toil on a family when the eldest son becomes addicted to drugs. At first sight Sheff (Carell), a successful journalist whose work has fea…

Director Kusama’s dour crime drama has its moments, as well as a typically committed performance from Nicole Kidman, but is uneven and pretentious. We first encounter LAPD detective Erin Bell as she wanders uninvited at the scene of a murder her colleague…

Dadcore (Burger Records) - I first caught wind of this Dutch band back in 2013 with their really rather good self-titled debut album and their sophomore release does more of the same but even better. They’re in thrall to US college rockers and this draws …

Although wrongly rumoured to be Robert Redford’s last role, writer-director David Lowery’s picture, his follow-up to the bold, sombre ‘Ghost Story’, nevertheless serves as an affectionate tribute to the veteran actor. Based on a true story that was chroni…

Based on the novel by Naomi Alderman, Chilean director Lelio’s follow-up to his dazzling and stirring transgender character study ‘A Fantastic Woman’ is more low-key and sombre, but no less a nuanced and empathetic piece. Weisz is Ronit, an edgy NYC-based…

This documentary about three identical twins, Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, who were separated at birth then later reunited in the early 80s, belongs alongside such docs as ‘Capturing the Friedmans’ and ‘The Imposter’ for its combination …

Hip-hop artist turned writer-director Boots Riley’s hotly anticipated (in some quarters) political satire is just as unhinged and bonkers as mooted. The currently ubiquitous Stanfield is Cassius Green (think about it) an Oakland resident living in near sq…

Based on a true story this crime drama about a disreputable blue-collar Detroit-dwelling dad and his son unfolds during the height of the 80s war on drugs, where desperate police would use any means necessary to secure arrests. McConaughey, sporting a for…

Another year, another masterly humanist picture from prolific Japanese writer-director Kore-Eda. This Palme d’Or winner sees him returning to his pet subjects: family relations and the Japanese state’s indifference to the suffering of children. It begins …

Writer-director Laurent Cantet returns to the classroom setting of his 2008 masterpiece docudrama ‘The Class’ with similarly involving results. The excellent Marina Foïs is Olivia Dezajet, a celebrated Paris-dwelling thriller writer, who temporarily reloc…

Mike Leigh’s most ambitious film to date marks the bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre, when the cavalry charged 60,000 peaceful protestors in St Peter’s Field, Manchester. It begins with the indelible image of a traumatised soldier, Joseph (David Moorst…