Reviews

Written by the world’s top critics, reviews in The Film Verdict are an authoritative guide to the most important new movies appearing on the international scene. In this section you can search for and find more than one thousand reviews that have appeared in The Film Verdict since it began in September 2021. The reviewers are a diverse group based all over the globe: Deborah Young and Jay Weissberg (Rome), Stephen Dalton and Ben Nicholson (London), Boyd Van Hoeij (Luxembourg), Jordan Mintzer (Paris), Clarence Tsui (Hong Kong), Oris Aigbokhaevbolo (Lagos), Patricia Boero (Punta del Este), Lucy Virgen (Guadalajara), Carmen Gray (Berlin), Kevin Jagernauth (Montreal), and Alonso Duralde (Los Angeles).

The Creator

The Creator

While lovely to look at, Gareth Edwards’ latest doesn’t make the case for why we should stop worrying and learn to love AI.

SURPRISE MOVIE AT SAN SEBASTIAN

SURPRISE MOVIE AT SAN SEBASTIAN

David Fincher’s eagerly awaited new movie, "The Killer," is the surprise film at the 71st San Sebastian Festival. From the director of Se7en, Zodiac and The Social Network, and based on the homonymous novel by Alexis Nolent (Matz) and illustrated by Luc Jacamon, The...

Kalak

Kalak

A deeply damaged Danish man relocates to Greenland in a bid to escape childhood sexual trauma in Swedish director Isabella Eklöf’s bleakly compelling drama ‘Kalak’, which is based on real events.

Last Shadow at First Light

Last Shadow at First Light

The 2012 Tohoku tsunami still holds an anguished Japanese-Singapore family in its clutches in ‘Last Shadow at First Light’, a complex, if at times overwritten, examination of survivors’ guilt  in a first feature from Nicole Midori Woodford.

CineVerdict: Memoria

CineVerdict: Memoria

CINE VERDICT: Después de su inquietante pero bien recibido thriller `Sundown`, el director mexicano Michel Franco , continúa  con `Memoria` un drama familiar-romance dibujado con plantilla , actuado por Jessica Chastain en el papel de una trabajadora social emocionalmente afectada, en Brooklyn.

The Belgian Wave

The Belgian Wave

Cult director Jérôme Vandewattyne uses a spate of real UFO sightings as the launchpad for ‘The Belgian Wave’, an incoherent but highly entertaining acid-punk sci-fi road movie about close encounters of the surreal kind.

Oldenburg at 30: Impressions and Memories

Oldenburg at 30: Impressions and Memories

Oldenburg Film Festival has evolved over the past 30 years, while preserving its intimate atmosphere and founding purpose: to celebrate and support the diverse voices and visions of independent filmmakers, to honor the creativity of the artists upon which the Festival...

Frames of Alicia

Frames of Alicia

A troubled young Swedish woman finds Copenhagen to be a town without pity in Danish director Adam Benjamin Mikkelsen’s slight, disjointed but emotionally powerful debut ‘Frames of Alicia’.

Maestra

Maestra

Maggie Contreras reveals workplace realities for female orchestra conductors as global candidates vie for a Paris contest title, in a warm, glossy doc with surprising political bite.

Society of the Snow

Society of the Snow

‘Society of the Snow’, the edge-of-seat disaster movie that closes the 80th Venice Film Festival, directed by J.A. Bayona of ‘The Impossible’ fame, recreates the 1972 air crash of a Uruguayan flight in the Andes in great but respectful detail.

CineVerdict: La sociedad de la nieve

CineVerdict: La sociedad de la nieve

La caída del avión uruguayo en 1972 en los Andes es recreada respetuosamente y en gran detalle en “La sociedad de la nieve,” una película infartante sobre el desastre, que cierra el festival de cine de Venecia número 80, y es dirigida por J.A. Bayona, que ganó fama con “Lo imposible.”

Memory

Memory

Mexican director Michel Franco follows up his unsettling but well-liked Tim Roth thriller ‘Sundown’ with ‘Memory’, a paint-by-numbers romance/family drama starring Jessica Chastain as an emotionally damaged social worker in Brooklyn

Coup!

Coup!

Writer-director duo Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman blend historical pandemic echoes with timeless political tensions in their old-fashioned but engaging class-war drama ‘Coup!’

Out of Season

Out of Season

An unexpected story of loneliness and yearning from Stéphane Brizé in which two former lovers come face-to-face with the disappointments of life, beautiful in its understatement and cinematic restraint yet still generating tremendous poignancy.

Woman Of…

Woman Of…

In ‘Woman of…’, the passive heroism of a Polish working class father of two who identifies as a woman is affectingly portrayed in the inimitable style of Malgorzata Szumowska and her co-director and D.P. Michal Englert (‘Never Gonna Snow Again’).

Holly

Holly

A high school girl demonstrates a special gift for empathy and healing others in Belgian director Fien Troch’s mysterious, multi-layered parable about the price of doing good.

Lubo

Lubo

Part survival-revenge drama, part love story, Giorgio Diritti’s ‘Lubo’ addresses the Swiss state’s forcible removal of Jenisch children from their families beginning in the 1930s, and while Franz Rogowski’s magnetism keeps his morally complex character sympathetic, the film feels too much like a miniseries cut down to a very long feature length.

The Summer with Carmen

The Summer with Carmen

A queer filmmaker in a funk despite his pink-blue hair needs to come up with a treatment for a film that’s “fun, sexy, Greek and low budget” in Zacharias Mavroeidis’ The Summer with Carmen (To kalokairi tis Karmen). The resulting meta film succeeds on three of those...

Malqueridas

Malqueridas

Women in Chilean prisons record motherhood and the raw pain of separation in Tana Gilbert’s empathetic and impressionistic, mobile-shot doc of solidarity.

Origin

Origin

Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” is a highly ambitious attempt to fictionalize Isabel Wilkerson’s theory on the centrality of caste rather than race in determining discriminatory hierarchies, playing to the director’s strengths in terms of depicting personal relationships but also her weaknesses in several overly didactic sequences that treat characters and audiences like ignoramuses.

Me Captain

Me Captain

Director Matteo Garrone steps back from the edginess of stylized crime dramas and horror fantasies to recount the no less cruel and shocking journey made by two Senegalese teens to Europe in ‘Me Captain’.

Dormitory

Dormitory

Turkish rookie director Nehir Tuna has made a beautifully played and shot if somewhat opaquely told coming-of-age story set in a rarely-seen world.

Following the Sound

Following the Sound

Kyoshi Sugita’s “Following the Sound” ticks all the boxes for nipponophiles seeking some extremely austere storytelling and swathes of slow-moving, soothing imagery set in a small, serene town in Japan.

Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard

Rural herders, urbanite journalists and a young monk consider the fate of a captured, livestock-ravaging wild animal in “Snow Leopard”, an affective, nuanced and multilayered film bowing out of competition at Venice four months after the death of its Tibetan director Pema Tseden.

For Night Will Come

For Night Will Come

A French family moves to a new place in a rural village in For Night Will Come (En attendant la nuit). What the villagers aren’t initially aware of is that the tenebrous and toothy teenage son of the family, Philémon, is somewhat unusual in nature. It’s not hard to...

Enea

Enea

A withering take-down of Rome’s vapid middle class, Pietro Castellitto’s (‘The Predators’) exuberant second feature ‘Enea’ is an amusing, fast-paced game that winks at gangster movies and bows in Venice competition.

Bye Bye Tiberias

Bye Bye Tiberias

Directed by Hiam Abbass’s daughter Lina Soualem, this beautifully layered, quietly intelligent documentary explores her female-centric family’s experiences of dispossession and exile following the 1948 Nakba, seeking to break the silence surrounding trauma.

Green Border

Green Border

In ‘Green Border’, veteran Agnieszka Holland is joined by young directors Kamila Tarabura and Katarzyna Warzecha in a black-and-white drama about refugees trying to enter the EU, which is more thematically than emotionally resonant.

Sky Peals

Sky Peals

An alienated young man becomes fixated on his late father’s extra-terrestrial origins in debutant director Moin Hussein’s underpowered but appealingly strange inner-space odyssey ‘Sky Peals’.

Pet Shop Days

Pet Shop Days

Olmo Schabel’s directorial debut succeeds as a delivery system for ’90s-indie vibes, but it fails to elicit empathy for its spoiled, obnoxious lead characters.

The Killer

The Killer

David Fincher brings his considerable style and craft to this procedural about a professional assassin, but not even Michael Fassbender can make the character distinguishable from a thousand other cinematic hired guns.

The Beast

The Beast

The inability to open oneself to love is the main beast of Bertrand Bonello’s striking and cerebral film that follows a stalled relationship over three time periods, though the message in the central portion doesn’t have the same resonance as the other two.

Arni

Arni

Hungarian director Dorka Vermes’ feature debut ‘Arni’ is a slow-burn slice-of-life drama with an exceptional lead performance from newcomer Peter Turi.

Maestro

Maestro

Bradley Cooper’s ambitious sophomore directorial effort, about Leonard Bernstein’s married life, soars and sweeps in some passages while falling flat in others.

Adagio

Adagio

Stefano Sollima delivers the kind of gritty, testosterone-driven underworld drama we’ve come to expect, boasting exceptional performances and location work, but a highly problematic undercurrent of homophobia can’t be brushed under the soiled carpet.

Finally Dawn

Finally Dawn

Saverio Costanzo’s use of “La Dolce Vita” for a 1950s loss-of-innocence story set in Rome’s film world feels locked in its period charms, and despite excellent performances fails to resonate beyond the surface.

Stolen

Stolen

The rich/poor divide in India is staggeringly vivid in Karan Tejpal’s first feature ‘Stolen’, the desperate search for a stolen baby that is powered by exciting chases and the constant threat of violence.

The Promised Land

The Promised Land

After The Royal Affair, which gave us Mads Mikkelsen and a then-unknown Alicia Vikander in a tumultuous Rococo-era court romance, Danish writer-director Nikolaj Arcel goes back to the 18th century for another story of power struggles and romance in The Promised Land...

Guillermo Arriaga Opens Up to TFV

Guillermo Arriaga Opens Up to TFV

by Liza Foreman Oscar-winning writer Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, Amores Perros, Babel) wasn't even 30 when he was asleep in a car which fell off a cliff. But instead of ending his life, the near-fatal accident inspired the Mexican multihyphenate’s first screenplay...

Dogman

Dogman

In a multi-faceted role, Caleb Landry Jones dazzles as the survivor of an inhuman childhood who believes only dogs can love him, in Luc Besson’s calculated, over-the-top yet poignant shaggy-dog story.

European Film Awards Documentary Selection

European Film Awards Documentary Selection

With 14 feature-length documentary films, the European Film Academy is presenting a strong Documentary Film Selection for the European Film Awards 2023. A committee consisting of a diverse range of invited European experts has chosen these 14 productions that have...

Ferrari

Ferrari

In his first feature film in eight years, director Michael Mann passionately captures a life where the drive for success and the threat of disaster were intricately intertwined.

El Conde

El Conde

In El conde, Pablo Larraín’s darkly comic horror-satire reveals that turning a real-life monster into the protagonist of his own monster movie is an effective way to process historical tragedy.

God is a Woman

God is a Woman

God is a Woman, nearly fifty years after a film documenting Panama’s Kuna community was lost, Swiss-Panamanian director Andrés Peyrot tracks it down and screens it before an emotionally engaged crowd in this fascinating though flawed documentary.

Hollywoodgate

Hollywoodgate

A sobering observational documentary shot at an air force base in Afghanistan, where director Ibrahim Nash’at embedded himself in order to bear witness to the Taliban mindset.

Comandante

Comandante

The true story of an Italian submarine commander in World War II who sank enemy ships yet saved defenseless men is told with old-fashioned gusto and retro sentimentality in ‘Comandante’, with star Pierfrancesco Favino injecting life into the film.

3 Questions for Roberto Cicutto

3 Questions for Roberto Cicutto

THE FILM VERDICT:  You have often underlined the uniqueness of the Biennale di Venezia, which encompasses art, architecture, dance, music and theater as well as cinema. You stress that it “has never been just a showcase for talents and films, it has also been a mirror...

Equalizer 3

Equalizer 3

The third film in Denzel Washington and Antoine Fuqua’s ultraviolent thriller series is the best one yet. (If only that meant more than it does.)

Bottoms

Bottoms

This queer comedy remains uncompromisingly outrageous and hilarious from start to finish, and if it’s too weird to be a box-office smash, then it has the makings of a future cult classic.

Blue Beetle

Blue Beetle

‘Blue Beetle’ is a superhero movie with laughs, action, cultural specificity and human-sized stakes — here’s hoping there’s room for this character in the next reboot of the DC Universe.

Medium

Medium

With ‘Medium’, Greek filmmaker Christina Ioakeimidi adapts Giorgos Sibardis’ novel about a 16-year-old girl coming of age across a scorching Athens summer. Premiered in Sarajevo International Film Festival

ANGELINA JOLIE RETURNS TO HUNGARY

ANGELINA JOLIE RETURNS TO HUNGARY

Angelina Jolie is set to return to Hungary 13 years after she directed her Golden Globe nominated debut feature film "In The Land of Blood and Honey." This time she will be in front of the camera, portraying the legendary opera singer Maria Callas in Chilean director...

Libertate

Libertate

A chaotic power struggle plays out in 1989 Transylvania, in Tudor Giurgiu’s cynical, directionless drama of civic breakdown and compromise, is showing in Sarajevo International Film Festival

De Facto

De Facto

Selma Doborac’s formally audacious, challenging and chilling ‘De Facto’, a doc-fiction hybrid, decontextualises war crimes testimony to plumb the power of language. In Sarajevo International Film Festival

Shayda

Shayda

Noora Niasari’s episodic debut film ‘Shayda’ stars Zar Amir Ebrahimi (‘Holy Spider’) in an involving performance as an Iranian woman in an Australian women’s shelter.

Rossosperanza

Rossosperanza

The audacious second feature from Annarita Zambrano (‘After the War’) explores the mindspace of Italian teenagers in 1990 who aren’t allowed to be themselves.

First Case

First Case

A young French law-office worker unexpectedly finds herself defending a murder suspect in First Case (Première Affaire), the debut feature from Victoria Musiedlak. The unassuming drama continues in the vein of down-to-earth portraits of regular people working in...

Baan

Baan

An undisciplined feature debut burdened by regrettably immature dialogue that knee-caps a potentially interesting impressionistic exploration of what “home” means in a globalized world.

Patagonia

Patagonia

A developmentally delayed young man falls under the spell of a pansexual itinerant children’s entertainer in Simone Bozzelli’s well-performed but psychologically ill-judged feature debut.

Touched

Touched

Claudia Roranius’s ‘Touched’ competently telegraphs a complex intimate relationship with unusual frankness and gorgeous visuals, and yet, it falls short of its own material in true emotional terms.

Stepne

Stepne

Maryna Vroda’s richly lensed feature debut is a melancholic look at a dying part of north-eastern Ukraine that’s seemingly untouched by the present war, and while the narrative holds interest thanks especially to the protagonist, it’s the documentary-like scenes that are the film’s heart.

All the Fires

All the Fires

With ‘All the Fires’, first-time director Mauricio Calderón Rico rises to the challenge of a sensitive coming-of-ager with LGBTQ+ interest and a personal style.

Yannick

Yannick

Quentin Dupieux’s gentle satirical humor has been put to better use than in “Yannick,” a slight (in every sense) comedy in need of either more intelligence or delirium to make it meaningfully fill its 66-minute running time.

Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer

In ‘Oppenheimer’, writer-director Christopher Nolan has a stronger handle on the creation of the atomic bomb than on the inner life of the tortured genius behind that creation.

Barbie

Barbie

With ‘Barbie’, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach bring an overflowing toybox of ideas to a funny, provocative, meaningful movie that defies its product-placement roots.

76 Locarno Official Selection

76 Locarno Official Selection

The 76th Locarno Film Festival offers 11 sections, 3 competitions and 20 awards, highlighting both quality and variety. It is a Festival that explores cinema from every perspective, discovering in-the-present filmmakers and films destined to have a future. Concorso...

The Winners of KVIFF Eastern Promises 2023

The Winners of KVIFF Eastern Promises 2023

KVIFF Eastern Promises, the festival's Industry section and film market, has the exciting mission of bridging the gap between talented filmmakers and their potential partners, festivals and audiences. “Just like every year, we’ve tried to curate a nice mix of projects...

Red Rooms

Red Rooms

A young woman becomes obsessed with a man accused of being a brutal serial killer in Pascal Plante’s slickly constructed and brilliantly unsettling thriller, Red Rooms.

Pure Unknown

Pure Unknown

A forensic anthropologist works to return names to the unidentified dead that EU states have forsaken in this sensitive yet urgent and persuasive observational documentary.

A Year of European Support

A Year of European Support

In the past year, 179 European films received Film Sales Support (FSS) from Hamburg-based EFP (European Film Promotion) accomplishing its core mission to facilitate sales to countries outside of Europe. FSS plays a crucial role in facilitating investment in additional...

Sorcery

Sorcery

A 13-year-old girl on a Chilean island reckons with colonial brutality in an ominous, supernatural tale of historical oppression and indigenous resistance.

No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings

Brash comedy gives way to heartfelt sentiment, but Jennifer Lawrence, whose multifaceted talent gets showcased here, carries the story across the finish line.

Elemental

Elemental

Visual delights, a sweet love story, and that potent Pixar sentimentality carry this animated feature past a periodic table’s worth of script flaws.

Patricio Plaza

Patricio Plaza

Léalo en español n animator and film director born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Patricio Plaza studied visual arts and audiovisual communication at the National University of La Plata. He worked as a commercial 2D animator for various studios for over 20 years,...

Marcos Almada

Marcos Almada

Marcos Almada is a children's book author, illustrator and filmmaker. He has created characters such as Oscar the Possum and Domingo Teporingo, as well as those starring in Dr. Gecko's Show, a TV series developed by CONACYT and INMEGEN. Alongside producer and animator...

Diego Huacuja T

Diego Huacuja T

Designer and illustrator Diego Huacuja T is the creative director and co-founder of the company Basa, specialized in design and animation. His fusion of different forms of visual expression and his passion for design and animation have led Diego and his company to...

Miguel Anaya Borja

Miguel Anaya Borja

After studying Graphic Communication Design at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), Miguel Anaya Borja has worked in the areas of art direction, graphic design, advertising, production, and animation. He taught animation courses at the Universidad...

Amanda Woolrich

Amanda Woolrich

An engraving artist as well as a painter and animator, Amanda Woolrich has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Faculty of Visual Arts of the UNAM. In 2019 and 2021 she was a recipient of a fellowship from the National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA) for young...

Amanda Woolrich

Amanda Woolrich

Amanda Woolrich es artista de grabado, pintora y animadora. Es egresada, con licenciatura y maestría de la Facultad de Artes Visuales de la UNAM. Fue beneficiaria del programa de jóvenes creadores del FONCA en 2019  con Aquí y allá y en 2021 con Trasiego ambos con...

The Flash

The Flash

The first and last 10 minutes demonstrate the winning superhero saga this might have been, but the middle two hours are devoted to sloppy, shameless fan service.

Hounds

Hounds

A taut, failed caper story with film noir elements set during a long night in the underbelly of Casablanca is well-paced and grittily shot.

The Old Oak

The Old Oak

After angry, affecting portraits of northern England’s working class families in his previous two films, in ‘The Old Oak’ director Ken Loach travels to a former mining village where Syrian refugees are being resettled, to tell a moving but more generic, less engaging story than its predecessors.

Salem

Salem

A powerful, at times remarkable sophomore feature from Jean-Bernard Marlin that takes the usual “Romeo and Juliet” plot, drops it into the projects of Marseille, and then widens its scope with a story of an apocalyptical plague and magical redemption.

Bread and Roses

Bread and Roses

Sahra Mani’s raw documentary about the dire situation for women in Afghanistan, as well as those all but abandoned in so-called safe houses across the border, forces Western audiences to pay attention and stop averting their gaze from the Taliban’s reign of terror.

The Pot au Feu

The Pot au Feu

The pièce de résistance of unabashed culinary cinema, Tran Anh Hung’s ‘The Pot au Feu’ serves up a French country idyll in romantic 19th century sauce for audiences whose tastes run to the fine wines and 12-course meals.

Levante

Levante

Cine Verdict: La directora brasileña debutante Lillah Halla hace una película llena de entusiasmo y empatía sobre una talentosa jugadora de voleibol que resuena en el panorama actual de los derechos reproductivos.

Pictures of Ghosts

Pictures of Ghosts

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s poetic docu-essay Pictures of Ghost is a passkey to his previous films as well as a personal reflection on his relationship with Recife and cinephilia, but this terrifically edited meditation is also a more universal ode to the way memories become ghosts that inhabit the physical spaces of our lives.

Kidnapped

Kidnapped

Marco Bellocchio’s tense, edge-of-seat historical thriller, ‘Kidnapped,’ is the devastating true story of a 6-year-old Jewish boy abducted in 1858 to be raised a Catholic.

CineVerdict: Cerrar los ojos

CineVerdict: Cerrar los ojos

“Cerrar los ojos” es una apasionada y atractiva reflexión sobre el arte, la memoria, la identidad y la recuperación del tiempo pasado. Una película del venerado maestro vasco-español Víctor Erice, contada atípicamente, pero que típicamente aborda grandes temas.

Close Your Eyes

Close Your Eyes

A passionate, big-issue film from revered Spanish maestro Victor Erice, ‘Close Your Eyes” engagingly reflects on art, memory, identity and recapturing time past.

The Buriti Flower

The Buriti Flower

Portuguese-Brazilian directors João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora return to Cannes with a complex, highly-charged chronicle of how different generations of a Brazilian indigenous community fight back against intruders on their ancestral lands.