This fantastic debut from Iranian writer-director Panahi, son of Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi, is a melancholy but zestful road movie that follows a family’s eventful car journey to mountainous North Iran. They are lynchpin mum (Panahiha), grumpy father (M…
Directors: Massashi Ando, Masayuki Miyaji Featured voices: Shinichi Tsutsumi, Hisui Kimura, Ryoma Takeuchi, Anne Watanabe Based on a series of Japanese fantasy novels by Nahoko Uehashi, this beautifully-rendered anime co-directed by Massashi Ando, one o…
This mildly diverting, self-consciously sophisticated sex comedy drama about a scatty thirty-year-old French woman struggling with life choices and romance, feels like a cross between Joachim Trier’s recent ‘The Worst Person in the World’ and 2017’s under…
British visual artist and director Beddington’s documentary, a meditation on migration, exile and longing, is slight but boasts some arresting imagery. Fadia Loubani is a Palestinian refugee who lost her husband when she was nineteen and now lives in a Le…
It’s unclear what attracted the revered multi-award garlanded Colman to this sentimental piece of uncut Irish blarney. Newcomer Charlie Reid is Mully, a twelve-year-old who we first meet at a pub cancer benefit event in memory of his mother who has recen…
Curious narrative choices topple this fanciful biopic of French civil engineering genius Gustave Eiffel. We first encounter Gustave (Duris, ee, he looks nowt like him!) in New York as the Statue of Liberty, which Gustave designed the metal framework for, …
This big screen adaptation of Delia Owens' hugely popular 2018 novel is a total misfire that exacerbates the flaws of the source material. ‘Normal Peoples’ Daisy Edgar Jones is Kya Clark, a reclusive young woman accused of murder in 1969 North Carolina. F…
Commissioned by Turner Contemporary, the MK Gallery and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, this discursive lyrical travelogue from British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong charts the cross country ramblings of a young Black British woman. The Wandere…
Adapted from a short film, this whimsical fantasy drama, co-scripted by and starring ‘Afterlife’s’ David Earl, struggles to justify its extended running time. Earl plays Brian, an eccentric loner in North Wales who collects scrap for his various ill-conce…
Released on the eightieth anniversary of this death, this engaging documentary charts the career of British artist Eric Ravilious, mainly focused on his World War II work. Freddy Fox narrates from Eric’s correspondence with his wife Tirzah (Tamsin Grieg r…
British director Bedwani’s profile of septuagenarian Trans activist, artist and performer Donna Personna is unassumingly low-key but poignant and ultimately uplifting. Raised as Gus in 50s suburban San Jose, and subject to a strict Baptist upbringing, Don…
Javier Bardem reunites with frequent collaborator de Aranoa for this occasionally amusing but unsubtle capitalist satire. Bardem is Blanco, the smarmy boss of Básculas Blanco, a company he inherited from his father, which is a leading manufacturer of indu…
Australian director Kurzel and screenwriter collaborator Shaun Grant return to the scuzzy antipodean suburbs of their debut ‘The Snowtown Murders’ for this horribly compelling but sensitively-handled retelling of the Port Arthur Massacre that took place i…
Ideally, Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann’s typically over-caffeinated but visually resplendent biopic of legendary rock 'n' roll singer Elvis Presley should be titled ‘Elvis and Tom’ as Presley’s notorious martinet manager Colonel Tom Parker is given equal…
This latest addition to the Jurassic sage, which unites characters from the old trilogy with the cast of the new one, is a chaotic misfire, the poorest franchise (dread word) entry since ‘The Rise of Skywalker’. The trailers promisingly mooted an adventur…
Home Counties folk may have been out feting some old Queen or other recently, but German acting legend Udo Kier is the real fabulous deal here in this poignant and very funny comic drama.He is retired hairdresser, Pat Pitsenbarger, now spending his days m…
Adapted from a memoir by late collaborator Emmanuèle Bernheim, Ozon’s latest is a moving if slightly mannered family drama with stabs of wry dry humour. After the eighty-five year old André (André Dussollier) suffers a debilitating stroke, his daughters E…
Mia Hansen-Løve’s film boasts some clever nods to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, his influence, and the industry he’s spawned. Consequently, this is more likely to appeal to buffs than the casual viewer. Filmmaking couple Chris and Tony (Krieps and Roth…
The feature debut from writer-director Lentzou feels a little affected at times, but boasts a luminous performance from Sofia Kokkali. She is Artemis, a young woman returning to Greece after some time away to visit her sick father in Athens. Dad, Paris …
Adapted from her short picture of the same name, this punishing but essential feature debut from Swedish writer-director Thyberg charts one young woman’s journey through the porn industry. Sofia Kappel is Linnéa aka Bella Cherry, a twenty-year-old relocat…
Shades of Ken Loach in this involving and complex realist Maltese drama. Jesmark (Scicluna) is a fisherman struggling to support his wife Denise (Farrugia) and their new-born son. In the opening scene his boat ( or ‘luzzu’) springs a leak meaning expensiv…
This sequel to the iconic but flimsy Reagan-era adventure is superior to the original in every respect. Tom Cruise playing ‘Tom Cruise’ returns as top navy pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell. Still feeling the need for speed, Mitchell has avoided promotions s…
Mooted as a hipper alterative to ‘Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness’ this sci-fi comedy, from the directing duo behind the endearingly oddball ‘Swiss Army Man’, is ingenious but exhausting. Yeoh, is Evelyn Wang, a put upon Chinese immigrant run…
This second solo outing for Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme, and the third feature-length sojourn into the Marvel multiverse following the superior Spidey outings, ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ and ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’, is alas, a muddled disappointm…
Based on a short story by Claire Keegan, the feature debut from writer-director Bairéad, is part coming-of-age tale and part soulful rumination on family bonds and grieving. It’s summer 1981 and withdrawn nine-year-old Cáit (Clinch) is living in a rundown…
Writer-director Emil Vogt’s second feature is a slow-burning and genuinely unsettling sic-fi horror. Seven-year-old Norwegian girl Ida (Fløttum) has just moved with her family, mum (Petersen), dad (Svartveit) and severely autistic older sister Anna (Ramst…
In 2016 Joe Corré, the son of shop assistant turned couture designer Vivienne Westwood and the late provocateur and Svengali Malcolm McLaren, announced he was going to burn millions of pounds worth of punk memorabilia as a statement against the commodific…
Heartfelt and elegiac but hugely disappointing, Terence Davies’ portrait of War Poet Siegfried Sassoon and his social circle of wits, artist and aristos, surprisingly the director’s first with an openly queer character, is a dramatically inert and poorly-…
Stunning photography, unsurprisingly, is the best reason to see this, at times, overly verbose nature documentary, a massive hit in France, from wildlife filmmaker Marie Amiguet and wildlife photographer Vincent Munier. On a frozen Tibetan plateau, Munier…
What this flawed Morocco-set picture musical drama lacks in originality it just about makes up for with youthful energy. Anas (Basbousi) a former rapper, now reduced to living out of his car, gets a job as a teacher working at a cultural centre on the out…
Documentary opuses are rarely as magnum as Guiseppe ‘Cinema Paradiso’ Tornatore’s exhaustive, and at three hours, pretty exhausting chronicle of the recently departed Italian movie music maestro’s career. Morricone himself, interviewed at home, and spor…
Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage in this ambitious but disappointing Meta comedy adventure. When we meet this particularly self-absorbed version of the actor, he is feeling creatively uninspired and is beset by money problems. He’s also struggling to conne…
Following his debut, the dread-imbued portrayal of religious hysteria ‘The Witch’, and heart of darkness-plumbing nightmare ‘The Lighthouse’, writer-director Robert Eggers goes full-on sensory maximalist with this intense and bloody Viking saga. It was co…
That increasingly rare thing, the Star Vehicle returns with this aggressively adequate adventure comedy in the ‘Romancing the Stone’ mould. Bullock is Loretta Sage, a writer of romances in which her heroine is paired up with hunky hero Dash McMahon. We me…
The third instalment of the Fantastic Beasts series is the bleakest chapter of the ‘wizarding world’ since 2010’s ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Pt 1’. The dark mood is established in an opening sequence, easily the film’s best, as Professor Albus…
There’s more than a whiff of déjà vu in this passable, if rote stiff upper lip WW2 yarn, based on true events. In 1943 British forces hatch an elaborate plan to fool the Nazis into thinking that the Allies are going to invade Greece, rather than the antic…
DreamWorks’ latest animation is a fun and frantic, if a little too narratively busy, crime caper, adapted by Etan Cohen from the graphic novel by Australian author, Aaron Blabey. The titular band are a quintet of notorious anthropomorphic criminals. They …
This audacious attempt to update Léo Delibes’s Nineteenth Century comic fairy-tale ballet to a sci-fi, social media-satirising fable is, alas, a kitsch misfire. A doll maker in the original, Dr Coppelia (Italian dancer Mazzeo) is a now an evil Rotwang-sty…
The second big screen outing for the popular Sega video game character sticks to the first’s recipe of caffeinated brash mayhem with lachrymose interludes. A prologue has evil scientist Dr Robotnik (Carrey) breaking out of his exile on the Mushroom plan…
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…
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