This captivating documentary charts the troubled making of the much-anticipated sequel ‘The Exorcist II: The Heretic’ and its disastrous reception on release. Along with candid interviews with stars Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher, filmmaker Kittredge tal…

There’s more than a whiff of Greg Araki about writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s bold and uncompromising two-hander in which a Los Angeles sex worker encounters a face from the past. British actor Kieron Moore from ‘Sex Education’ is excellent as Alex, the q…

Like its central figure, viewers may have to make a leap of faith with this semi-dramatized documentary about love and destiny from grandly named director Orlando von Einsiedel. Using to-camera testimony from those involved, and dramatized material with a…

Soundtracked to period pop, this 1985-set, crowd-pleasing comedy drama, was a huge hit in its native France. Impressive newcomer Boublil is Vincent, a thirteen-year-old boy and youngest member of a family of Sephardim Jewish immigrants from North Africa l…

American writer-director Lance Hammer’s North London-set drama ‘Queen at Sea’ follows a middle-aged woman, Amanda (Binoche), as she struggles with her mother’s dementia. In the film’s striking opening sequence, she walks in on her stepfather Martin (Court…

Assembled from footage from across the globe, Ed Sayers’ documentary is a series of beautiful visions and meditations on the environment. A long-time enthusiast for the home movie Super 8 medium, Sayers was inspired to dig his old camera out when he came …

The proverbial must-see for Pulp fans, Garth Jennings’ picture is part rockumentary (if you will), and part concert movie. Frontman Jarvis Cocker’s droll narration takes us through the necessarily truncated forty-eight-year history of the band,  likening …

A typically luminous performance from Vicky Krieps is the best reason to see this languid French drama from French writer-director Anna Cazenave Cambet, based on the novel by Constance Debré. Clémence (Krieps), a lawyer who is contemplating switching to f…

Director: Jane Schoenbrun Stars: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson The third part of writer-director Schoenbrun’s ‘Screen Trilogy’, following cult hit ‘I Saw the TV Glow’, is another reality-twisting study of cultural obsession and identity. Einbinder …

Almodóvar’s latest sees the director exploring the ethics of adapting art to life while possibly reflecting on his own process. The picture takes place over two time periods. The first is set in 2004 where fashion photographer Elsa (Lennie) is living with…

Set in the same universe as the directors’ COVID-era web series ‘2 Lizards’, Bennani and Barki’s anthropomorphized animation is a bold if not entirely successful study of identity, longing and the immigrant experience. Bennani also voices the titular lesb…

Reportedly shot in seventeen days and featuring drag queens from ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ as its main players, this is a cheap and cheerfully naff comedy disaster picture. Best friends and train stewardesses Tess (Minj) and DeeDee (Jujubee) find themselves ou…

The estimable Sian Clifford throws everything she’s got and manages to wring some laughs out of this unoriginal comedy mockumentary, the debut from writer-director Simon Abrahams. She is Lady Isabella, an eccentric aristocrat who lives in a massive countr…

The directorial feature debut from artist turned filmmaker Imran Perretta, co-written with Irish playwright Enda Walsh, is an observant and poetic coming of age tale. Ish (Hasnat) and Maram (Kitana) are twelve-year-old friends in Luton. Ish, a third-gener…

Featuring a score by Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja, this shocking and furiously righteous documentary follows the experiences of a group of doctors working in Gaza from 2023 to 2025, utilising footage and testimonials from their phones. As only interna…

The feature debut from Canadian comedy duo Nirvanna The Band, famous over there for their online mockumenrary sitcom series, is amusing enough, even as it struggles to justify a ninety-five-minute running time. For the uninitiated the ‘band’ is keyboardis…

Based on novella ‘Sukkwan Island’ by American writer David Vann, French writerdirector de Fontenay’s film is a handsome but frustrating experience. A moody framing sequence has a clearly troubled young British man Roy (Mollica) making his way to Norway to…

The subject of this documentary, Misan Harriman, has been in the news recently where various right wingers have been campaigning to remove him from his post as Chair of the Board of trustees for London’s Southbank Centre, which probably has a lot more to …

Director and co-writer Loquès emerges as a confident, fully-formed filmmaker with this small (at 85 minutes) but perfectly formed picture that recalls Agnes Varda’s ‘Cleo from 5 to 7’. Pellerin is the titular shy young man about to celebrate his twenty-ni…

Written by filmmakers Robin Campilo, Laurent Cantet and Giles Marchand, this affecting and nuanced coming-of-age picture was originally intended to be helmed by Cantet, but his tragic death from cancer in 2024 meant that Campilo stepped in to direct. Pohu…

Set in 1910, this Virginia Woolf adaptation (the clue is in the title) charts a young woman’s efforts to make her own way in a suffocating patriarchal environment. Hayley Bennett is Katharine Hilbery, the daughter of a wealthy Hampstead couple. Her father…

Produced by the titular model, this flimsy picture from writer-director Lucas explores the supposedly transformative friendship that developed between Lucian Freud and Kate Moss in the early noughties. In 2002 Moss (Bamber) agrees to pose for Freud (Jacob…

Drawing on autobiographical elements and her earlier short film ‘Still Processing’, writer-director Romvari’s picture is part memory excavation, part child’s-eye-view portrait of a family in crisis. It is the late 90s and a Hungarian married couple (Tompa…

A young woman exhumes her uncomfortable family history in Spanish writer-director Carla Simon’s engaging semi-autobiographical drama. The year is 2004 and eighteen-year-old Marina Piñeiro (Garcia) travels from Barcelona to Vigo, a city on the Spanish coas…

Released in Germany to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the release of Keith Jarrett’s ‘The Koln Concert’, the best-selling solo album in jazz history, Ido Fluk’s film has a fascinating and rousing true story to tell, but the execution is puzzling. E…

This adaptation of Shuichi Yoshida’s 2018 novel is the highest-grossing live action Japanese film to date. It begins in 1964 with the killing of a kabuki performer during a yakuza shootout. His son Kikou Tachibana is taken on as an apprentice by kabuki ac…

The final instalment of writer-director Tarik Saleh’s ‘Cario Trilogy’, following ‘The Nile Hilton Incident’ and ‘Boy From Heaven’, is a handsomely mounted but flawed drama. George Fahmy (Fares) is one of Egypt’s most popular actors, playing heart-throb he…

Following his enjoyably breezy spy yarn ‘Black Bag’, Steven Soderbergh turns in another enjoyable England-set picture, this time around a black comedy set in the art world. McKellen is disreputable, unreconstructed artist Julian Sklar, whose celebrity/not…

László ‘Son of Saul’ Nemes’ third picture is a beautifully mounted but structurally unsure bildungsroman. A 1949 prologue sees four-year-old Jewish boy Andor reunited with his mother Klára (Waskovics). During the War, Klára had gone into hiding when her h…

The ever-versatile François Ozon's fairly faithful adaptation of Albert Camus 'The Stranger' starts on a deceptively cheerful note with gaudy travelogue footage of 1930s French Algiers; but he also signals something is off via accusing glances from the na…

A sense of renewed possibility runs through director-co-writer Macaro’s otherwise dystopian sci-fi drama. The setting is near future Brazil where the elderly are sent away to living facilities to avoid hindering their offsprings’ productivity. Graffiti hi…

Jarmusch’s latest is an elegantly structured family triptych. The first segment, ‘Father’, has Driver and Bialik’s siblings Jeff and Emily driving to a wintry U.S. rural town to see their father. Emily is spiky and suspicious, the divorced Jeff (Driver) i…

For his feature debut, Italian director Michieletto delivers a solid period drama. The setting is the Ospedale della Pietà in 18th century Venice, a huge orphanage where the young inmates are taught music. In fact, the orphanage has one of the world’s mos…

This Italian comedy period melodrama sparkles occasionally but ultimately feels ersatz. Drawn from his memories of working as an assistant director and dealing with costume ateliers, Özpetek’s film is a celebration of Italian women, their strength and sol…

Taking its title from Frédéric Chopin's Prelude in E Minor, German writer-director Petzold’s film is a compelling low-key drama which once again sees him working with collaborator Laura Beer. We first encounter Beer’s Laura, a depressed music student from…

This documentary meets cine-essay from British filmmaker Chris ‘Radio On’ Petit and his partner Emma Matthews is an attempt to convey the experiences of their son Louis who suffers from a debilitating epilepsy. Louis was twelve when he had his first fit w…

Spanish director Laxe’s extraordinary picture is pitched somewhere between audacious hallucinatory odyssey and dark punishing cinematic DJ set. The title refers to the Islamic notion that there is a fragile bridge over Hell that the dead must cross to mak…

An appealing air of autumnal melancholy hangs over writer-director Paolo Sorrentino’s latest collaboration with actor Toni Servillo. Servillo is Mariano De Santis, the widowed President of Italy entering his ‘white semester’, the last six months of the It…

German director and co-writer Mascha Schilinski's second feature is an elegantly constructed but demanding profile of young German women over four generations. In 1910, seven-year-old Alma (Heckt) lives on a farm in the Altmark region, where she observes …

Remembrance and identity are explored in this disappointing adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1982 book, co-scripted by the author. The story begins in 1980s England where young English aspiring writer Niki (Aiko) questions her Japanese mother Etsuko (Yoh Yo…

‘Godland’ director Hlynur Pálmason narrows his canvas for this bittersweet, occasionally surreal, drama charting the twelve-…

British essayist and author George Orwell’s writings have been woefully misunderstood and misrepresented in the recent political discourse. Taking its title from a passage in the writer’s last and most referenced and influential novel, ‘1984’, Raoul Peck,…

Set in 1977 Brazil, ‘a time of mischief’, writer-director Fihlo’s picture is a complex, sprawling and playful but deadly serious study of a country in moral and political disarray. It opens with Marcelo (‘Narco’s’ Moura) pulling into a remote petrol stati…

Hasan Hadi’s supremely assured feature debut is an appealing and quietly riveting child’s eye view comedy odyssey set against a dangerous and precarious backdrop. The story takes place in Iraq in the 1990s after the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. Nine-year-old…

Taking its stylistic cues from the movement itself, Richard Linklater’s affectionate tribute to Nouvelle Vague focuses on the making of Godard’s mould-breaking ‘Breathless’. We are introduced to Godard and his fellow Cahiers du Cinema critics, Francois Tr…

Adapted from Isabel Greenberg’s feminist fairy tale graphic novel, British director Julia Jackman’s picture brings the whimsy if not much substance. In a kingdom where the populace worship a God called Birdman (played by Grant in framing intro), Cherry (M…

This gorgeously rendered animation, based on the Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb’s autobiography, charts an unusual cross-cultural upbringing in 1960s Japan. Amélie is born in a vegetative state to a Belgian family. Her father is a diplomat. In voiceover t…

Kristen Stewart' directorial debut, an adaptation of writer and educator Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoirs, is accomplished if at times over-reaching. A bright student and accomplished swimmer, Lidia grows up with a sexually and emotionally abusive father (Epp),…

Mona Fastvold’s audacious and visionary historical drama charts the life of Ann Lee, a Mancunian woman, who in the 18th century became the figurehead of a radical religious movement. Born to a working-class family and illiterate, Ann (Seyfried) works in a…

Like Lynne Ramsay’s recent, harrowing ‘Die My Love’, writer-director-actor Bronstein’s picture is a harrowing look at fraught motherhood. Byrne is Linda, a therapist at the end of her tether. Her husband, a U.S. naval officer is away, and Linda is struggl…

Set in the 50s, but audaciously soundtracked to choice 80s pop, Josh Safdie’s picture is a deliriously freewheeling, anarchic and kinetic sports picture meets screwball comedy. Chalamet is Marty Mauser, a young Jewish New Yorker who we meet in 1952, charm…

Based on real events which occurred in January 2024, this almost unbearably poignant drama charts the efforts of workers in the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Ramallah to respond to an emergency call made from a petrol station in Gaza, fifty-two miles …

Park Chan-wook’s dark comic state-of-the-nation satire adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel, “The Ax” features great set-pieces but does not quite congeal into a satisfying whole. Byung-hun is Mansu, a conscientious manager at a paper factory. An …

Writer-director Ira Sachs’ follow-up to the knotty romance ‘Passages’ is an intimate and elegant drama, beautifully played by its two leads, and based on recorded conversations thought lost until 2019. It’s December 1974 in Manhattan and photographer Pete…