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).
Edgy Media is a new film distribution and sales company, aiming to make its mark with a fresh and ambitious approach. The company is founded by Adam Ghobrial, an industry veteran with 20 years of experience. The company's goal is to link groundbreaking storytelling...
The sixth annual French Riviera Film Festival (FRFF), scheduled to take place from May 17-18, 2024, celebrates short films and short-form content from all over the world. The festival co-founders, Nicole Goesseringer Muj and Gotham Chandna, have announced the finalist...
Karlovy Vary IFF will hold a special retrospective titled "The Wish To Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema". This showcase will offer cinematic reflections on the work of one of the most influential figures of 20th-century literature. Works from filmmakers such as Orson...
Nestled on the shores of Lake Geneva, , Visions du Réel has developed into a small gem for documentary cinema, screening 128 films in its main programs.
Atmospheric, compelling and timely, Swiss documentarian Nicole Vögele’s ‘The Landscape and the Fury’, about migrants trying to cross the Bosnia-Croatian border to reach Europe, won Visions du Réel’s top prize.
Guy Ritchie displays his usual skill at stylized violence, cheeky repartee, and bespoke costuming, but the build-up in this WWII action saga outshines the climax.
The Cannes Film Festival is presenting its Honorary Palme d'Or award to Studio Ghibli. This studio, led by storytellers Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, has introduced a breath of fresh air in the world of animated films over the last forty years, creating a host of...
Lynne Ramsay checks in from Stockfish, where she received the festival’s Honorary Award, with new films starring Julianne Moore and Jennifer Lawrence on the horizon.
A nun weighs up the freedoms and limits of a Belarusian convent after heartbreak and heroin addiction in this sublime and sensorial debut feature doc.
In the slantwise ethnographic documentary ‘Empathfridges’, Rakel Jonsdottir explores the concept of shared fridges in Iceland to create microcosmic portraits of place and community.
The 10th anniversary edition of the Icelandic festival Stockfish brought professionals and casual audiences together in a warm, intimate manner.
The tale as old as time gets a stylish Icelandic makeover in ‘Belle’, the closing film of Stockfish 2024.
The Balkan landscape is a witness to cycles of time and displacement in Nicole Vögele’s atmospheric, compelling and very human doc.
Haunting and multi-layered, this is a stunning debut doc on death, female resistance and knowledge in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Maria Stoianova draws on her figure-skater father’s ‘80s and ‘90s VHS archive in a poignant debut doc on a Ukraine caught between the illusions of two systems.
Luca Guadagnino’s twisty, sexy, adult tennis saga entwines three players who understand each other (and themselves) on the court but have a harder time working outside the lines.
Scott Cummings explores the Church of Satan through theatrical vignettes in his inventive, irreverent documentary portrait of a maligned American outsider culture.
The experimental short If I die, will I go home? unnervingly explores the psyche of a young man wrestling with how to survive as an adult when bound by the long grip of childhood trauma.
Alex Garland can mount a battle sequence as well as any filmmaker working today, but the lack of political context and specificity undermines this ambitious film.
The 77th edition of the Festival de Cannes announced. Opening film THE SECOND ACT (LE DEUXIÈME ACTE) by Quentin DUPIEUX – Out of Competition In Competition THE APPRENTICE by Ali ABBASI MOTEL DESTINO by Karim AÏNOUZ BIRD by Andrea ARNOLD EMILIA PEREZ by Jacques AUDIARD...
Hats off to the grande dame of the film world.
A young women who suffered a stroke at the age of thirteen, Hafey reconnects with the use of her body through dance in this moving and affirming documentary portrait.
Kevin Costner will present the first part of "Horizon, An American Saga" as a World Premiere, Out of Competition at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. “I’d like to thank the Festival de Cannes for including my film Horizon, An American Saga in this year’s...
George Lucas is set to receive the Honorary Palme d’Or during the Closing Ceremony of the 77th Festival de Cannes, which will be broadcast on French TV channel France 2 on May 25, Saturday. The Festival is “delighted to pay tribute to one of the greatest figures of...
Dev Patel makes a dazzling directorial debut that mixes stylish ultra-violence with a provocative political point of view.
In partnership with MILC Metaverse, The Film Verdict (TFV) will launch screening rooms in the metaverse for acquisition executives who want to easily screen films at Cannes and around the world. Off the back of the successful launch of the very first MILC Metaverse...
By Richard Flynn Is the metaverse DEAD? The metaverse exploded onto the scene like the hottest new Hollywood A-lister, bringing with it the promise of revolutionising the way we live, communicate, and consume content online. But today, “metaverse” has become a dirty...
TFV y CineVerdict le da al cine en español una muy merecida atención
TFV is proud to give Cinema in Spanish some well-deserved attention.
TFVN is a trailblazing podcast platform focusing on the global film industry, delivering dynamic audio content tailored for professionals, creatives, enthusiasts and students, revolutionizing the way industry insights are accessed and fostering valuable connections within the international film community.
A trade magazine is only relevant when a film community values its content and when it provides a bridge for filmmakers to reach the wider film industry of acquisition executives and festivals.
International films are emerging from a bleak winter of disregard, thanks to the power of professional reviews.
Al-Takdir, a new bilingual film platform spotlighting the cinema of the Middle East, is about to bow at Cannes.
One of the better American Godzilla movies delivers the giant-monster-fighting goods, even if waiting for the grand finale occasionally feels like a chore.
On Wednesday, 27 March the Movies that Matter Festival announced the winners of its 16th edition during the award ceremony at Theater Aan het Spui in the Dutch city of The Hague. The Grand Jury Fiction Award, worth € 5.000 was awarded to Mexican comedy-drama 'Radical'...
Stockfish Film and Industry Festival announces its 10th anniversary celebration. To mark the occasion, Stockfish is offering free admission to this year's festivities. The festival offers a diverse program for professionals in the industry. Emphasis is placed on...
The expansion at Shepperton Studios in Surrey is now open and Amazon MGM Studios and Netflix are in occupation. The state-of-the-art development will add to Shepperton’s world-class amenities and provide an additional 17 sound stages, 548,000 sq ft of production and...
Hafsia Herzi extends a smile and a gaze to Nina Meurisse, in Iris Kaltenbäck’s first feature film ‘The Rapture.’
The lineup boasts 88 world premieres and 14 international premieres among 128 selected films.
A franchise once built on comedy with some creepy ghosts on the side now feels more committed to nostalgic brand-building, sprinkled with forgettable scares and half-hearted attempts at humor.
Artists protest the festival’s military and defense sponsorship as the war in Gaza continues.
The production will have the largest total qualified expenditures in the history of the California Film and Television Tax Credit Program.
Brisk, exciting and genuinely funny, ‘Kung Fu Panda 4’ is the highlight of this
long-running franchise, furthering the hero’s journey to enlightenment, working wonders
with its ensemble cast, and embracing the philosophical spirit of kung fu.
A new production agreement between the United States and Italy is in the works that could mean significant advantages to projects of Italian origin.
The Arab Cinema Center turns ten this year, continuing to offer networking opportunities to Arab filmmakers and their counterparts around the globe.
When her lover of forty years suddenly dies, Angie discovers she has no rights even to her own apartment in Ray Yeung’s Teddy Award-winning ‘All Shall Be Well’, a heartfelt though unexceptional drama revealing Hong Kong’s unjust inheritance laws for same-sex couples.
Berlin’s transitional year unfolded uncertainly amid a dire world political situation and an imminent leadership change at the festival.
The Berlinale awards celebrated cultural differences, with the Golden Bear going to Mati Diop’s poetic and thoughtful documentary on colonialism ‘Dahomey’, which follows the return of looted cultural artefacts to Benin.
By Liza Foreman This week’s European Film Market in Berlin had buyers buzzing about big projects. Jason Resnick, consultant and former acquisitions exec at Universal said: “There were a lot of commercial projects with big stars which got the buyers excited. Post the...
Crypto-currencies and cryogenics become intertwined in Gala Hernandez Lopez’s illusory dual-screen collage which ruminates on humanity’s speculative relationship with the future, for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world.
Italy was 2024’s Country in Focus at the Berlinale’s European Film Market.
Nepal’s first-ever competition title at the Berlinale, Min Bahadur Bham’s Shambhala is a visually breathtaking, emotionally engaging relationship drama about a young Tibetan’s physical and mental journey across the Himalayas in search of her vanished husband.
A filmmaker explores her struggles with motherhood and artistic stimulus through a correspondence and a short film about birdwatching in That’s All from Me, a deft epistolary short.
Three generations of Russified women in Ukraine come to grips with their identities and displacement in Svitlana Lishchynska’s rough-edged, absorbing film-as-therapy documentary.
Bowing in the Berlinale’s independently curated Forum programme, Indian filmmaker Siddartha Jatla’s second feature, ‘In the Belly of a Tiger’, combines social critique with magical realism to depict the struggles of India’s rural poor.
BY Liza FOREMAN The year 2018 was a special Cannes for women filmmakers in several ways. Nina Menkes, the iconic feminist director of films like 'Queen of Diamonds', (restored by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation), stood on stage at The Members Club to hold court...
Gustav Möller returns to the thriller genre with his second feature ‘Sons’, bolstered by terrific performances.
Wang Xiaoshuai, controversially without an official screening permit, returns to Berlin with another superb picture about Chinese politics (and peasantry) featuring outstanding performances and stellar dialogue.
Featuring wordless performances by a heavily disguised Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ is a boldly surreal Bigfoot comedy with surprising emotional depth.
A misguided narrative full of ill-thought-out atmospheric twists spoils the cinematic attractions of Tunisian-American Meryem Joobeur’s debut feature about a family torn apart when two sons join Daesh.
A man has his heart removed in an attempt to lessen his existential anguish in Fanny Sorgo and Eva Pedroza’s expressive, lingering animation, Tako Tsubo.
BY LIZA FOREMAN This year’s European Film Market has been awash in big titles sold by a slew of independent sales companies that are creating momentum going into 2024. At this week’s EFM, buzz titles like 'Oh Canada' from Paul Schrader, Oscar nominee Celine Song’s...
The gap between African and Chinese culture proves easier to breach than the perspectives that separate a woman and a man in acclaimed director Abderrahmane Sissako’s ‘Black Tea’, a fascinating love story set in China but one that sadly gets lost in the telling.
Aliyar Rasti’s contemplative fable searches for a better future in the vast Iranian countryside.
The outmoded bleach sellers of Tangier offer a window to a simpler time and a resistance against rampant growth in Hicham Gardaf’s tranquil documentary, In Praise of Slowness.
This lumbering lesbian road-trip “comedy” lurches its way toward nowhere in particular.
Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Ngoc Lan’s first feature, ‘Cu Li Never Cries’, is an absorbing, beautiful ode about a pensioner’s nostalgia for her past and a young couple’s uncertainty about their future.
The Undersecretary of the Culture Ministry, Lucia Borgonzoni hosted a private meeting Tuesday at The Italian Pavilion between Italian cinema representatives and the US Motion Picture Association. Lucia Borgonzoni in a closed door meeting with Charles Rivkin, President...
An elderly couple retreats from the outside world in preparation for the launch of three artificial moons in the strange and meditative experimental documentary, The Moon Also Rises.
Nelson Makengo’s beautifully shot and observed documentary ‘Rising Up at Night’ captures the darkness of Kinshasa after severe flooding and electricity cuts, along with the resilience of its people.
Ukrainian director Oksana Karpovych’s quietly powerful documentary ‘Intercepted’ combines bleakly beautiful, defiantly hopeful images of her war-ravaged homeland with recordings of phone calls made by invading Russian soldiers.
The second chapter of Denis Villeneuve’s epic adaptation delivers on the visual grandeur and political intrigue, even if the characters tend to be reduced to their plot function.
Santiago, Chile is both brought into focus and dreamily abstracted in Towards the Sun, Far from the Centre, a languid city symphony featuring a queer couple looking for a space in which they can express themselves.
A joyful feminist fantasy set in Venice in 1800, in which music unchains an orphanage full of talented girl musicians, ‘Gloria!’ will split audiences into two distinct camps.
Martin Scorsese pays personal homage to visionary film-maker duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in David Hinton’s formally traditional but thorough documentary ‘Made in England’.
Real historical murder cases inspired ‘The Devil’s Bath’, a relentlessly grim but atmospheric psychological horror thriller from Austrian writer-director duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.
A wonderfully observed sketch of a family lunch in late-1990s China, Remains of the Hot Day not only captures period mood but is compiled from glimpses of myriad miniature dramas.
A depressed Chinese woman tired of her unaffectionate family and middle class life heads towards a breakdown in ‘Some Rain Must Fall,’ the first feature by Qiu Yang, whose minimalist storytelling is full of atmosphere and foreboding.
A young girl avoiding her home and a woman returning to hers after a long absence form a brief but profound bond in Selin Oksuzoglu sparkling short, Bye Bye Turtle.
Three people in Beirut representing the past, present and future of Lebanon experience the hopes, disappointments and decimated sense of stability in Myriam El Hajj’s sad yet defiant documentary tracing the country’s ups and downs since 2018.
Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias’s fanciful exploration of the inner life of one of Pablo Escobar’s cocaine hippos, Pepe, is an idiosyncratic affair as piercing and beguiling as it is confounding.
Hong Sang-soo’s third collaboration with Isabelle Huppert is the weakest outing for both the director and actor so far.
Las voces de tres mujeres dan autenticidad a una película a punto de rebasada por propósitos didácticos. Memorias de un cuerpo que arden que se estrena en la sección Panorama en la Berlinale.
The voices of three women give authenticity to ‘Memories of a Burning Body’, premiering in the Panorama section at the Berlinale.
TFV attended a Berlinale networking event for German talents and asked them about their experiences.
In her first solo directing stint ‘Langue étrangère’, Camera d’Or winner Claire Burger cleverly evokes the fears and anxieties of two middle-class 17-year-old European girls about to inherit a world racked with violently diverging political opinions.
Shot over 15 years, Birgitte Stærmose’s deeply empathetic documentary, focused on child survivors, is an intimate and diligent depiction of the lingering aftermath of war.
A young girl draws a circle on the ground and people are drawn to stand within its borders in Joung Yumi’s typically mannered and strangely engrossing monochrome animation.
Another stunning documentary from Victor Kossakovsky full of gob-smacking immersive images of the natural world, pitched this time as a call for a harmonious alliance between nature and architecture.
The Italian Ministry of Culture, with Cinecitta’, are hosting a series of events in the Gropius Dome at the Italian Pavilion. Organizers of the Italian film industry say the focus-event aims to introduce a new format yet unseen at international festivals that will not...
Mischievous writer-director Bruno Dumont combines visually dazzling ‘Star Wars’ parody with small-town French farce in his admirably ambitious but muddled space opera ‘The Empire’.
The living haunt the dead in Yorgos Zois’s sexy glumfest ‘Arcadia’, an aching, downbeat tale about loss and lingering grief, told from the ghosts’ POV.
Santiago Lozano Álvarez encontró una manera original -lírica y exuberante- de hablar sobre los asesinatos, desapariciones y ecocidio en Colombia en Yo vi tres luces negras
The true story of Latvian-born German silent film diva Maria Leiko and her fateful journey to Stalin’s USSR in 1937 is retold in Davis Simanis’s ‘Maria’s Silence’ with a tragic depth that is engrossing and emotional.
Santiago Lozano Álvarez finds an original way – lyrical and exuberant – to talk about the murders, disappearances and ecocide in Colombia in ‘I Saw Three Black Lights’.
German director Matthias Glasner’s autobiographical, darkly funny, emotionally raw ensemble drama ‘Dying’ plays like a three-hour family therapy session.
Jeremy Clapin follows I Lost My Body with Meanwhile on Earth, another high-concept exploration of loss occupied by expressive ethical wrangling and intangible alien lifeforms.
Mati Diop’s thought-provokingly cerebral-poetic documentary follows the return of 26 looted cultural artefacts and their welcome home to Benin, encompassing the celebrations as well as larger debates around colonialization and how to reintegrate such potently spiritual objects into a society 130 years after they were plundered.
Filmmaker Inadelso Cossa uses sensory evocation to delve into the lingering impact of Mozambique’s civil war (1977 to 1992) in ‘The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder’.
Olivier Assayas’s semi-autobiographical reverie ‘Suspended Time’ on his stay in the family home during lockdown, is likely his weakest work, playing like a parody of an intellectualized director’s banal ruminations.
Corporate scientists use memory technology to bring back the dead for a brief reunion with their loved ones (played by Gael Garcia Bernal and Bérénice Bejo), in Piero Messina’s clever but often perplexing ‘Another End’, whose futuristic love story beyond the grave is a mighty challenge to unravel.
Although a bit too dry for a wide audience, Mamadou Dia’s ‘Demba’ has moments of visual grace, a great central performance, and a compelling subject at its core.
German director Andreas Dresen’s biopic of anti-Nazi activist Hilde Coppi, ‘From Hilde, With Love’ is diligent and thoughtful but too tastefully restrained.
Beginning in 2019, a quartet of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers in the Occupied Territories start documenting Israel’s appropriation of the land and its escalation until just after the start of the current juggernaut in Gaza.
A disappointing, maddeningly self-indulgent plunge into the tensions and inequities in the kitchen of a Times Square eatery, designed as an anti-capitalist diatribe messily juggling personal and choral storytelling but saved to some degree by excellent chiaroscuro camerawork and a strong cast.
In the week between the Grammys and the Super Bowl, Human Rights Watch announced that Vladimir Putin and other military officials should be investigated for war crimes following Russia’s assault on Mariupol. On Valentine’s Day it was reported that UNESCO calculated...
Michael Fetter Nathansky, with assistance from lead actress Aenne Schwarz, inspects a shaky relationship in the shadow of work pressures in this adequately sensitive, surreal, and discomfiting look at marriage and its dissatisfactions.
by Liza Foreman For our daily column Market Voices, The Film Verdict will be checking in with the peeps peopleing the shop floor at this week’s European Film Market in Berlin, to give readers a feel for the first major film market of the year. Stay tuned. Pedro Peira,...
Jennie Livingston’s seminal Paris is Burning was probably the first hit film to show what LGBTQ+ people have always known: we make our own families. They’re often not biological but they are carefully chosen, proving that genetics is no determinant of unconditional...
A teenager navigates the social pressures of school and the expectations of family in Muna, a thoughtful coming-of-age drama about personal desires and dislocated grief.
A small jewel of an Iranian romantic comedy, ‘My Favourite Cake’ pits an older woman determined to find a measure of happiness against the restrictions of the Islamic regime and the loneliness of aging, while the film’s creators Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha have been banned from traveling to Berlin.
The devastating impact of Alzheimer’s disease on a couple becomes an engaging, moving chronicle in the skillful hands of documentarian Maite Alberdi.
El devastador impacto de la enfermedad de Alzheimer en una pareja se convierte en una crónica que cautiva y conmueve en las hábiles manos de la documentalista Maite Alberdi.
Cillian Murphy follows his huge ‘Oppenheimer’ success with glum but powerful personal project ‘Small Things Like These’, a soulful literary psychodrama about mercy, empathy, complicity and dark misdeeds in 1980s Ireland.
Celebrated stage dramatist Annie Baker paints childhood as a midsummer daydream full of tragicomic adult behaviour in her droll, charming film debut ‘Janet Planet’.
By Liza Foreman PARIS - The Hôtel du Collectionneur is awash with French cinema talent and journalists buzzing between interview rooms at the tail end of the annual UniFrance Meetings in Paris a few weeks ago. But Daniela Elstner, the Executive Director of the French...
Aaron Schimberg’s darkly funny body-horror fairy tale ‘A Different Man’ takes a satirical scalpel to the beastliness of beauty.
Berlinale 74 presents the International Jury, who will be presenting the awards for:Golden Bear for Best Film (awarded to the film’s producers), Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, Silver Bear Jury Prize, Silver Bear for Best Director, Silver Bear for Best Leading...
Despite a tangled narrative web, this arachnid superhero saga makes a far better would-be tentpole in Sony’s Spider-verse than ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’ or ‘Morbius,’ thanks mainly to Dakota Johnson.
Carlo Chatrian is about to unleash his fifth and final Berlinale.
TFV speaks to Simone Baumann, Managing Director of German Films.
The Berlinale European Film Market (EFM) this year spotlights the artistry of Italian filmmakers and will offer industry participants opportunities to network with a variety of Italian producers, distributors, investors and experts. The 2024 EFM kicks off February 15...
The start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is captured with total professionality by AP correspondent Mstyslav Chernov and his team in ’20 Days in Mariupol’, in iconic images that strike the heart forcefully in a classic, masterful documentary on war.
This female-gaze take on 1980s teen movies must have looked great on paper, but it never comes to life on screen.
European Film Commissions Network (EUFCN) member film commissions had the opportunity to submit one location from a feature film or a TV series shot in their territory and released between Oct. 3rd 2022 and Sept. 11th 2023. The Location Award Jury selected the five...
Rotterdam Film Festival’s 53rd edition balanced an uneven competition program full of sombre three-hour dramas with more adventurous sidebars, essay films, experimental video art and pop superstar guests.
Scattered over different sections with few ripples in the media, four films detailing the Palestinian experience stood out at Rotterdam.
Indian director Midhun Murali’s prize-winning animated shadow-puppet epic ‘Kiss Wagon’ is loopy and confusing but still a dazzling, highly original visual feast.
Daniele Luchetti’s ‘Confidenza’ (Trust), from the Domenico Starnone novel about a dangerous confidant, features a noteworthy performance from Elio Germano.
Language is an instrument of oppression and a tool to combat it in Tevin Kimathi and Millan Tarus’ charming tale of childhood resistance, Stero.
Earlier this month, the Berlinale announced the selection of the Iranian film My Favourite Cake by Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha in Competition at this year’s 74th edition of the festival. Since then, the festival has learned that Iranian writers/directors...
This is an establishing shot of the hotel where Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) and Gus Waters (Angel Elgort) stay while on their trip to Amsterdam. The Fault in Our Stars is an American coming of age romance film directed by Josh Boone, based on the novel of...
Three very different films from Japan, India and Australia won Rotterdam’s Tiger Awards, underlining the festival’s range of new talent.
Awash in a luxuriant atmosphere of passion and emotional discovery created by exquisite b&w images of seas rivers and jungles, Marcelo Gomes’s three characters struggle to shake off the past and move forward post-WW2 in ‘Portrait of a Certain Orient’.
Ilir Hasanaj’s deeply empathetic documentary ‘Workers’ Wings’, is centred on manual labourers who have suffered workplace injuries, is a tender and intimate marvel.
Dmytro Moiseiev’s laconic portrait of a solitary beekeeper with an evolving political consciousness in the “grey zone” of Donetsk is sage and affecting.
TFV interviewed outspoken Hong Kong director Scud, who brought his tenth and perhaps final film to Rotterdam.
The Arab Cinema Center (ACC) will bestow its 5th Arab Cinema Personality of the Year Award to Mohannad Al-Bakri during the 74th Berlin International Film Festival.
Fumbling first love stirs up a frenzy in this indie debut that gets further away the closer you get.
Using the aesthetics of home video, with 78 Days Emilija Gasic crafts a poignant coming-of-age drama set amidst the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO.
Throughout the month of February, the Locarno Film Festival will showcase 29 dazzling short films as part of the Locarno Shorts Weeks, one of its most highly awaited online spin-off events for audiences around the world, with the leap year bringing one extra day and...
In this scene, Danny Ocean (George Clooney), Rusty Rusty (Brad Pitt) and the rest of Ocean’s team arrive at their hotel in Asterdam in preparation for a big heist they hope will pay off their debt to Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia). Ocean’s Twelve is the second...
Kazakh writer-director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s stylish but brutal neo-western thriller ‘Steppenwolf’ takes place once upon a time in the Wild East.
Yet another star-packed, high-gloss caper lacking in wit, stakes, charm, or a reason to exist.
In the spritely and tactile essayistic ode to a heroine of Greek myth Daphne was a torso ending in leaves, Catriona Gallagher reflects on the legacy of an ancient arboreal transformation.
TFV correspondent Max Borg investigates the Manetti-verse and how the Italian duo scored a Focus program at this year’s IFFR.
The traumas of Cambodia’s past stretch their icy fingers into the present in Tenement, a deeply unsettling psychological horror set in a rundown Khmer-era housing block.
Using a blend of stop-motion animation and live-action, Niles Atallah gorgeously crafts a mesmeric, dying world of analogue detritus and vestiges of magical knowledge, in which a half-amphibian being dreams of survival.
IFFR’s co-production market CineMart presented seven awards to projects presented during the IFFR Pro Awards Ceremony on Tuesday 30 January, which was co-hosted together with Catalan Films. The winners were selected from the 16 features and 4 immersive projects in...
A solitary artist rents her Tehran house out to a film crew, in an ingeniously layered, droll reflection on how we construct memory and community.
The cast shines, but this adaptation of the popular Nigerian novel could use a little more life.
Damien Hauser’s enchanting, sun-baked drama ‘After the Long Rains’ has bigger questions beneath its welcoming glow.
The feted Scottish film and video artist Rachel Maclean talks Barbie, James Bond, pink-punk maximalism and the subversive power of bad taste.
IFFR awarded 3 films from among the the 21 competitng Tiger Shorts of 2024. The jury included former Tiger Short Award-winner Mónica Lima, writer, programmer, and researcher Yasmina Price and distributor, curator and festival producer Jade Wiseman. The KNF (Circle of...
A cryptic Deborah Levy novel is stylised for the screen as an elusive and surrealistic dance of the subconscious, as an uninvited guest crashes a poet’s family vacation.
In this scene, Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) is forced into taking a training run while the team is in Amsterdam. He makes the best of it by taking his coach and mentor Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) to the location of the Skinny Bridge from the James Bond movie, Diamonds...
A major piece of Finland-Swedish literature comes to life with epic results in Tiina Lymi’s dramatic adaptation, ‘Stormskerry Maja’,
Australian director Jaydon Martin’s debut documentary ‘Flathead’ is a feast of gorgeous monochrome cinematography and a compassionate, humane, quietly spiritual work.
Veredicto: ‘La historia se escribe de noche’ es un retrato inusual de los apagones que han azotado a Cuba durante los últimos años y un ejercicio exquisito de atmósfera cinematográfica
‘History Is Written at Night’ is an unusual portrait of the blackouts that have plagued Cuba over the past few years and an exquisite exercise in atmosphere.
The iconic Blondie singer narrates and appears in Kramer’s new documentary ‘So Unreal’, a mind-bending deep dive into prophetic cyberpunk cinema.
Set in the Negev Desert where action blockbuster ‘Rambo III’ was shot, ‘Under a Blue Sun’ is an intricately layered doc scrutinising the intersection of war simulation, oppression and entertainment.
From Aay Liparoto’s powerful ‘Small Acts of Violence’ to Rachel Maclean’s darkly surreal ‘I’m Terribly Sorry’, Rotterdam kept Immersive Media viewers up-to-date.
Danish director Ulaa Salim’s romantic sci-fi weepie ‘Eternal’ is a glossy but underpowered inner-space odyssey that falls short of its Christopher Nolan-sized ambitions.
Finnish director-screenwriter-actress Tiina Lymi. whose ‘Stormskerry Maja’ had its international premiere in Rotterdam, reflects on making the spoken word realistic on screen.
Baffling, free-ranging and mesmeric, ‘Moses’ roams through a text on religion by Freud with deadpan Finnish humour that grounds its kooky performance art.
Director Billy Woodberry’s documentary portrait of Angolan poet, revolutionary and Pan-African icon Mário Pinto de Andrade offers an austere but absorbing history lesson.
In this scene of A Bridge Too Far, a German soldier (Lex van Delden) returns from an attempt to surrender to the Allied forces, but has to tell his Lieutenant (Maximillion Schell) that the enemy said, “No, thank you.” A Bridge Too Far is an epic war film directed by...
In the 16-minute short DUCK, visual artist Rachel Maclean co-opts the inherent suspicions of cinematic espionage to craft this surreal mash-up about the escalating media paranoia.
A young woman challenges the superstitious fears of her cult-like patriarchal community in Swiss director Sophia Bösch’s ambitious but uneven dystopian fairy-tale debut ‘Milk Teeth’.
A joyous Kiwi midnight-movie oddity that channels ‘80s fantasy and DIY gumption in a cosmic quest for a hyper-dimensional crystal.
Showing films by Chilean directors in exile, IFFR’s Focus on ‘Chile in the Heart’ helps us better understand the country and the 1973 coup d’état that changed it.
With a focus on the Central and South American continent, European Film Promotion will be launching the Latin American Critics’ Awards for European Films for the first time. Following the model of the well-established and successful Arab Critics’ Awards introduced in...
Al mostrar filmes de directores exiliados, el Focus Chile en el corazón de IFFR 2024 nos ayuda a entender mejor el país y el día en que cambió de golpe.
An absurdist, Gothic twist takes Jonathan Ogilvie’s coming-of-age comedy and New Zealand post-punk subculture origin story into delightfully uncharted territory.
Amanda Kramer’s debut documentary ‘So Unreal’ revisits classic sci-fi movies and vintage cyberpunk thrillers looking for cautionary clues about our current age of digital dystopia.
Entertainment Oxygen (eo) unveiled eoFlix, a comprehensive festival streaming and networking platform “eoFlix stands at the forefront of the industry, offering an unmatched, seamless blend of networking, dynamic live and online streaming, empowered self-distribution...
The Swiss director is bringing his new film ‘Bisons’ to Rotterdam.
The mainstream and the niche coexist at IFFR this year under artistic director Kaludjercic and managing director Stewart.
Johan Grimonprez’s complex, cacophonous ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ is a feat of design, narration, sound, and cinema about an important chapter in Congo’s tragic relationship with the UN, the U.S., and Belgium.
In ‘Sebastian’, Mikko Mäkelä presents a frank and graphic portrait of a writer as a young sex worker in literary London.
An intimate and profound study of a child’s need for maternal love, with outstanding acting from 6-year old Louise Mauroy-Panzani and her nanny, Ilça Moreno Zego.
Reinas, dirigida por Klaudia Reynecke es una buena película coming of age que confirma la presencia de una voz con sello propio en el cine latinoamericano
Reinas, directed by Klaudia Reynicke, is a coming of age film that confirms her unique voice in the Latin American Cinema.
International Film Festival Rotterdam offers the Tiger Short Competition Program. For the 2024 edition there will be twenty-one short and mid-length films compete for one of three equal awards. Qualifying films are between 1 and 63 minutes long, and they will be...
The Europeans were in form at Sundance, where they showed their first new films of 2024.
Thea Hvistendahl’s half-Stephen King, half-Kafka first feature, ‘Handling the Undead’, is a confident three-pronged narrative on the irreversibility of death.
Computer games offer a severely disabled young man an emotionally rich alternative life in Norwegian director Benjamin Ree’s moving, visually impressive documentary ‘Ibelin’.
In a Norwegian doc world premiering at Sundance, a moving family story is occasionally snagged by unconvincing dramatic contrivances.
Grimm Vandekerckhove is a Belgian cinematographer known for his collaborations with directors such as Bas Devos, Stephan Streker, Jeremy Guez and Fien Troch. After graduating from the LUCA – School of Arts in Brussels (2011), he started as a second unit camera...
The Tiger Competition Jury consists of Marco Müller, former director of Locarno, Venice, and IFFR (1989–1991); Ena Sendijarevi?, a Bosnian-Dutch filmmaker known for her acclaimed debut Take Me Somewhere Nice (IFFR 2019) and the Netherlands’ Oscars submission Sweet...
Facts come with chills in this cautionary doc overview of an ethically thorny new reality: the sale of immortality via AI simulations of the dead.
Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann’s ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici’ is an incredibly clear-eyed take on the absolute power the rich have in a capitalist society.
Berlin Film Festival has announed the films for the Panorama, Forum and Generation sections. The 2024 Panorama: Bridges Between Lived Experiences and Cinematic Possibilities Afterwar by Birgitte Stærmose | with Gëzim Kelmendi, Xhevahire Abdullahu, Shpresim Azemi,...
In collaboration with the Sundance Film Festival and with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA of the European Union, EFP provides a meeting space for the European film industry at the DoubleTree Hotel, The Yarrow, to promote and celebrate the diversity of European...
Santa Barbara. International Film Festival will showcase 45 world premieres and 77 U.S. premieres from 48 countries, along with tributes featuring the year’s top talent, panel discussions, and free community education and outreach programs. “We have a wonderfully...
The Duhok International Film Festival held a successful, vibrant 10th edition in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
The Film Verdict announces it's 2024 Film Festival coverage. EFP European Films at Sundance Jan 18 – 28 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) Jan 25 - Feb 4 Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) FEB 15 – 25 Hong Kong International Film Festival March...
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Cold-War-in-space thriller benefits from a lean-and-mean B-movie sensibility crossed with seamless effects work and potent performances.
More reviews, more coverage in the new year.
Será un año lleno de descubrimientos y más cobertura de las películas.
Per il 2024, continuiamo con innovazione e crescita; ancora più recensioni e festival.
TFV offre des opportunités équitables aux cinéastes du monde entier.
A pleasant-enough musical reworking of the 2004 comedy, hitting the big screen on its way to becoming a slumber-party staple for decades to come.
Entertainment Oxygen (eo), announces three new international festival partners - Soho London Independent Film Festival (January 25-28, 2024), Auroville Film Festival in India (January 22-28, 2024) and Utah International Film Festival (February 12-17, 2024)....
This haunted-swimming-pool thriller goes from creepy to ridiculous and back again, but as January-dumped horror films go, it’s a cut above.
Taking place just two months after the onset of the horrendous war in Gaza, the El Gouna Film Festival’s ‘Special Edition’ was a sober but not gloomy affair that paid its respects to the Palestinian people and their cinema.
The El Gouna Film Festival awards this year included ’Goodbye, Julia’, a Sudanese film by Mohamed Kordofani about two women divided by their cultures, which won the Cinema for Humanity Audience Award, while Egyptian director Ibrahim Nash’at’s ‘Hollywoodgate’ won as best documentary and Hong Sang-soo’s latest ‘In Our Day’ got the best narrative nod.
This superhero sequel represents something never-before-seen in cinema: a boring James Wan movie.
From personal journeys of discovery to man’s inhumanity to man, the stories shared in the films of 2023 speak to our moment in history and will continue to do so for generations to come.
East End Studios, located in Sunnyside, Queens has begun construction. Just minutes from Midtown Manhattan via the 59th Street Bridge, Sunnyside will feature three large 37’ clear state of the art stages and one purpose-built flex 27; clear stage. The flex stage...
Netflix announces ‘Too Much’, a new rom-com series created by multi award-winning writer, director, producer and actor Lena Dunham (Girls/Catherine Called Birdy) and her husband Luis Felber. The series will begin shooting in the UK in 2024. Megan Stalter (Hacks) will...
Flemish Economy Minister doubles budget; Screen Flanders invests three million in 14 new projects. Due to the high demand and high quality of the submitted dossiers, Flemish Minister of Economy Jo Brouns has doubled the 1.5 million euros budget initially allocated to...
Two of El Gouna Film Festival’s leading ladies discussed Yousra’s film career in a special masterclass.
Egyptian filmmakers stand out in El Gouna’s official Short Film Competition.
Director Lucy Kerr’s feature debut ‘Family Drama’ is slender and elusive, but highly atmospheric and hauntingly strange.
Alice Walker’s saga of sisterhood and survival becomes a rousing and heartfelt screen musical.
Vicky Krieps gives a striking performance as a racist Arizona border patrol guard in Belgian director Phillippe Van Leeuw’s otherwise underwhelming contemporary frontier western ‘The Wall’.
A delightful Algerian documentary about cinema and the Casbah makes a superb companion piece to the newly-restored 35mm print of ‘Tahia Ya Didou’ by cult comic and director Mohamed Zinet.
Since its foundation in 1972, International Film Festival Rottredam has maintained a focus on independent and experimental filmmaking by showcasing emerging talents and established auteurs. The festival also places a focus on presenting cutting edge media art and...
In a time of war, El Gouna’s special 2023 edition presents an insightful collection of recent films from Palestine, curated with the Palestine Cinema Days.
Gaining extra urgency in the light of current events, British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi’s debut feature ‘The Teacher’ is a well-intentioned but flawed drama set in the occupied West Bank
An all-female Islamic sect in Lebanon first ensnares, then abandons a deeply spiritual woman, along with her mother and her daughter, in Jude Chehab’s intriguing but unstructured portrait of her unusual family in ‘Q’.
El Gouna is screening eight Sudanese shorts from the ’70s and ’80s to retell a forgotten chapter of African film history.
The Finnish-German co-production 'Fallen Leaves' by Aki Kaurismäki has won this year’s Arab Critics' Awards for European Films, which is being presented for the fifth time by European Film Promotion (EFP) and Arab Cinema Center (ACC). 'Fallen Leaves' by Aki Kaurismäki...
The cruel and gripping story of Reyhaneh Jabbari, a 19-year-old Iranian woman convicted of murdering a man who attempted to rape her, unfolds like a thriller in Steffi Niederzoll’s documentary recreation, ‘Seven Winters in Tehran’.
French-Iraqi director Leila Albayaty explores her own complex cultural roots, painful family tensions and buried traumatic memories in her emotionally raw docu-musical ‘From Abdul to Leila’.
The Lumières Award presented by the Académie des Lumières to honor the best in the French-speaking cinema of the previous year. The awards ceremony is organized by the Académie des Lumières which consists of over 200 representatives of the international press based in...
Marwan Hamed’s work cannot be separated from the industry aspects of his successful film career.
Magical realism and Far East ghost stories inject a thrilling, if not always crystal clear, element into Nelson Yeo’s fishy tale of an overage and not completely human love triangle, ‘Dreaming & Dying’.
A charmingly eccentric 12-year-old girl struggles to bond with her estranged father in writer-director Charlotte Regan’s funny, sunny, prize-winning debut feature ‘Scrapper’.
FIPRESCI President and head of CineGouna SpringBoard Ahmed Shawky aspires for more diversity in film circles and more freedom for Arab narratives.
Marwan Hamed is an Egyptian film director known for his distinctive style that blends tradition and modernity. His talent first shone through his directorial debut, 'Lilly', a short film adapted from a story by Yousef Idrees. This gem achieved resounding success,...
The IDA Documentary Awards are dedicated to the documentary genre, celebrating the best nonfiction films and programs of the year. It seeks to represent excellence in the documentary field from around the world by emerging and established documentarians. Best Feature...
“Art should not be sacrificed during wars”: El Gouna’s Intishal Al Timimi and Marianne Khoury tell TFV
El Gouna Film Festival offers Window on Palestine, showcasing a collection of films that delve into the heart of Palestinian narratives. The carefully curated selection sheds light on the challenges faced by a resilient people, inviting audiences to gain a deeper...
Tricia Tuttle, a former director of the BFI London Film Festival, will become the new director of the Berlin International Film Festival next year, the German culture minister announced Tuesday. She will take over the directorship from 1 April 2024. The upcoming...
A timely coming-of-age drama about young women dealing with the complexities of sexual consent, writer-director Molly Manning Walker’s prize-winning debut feature ‘How to Have Sex’ is impressively nuanced and emotionally rich.
Two African boys who dream of Europe cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean on a heroic journey in ‘Me Captain’. Italy’s Oscar entry from acclaimed filmmaker Matteo Garrone.
Omar Hilal’s compelling ‘Voy! Voy! Voy!’, Egypt’s Oscar submission, dissects how far a bunch of Egyptian men will go to immigrate to Europe by impersonating blind soccer players,
Who wanted to assassinate Mihailo Obrenovic, the ruling Prince of Serbia, in 1868? As the true story plays out in The Duke and The Poet, director Milorad Milinkovic’s glossy tale of royal intrigue, almost everybody inside and outside the country had an ax to grind....
Filmmaker and producer Milorad Milinkovic reveals he is also a history buff in his recreation of the assassination of Prince Mihailo Obrenovic III in Serbia’s Oscar entry, ‘The Duke and the Poet’.
Nine cinematographers worked on depicting the landscape of glaciers and fjords that shaped director Margreth Olin’s childhood in Norway.
At age 82, Hayao Miyazaki proves once again that he’s our greatest living animator with this haunting tale of a boy on a mystical adventure in WWII-era Japan.
The director of ‘Bad Living’ talks to TFV about how it feels to be Portugal’s Oscar submission for the third time.
A stunningly shot meditation on man and nature — or more like man in nature — that could have benefited from more substance.
Director Anna Hints discusses all things ‘Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’, Estonia’s Oscar entry.
Exuberant director Radu Jude talks to TFV about Romania’s Oscar hopeful ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the
End of the World’ and what’s coming next.
As part of The Film Verdict’s International Contenders Series, TFV launched a private Metaverse Screening Room(s). Sreening this week is dedicated to the 2023 Western drama, “The Last Ashes,” directed by Loïc Tanson. This film, Luxembourg’s submission for the...
FABRIQUE DU CINÉMA AWARDS has been promoting the creativity of young and talented directors, actors and writers. Filmmakers from all over the world are invited to submit their work. With more than 1,300 submissions every year from more than 70 countries, the FABRIQUE...
Musical prequel manages to find the sweet spot between the wicked psychedelia of the original Willy Wonka and the feel-good delights of the director’s Paddington movies.
The filmmaker talks about ‘The Last Ashes’, an intriguing blend of European and American film traditions that is Luxembourg’s selection for the Oscar race.
Ramata-Toulaye Sy, the talented new director shooting in Senegal, gracefully glides from a Cannes premiere to the Oscar race.
Luminous hand-painting animates a famed Polish tale of female defiance in a rural world of predatory opportunism and survival.
More a retrospective documentary than a traditional concert film, this souvenir of Beyoncé’s recent smash tour will delight fans who want a peek behind the scenes even as those peeks occasionally distract from the artist’s extraordinary stagecraft.
A lone woman rides into famine-ridden 19th century Luxembourg hell-bent on revenge in Loïc Tanson’s enjoyably erudite first feature ‘The Last Ashes’, intriguingly poised between European fairy tale and the American Western.
Tinatin Kajrishvili, the director and producer of Georgia’s official Oscar submission ‘Citizen Saint’ discuss superstition, crucifixion and the current boom in world-class Georgian cinema.
The European Film Academy revealed the winners of the Excellence Awards. The winners in these eight categories honouring the different arts and crafts of film making will receive their awards at the award ceremony of the 36th European Film Awards taking place on 9...
The Gotham Awards are part of the Gotham Film & Media Institute (formerly Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), The awards were inaugurated in 1991 to honor US independent film, and expanded in 2004 to include the International film community, with an increase from six...
What was clearly designed to be a victory lap for Disney’s 100th anniversary will be mostly forgotten by the time the studio turns 101.
Festival confirms dates will be December 14 – 21.
Marco Mueller will direct the Asia-Europe Festival with Jerome Paillard handling the industry side.
IDFA 2023 received a staggering dose of real-life events on its opening night; the quality of its film selection and a few political moves helped it recover.
Shoghakat Vardanyan’s ‘1489’ wins Best Film at IDFA for its humor and humanity in what the jury called “a vivid evocation of 100 years of history in less than 100 minutes of cinema.”
For the fourth time, award-winning director Reza Mirkarimi is repping Iran at the Oscars with ‘The Night Guardian’, handling a predictably downbeat social drama set amid Iran’s swelling underclass with a delicate, sensitive touch, illuminated by young actor Touraj Alvand.
Elvis Sabin Ngaibino’s IDFA 2023 documentary, ‘The Burden’, walks a familiar path of African misery, but his compelling subjects lends this sophomore feature documentary a deserved poignancy.
Mohammed Almughanni’s project Son of the Streets won the IDFA Forum Award for Best Pitch, Amber Fares’ Coexistence, My Ass! took home the Forum Award for Best Rough Cut, and the DocLab Forum Award went to Turbulence by Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts. Each award...
Just over a dozen artworks are observed in situ in 14 Paintings, a patient but cumulatively fascinating cross-section portrait of contemporary China.
A star guest at the Dutch documentary festival, 81-year-old art-house provocateur Peter Greenaway discusses his two new feature projects, his fears for the future of cinema, and his own feelings of mortality.
Dutch director Walter Stokman digs into recently declassified KGB archives in ‘The Kyiv Files’, an uneven but timely documentary about Ukraine, Russia and Cold War paranoia.
While this sumptuously mounted production delivers as a sweeping war epic, one hopes Ridley Scott’s promised director’s cut will fill in the emotional and historical blanks.
Hussain Currimbhoy, whose film industry career and passion for championing works by marginalized filmmakers, is set to bring a new vision to Hot Docs, overseeing programming for Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto’s Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema...
Directors Juan Palacios and Sofie Husum Johannesen find beauty and sadness in ‘As the Tide Comes In’, a visually exquisite documentary about a tiny Danish island community menaced by climate change.
French visual artist and film-maker JR chronicles his grand-scale collaboration with the inmates of a maximum-security prison in his didactic but uplifting documentary ‘Tehachapi’.
A raw and immediate found-footage assemblage, ‘Limitation’ traces Russia’s hand in the coup that overthrew Georgia’s first post-Soviet president Zviad Gamsakhurdia.
Melissa Thackway and Biljana Tutorov, jury members for the Beeld en Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award at IDFA 2023, join TFV’s Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, the jury’s third member, in a discussion about the evolution of archives and the festival’s controversial opening night.
Director Barbara Visser explores the controversial links between pioneering Dadaist artists Marcel Duchamp and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in her lively, adventurous, unconventional documentary ‘Alreadymade’.
Sirin Bahar Demirel’s stimulating bricolage short, Between Delicate and Violent, combines archival imagery with animation to examine how pictures tell stories and whether they can be mined for truth.
Fear-stoking myths around wolves, back in Germany after a century, are dismantled in Ralf Bücheler’s doc ‘In Wolf Country’, appealing to nature management via science.
A haunting, poetic doc with political undercurrents, ‘Magic Mountain’ examines a once-grand sanitorium in the Georgian mountains lost to the vultures of capitalism.
Animated Short Film BACKFLIP by Nikita Diakur (12 min, 2022, DE/FR, Best Animated Short Film - German Short Film Award 2022) I’M NOT AFRAID! by Marita Mayer (7 min, 2022, DE/NO, Fabian&Fred, Theatrical Run USA) LITTLE FAN by Sveta Yuferova, Shad Lee Bradbury (5 min,...
Director Marc Isaacs takes a bumpy but engaging journey into post-Brexit England in his eccentric docu-fiction pageant ‘This Blessed Plot’.
This tedious, overlong prequel sheds little new light on the Hunger Games universe, although Viola Davis and Jason Schwartzman camp it up with gusto.
Chloe Galibert-Laine’s latest video essay, I Would Like to Rage, reflects on the place of rage online and through this lens explores the blurred lines between authenticity and performativity
Olga Chernykh’s poetic, vividly sensorial essay-doc debut ‘A Picture to Remember’ reconstitutes Donetsk as a cinematic site of memories for three family generations of women.
This admirable attempt at subverting superhero-movie formula and tone should have soared beyond where MCU movies typically go.
IDFA’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia talks with TFV critic Carmen Gray about the festival’s role in times of tension, and where documentary might be heading.
Peter Mettler’s multi-layered, monumental cine-diary is a meditation on our obsession with the other side that is as playful and surprising as it is frequently sublime.
These are the 2023 nominees: European Film: • ANATOMY OF A FALL (ANATOMIE D'UNE CHUTE) directed by Justine Triet, produced by Marie-Ange Luciani & David Thion (France) • FALLEN LEAVES (KUOLLEET LEHDET) directed by Aki Kaurismäki, produced by Aki Kaurismäki, Misha...
Pia Lundberg has been appointed as the new Artistic Director of Göteborg Film Festival. Lundberg, who most recently served as Counsellor for Cultural Affairs at the Embassy of Sweden in London, has broad and varied experience in the film industry. She is a trained...
Trinity Creative Partnership has acquired UK sales rights for the highly-anticipated historical war film Love, Courage and the Battle for Bushy Run, launching at AFM this week and set for release in 2024. The historical drama set against the backdrop of the Battle of...
For over 30 years, the Hubert Bals Fund has developed a distinguished taste for filmmakers with a forward-looking artistic vision. The HBF focuses on supporting filmmakers from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe International...
Saban Films has taken U.S. rights to action-thriller “Duchess”, directed by Emmy Award nominee Neil Marshall’s (“Game of Thrones,”Hellboy”) Saban is expected to release the film in early 2024. The deal was announced by Palisades Park Pictures CEO, Tamara Birkemoe. “We...
It was announced at the CineEast festival Awards ceremony that the Eastern European Film Festival Network (EEFFN) brings together the five film festivals dedicated to promoting and showcasing Eastern European cinema. The primary objective is to enhance cooperation and...
VIFF announces a new partnership with A24, one of the fastest-growing film studios in the United States. This collaboration marks a significant milestone for the VIFF distribution department and holds great promise for the cinema industry in the Baltic region....
Best Feature Documentary Shortlist • Against the Tide (India | BBC Storyville | Director: Sarvnik Kaur | Producer: Koval Bhatia, Sarvnik Kaur) • ANHELL69 (Colombia | Square Eyes | Director: Theo Montoya | Producers: Bianca Oana, David Hurst, Theo Montoya, Juan Pablo...
This video-game adaptation never lives up to its premise’s potential as either a scary movie or an exercise in absurdism.
The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) announced “A Picture to Remember “by Olga Chernykh as the opening film to IDFA 2023, alongside the main competition lineups for the fast-approaching edition. “A Picture to Remember” presents a deeply...
Chinese filmmaker Li Binbin’s directorial debut, ‘The Night Rain South Township’, won a special mention at Pingyao with an enigmatic story of a young man’s rediscovery of his cultural roots in a foggy town in China’s southwest hinterlands.
AFM is the film acquisition, development and networking event where more than $1 Billion in distribution and film financing deals are closed each year on completed films and those in every stage of development. Thousands of professionals from all corners of the...
Awarded by both the main and youth juries at Pingyao, ‘Dance Still’ is directing duo Qin Muqiu and Zhan Hanqi’s triumph of a slacker comedy, trading in jet-black absurdist humour aimed at China’s bewildered millennials.
In ‘City of Wind’, Mongolia’s Academy Award hopeful which has already collected prizes at Venice and Pingyao, director Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir offers a charmingly intimate look at a gifted young city-dwelling shaman.
With its socially and politically engaged agenda, DOK Leipzig’s 66th edition felt especially timely this year during a major period of global turbulence.
Peter Mettler’s personal and poetic reflection ‘While the Green Grass Grows’ wins DOK Leipzig’s Golden Dove as best international documentary.
Nearly three hours of Taylor Swift in concert might be too much of a good thing for newcomers, but devotees will wish this beautifully shot and edited performance doc had been even longer.
Lina Soualem is touring global festivals with her very personal documentary’ Bye Bye Tiberias’, in “a moment of great tragedy and despair”.
‘El Shatt’, a commune established by 28,000 Dalmatian Croats in colonial Egypt where they fled Nazi persecution in 1944, is remembered in Ivan Ramljak’s romanticized but well-researched documentary.
Documentary director Matthew Lancit addresses his existential health fears through horror movie tropes in ‘Play Dead!’. a compelling hybrid blend of non-fiction and playful fakery.
Adrien Beau’s ‘La Vourdalak’ is a lo-fi take on the 1839 Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy novella and a super-quirky, semi-scary, and supremely absurd film..
‘One Hundred Four’ is the number of refugees stranded on one of the world’s deadly smuggling routes, the Mediterranean, in Jonathan Schörnig’s real-time documentary.
Mass wig exportation becomes the lens through which the fascinating, spectral doc An Asian Ghost Story explores Hong Kong’s late 20th-century modernisation and position between East and West.
A hard-hitting immersion into life and death under Russian invasion in eastern Ukraine, ‘White Angel – The End of Marinka’ is seen through an evacuation team’s GoPro helmet footage.
Director Katrin Rothe’s animated bio-documentary hybrid ‘Johnny & Me’ brings to life the visually striking photomontage work of pioneering political artist John Heartfield.
One of the traditional fables of Sang Kancil, the wily mouse-deer, is brought exquisitely to life in Zhang Xu Zhan’s electrifying, otherworldly animation, Compound Eyes of Tropical
Delphine Girard examines the possibly violent encounter between a man and a woman in her solidly unadorned debut feature, ‘Through the Night’, winner of the Audience Award at the Giornate degli Autori.
In this scene, Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) wipes down a table at a New York City bar as he makes small talk with a patron before stealing a diamond bracelet off her wrist. "Uncharted", originally set to be released on December 18, 2020, faced delays due to the COVID-19...
At the DOK Co-Pro Market, a total of three awards have been presented. Belarusian director Daria Yurkevich and her project “GENESIS" (Belarus, Germany) received the Saxon Award for the Best Documentary Project by a Female Director. The prize is endowed with 5,000...
The feted Austrian documentary maker talks about capturing the Coronavirus crisis on camera, filming in perilous places, and his life-changing rejection from film school.
A married LGBTQ+ couple worry if a future Armenia will honour the rights of their non-conventional family, in this intimately observational, activism-based doc.
In the complex and thought-provoking essay film, Lumene: Privatisation, David Shongo reflects on the commodification of cultural memory and the lasting impacts of insidious colonial impositions.
Belarusian Independent Film Academy founders, and the team of doc ‘Who, If Not Us? The Fight for Democracy in Belarus,’ discuss aims and challenges at DOK Leipzig.
In this scene, Deputy Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum) weaves his way through the Kunst Museum in an effort to elude J.G. Jopling (Willem Dafoe), a henchman, and also the man who killed his cat - sent by Madame D’s (Tilda Swinton) evil son and heir, Dmitri (Adrian Brody). The...
German director Jürgen Ellinghaus retraces the West African travels of a silent-era film director in ‘Togoland Projections’, a dry but engaging documentary about European colonialism’s screen legacy.
The chill is both atmospheric and emotional in Zima, a scratchy, punkish, magical realist animation about life in a quiet, snow-laden fishing village.
Maria Fredriksson plunged into the doc-making deep end for her debut feature ‘The Gullspång Miracle’, screening at DOK Leipzig.
Austrian documentary maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s symphonic Covid chronicle ‘The Standstill’ plays like a slow-motion disaster movie with immersive widescreen visuals.
Asmae El Moudir’s ‘The Mother of All Lies’ embodies both sides of DOK Leipzig’s festival identity.
An ostensibly simplistic documentary about a flat in Kyiv, Three Windows on South West uses incidental memories to paint a fleeting collective portrait of another time.
Polish director Agnieszka Zwiefka’s lively documentary ‘Vika!’ paints a celebratory but poignant portrait of Warsaw’s oldest club DJ.
Spanish animator, author and producer Isabel Herguera bings her first feature to DOK L — a masterfully evocative work on feminism and women’s lives, ‘Sultana’s Dream’.
Masses seduced by past imperialistic might and activists seeking change present clashing public spectacles in Marianna Kaat’s punchy, broad-strokes doc on modern Russia.
Three juries comprised of distinguished filmmakers and arts professionals, as well as a jury of audience members, will be presenting awards for short and feature-length animated and documentary films in competition at the 66th edition of DOK Leipzig. The jury members...
The head of the world’s oldest documentary film festival talks controversial programming choices, magical public screenings, and the need to learn from uncomfortable history lessons.
Eerie, gripping and expertly crafted, Maria Fredriksson’s mind-bending doc takes myriad twists through a Nordic family mystery.
A trio of documentarians traverse the forbidding digital landscapes of an online survivalist video game to explore the communities that have emerged there in this verité machinima, Knit’s Island.
It takes a village to perform an exorcism, and it takes the power of Ann Dowd and Ellen Burstyn to make this familiar material compelling.
‘My Lost Country’ is a personal documentary in which the director Ishtar Yasin uses multiple tools in a moving portrait of her Iraqi father.
This year’s San Sebastian was a sunny festival filled with discoveries.
Jaione Camborda’s delicate drama of a midwife, ‘The Rye Horn’, won the Golden Shell.
Gabriel Byrne plays dual versions of Irish literary legend Samuel Beckett in Oscar-winning director James Marsh’s unrevealing but elegant and engagingly offbeat bio-drama ‘Dance First’.
BY LIZA FOREMAN SAN SEBASTIAN - Spain’s most important film festival draws to a close on Saturday night, concluding nine days of industry meets, film screenings and galas. The Spanish film industry’s post-pandemic recovery program: Spanish Screenings XXL, worked to...
Mi país perdido es un documental personal en el que la directora usa múltiples herramientas en un conmovedor retrato de su padre irakí
Canadian director Henry Bernadet paints a sunny patchwork portrait of multicultural Montreal in his collaborative teen-driven docu-drama ‘Gamma Rays’.
Lively characters get involved in a farcical church course designed to rewire gays in the otherwise staid ‘Toll’ (‘Pedagio’), a story about coping with poverty and ignorance in remote Brazil.
BY LIZA FOREMAN SAN SEBASTIAN -- Muslim Feminist writer and social reformer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain published Sultana’s Dream in 1905. Spanish filmmaker Isabel Herguera’s big screen adaptation of that story, ten years in the making, has made the competition section at...
Víctor Erice maestro del cine español recibe el Premio Donostia en el SSIFF.
TIFF 2023 Competition (Ab)normal Desire (Japan) Dir Kishi Yoshiyuki (World Premiere) Air (Russia) Dir Alexey German Jr. (World Premiere) Blind At Heart (Ger-Switz-Lux) Dir Barbara Albert Dwelling By The West Lake (China) Dir Gu Xiaogang (World Premiere) A Foggy...
In equal parts fiercely amusing and roundly desolating, Robin Campillo’s ‘Red Island’, an offbeat look at the end of French colonialism in Madagascar, is a crowd-pleaser in San Sebastian’s Official Selection.
Rati Oneli’s phlegmatic drama, We Are the Hollow Men, depicts the difficult relationship between an estranged father and son when the latter returns home after his mother’s death.
BY LIZA FOREMAN SAN SEBASTIAN - It wasn't long ago that German directors making the festival rounds typically were Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlondorff. But a slew of newer directors has come up through the ranks in the past two...
Griffin Dunne, James Norton and Miles Heizer co-star in Noah Pritzker’s underpowered but charming ensemble drama ‘Ex-Husbands’. which pays fond homage to a lost analogue era of bittersweet New York comedies.
Revered Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice receives the Donostia Award at SSIFF.
Australian writer-director Kitty Green takes a hellish holiday in the badlands of toxic masculinity with her punchy feminist Outback thriller ‘The Royal Hotel’.
Celebrating the natural cycles of life in women’s ever-changing bodies, Jaione Camborda’s second feature ‘The Rye Horn’ is a moving period drama that touches on abortion laws in 1971 Spain.
Mohamed Kordofani’s GOODBYE JULIA was just named Sudan’s official submission for Best International Film at the 96th Academy Awards. The acclaimed Sudanese title will be released in Egyptian theaters on October 25th; a few weeks after its Arab World premiere at the El...
Angelica Maria Torres Tamayo works through a personal tragedy in Pirsas, a deeply affecting documentary about a family trauma and the prospect of recovery.
By Liza Foreman A bevy of high-power American executives hit the San Sebastian International Film Festival on Tuesday for the 2nd edition of the Creative Investors’ Conference. That conference serves mainly to put a spotlight on business beyond Europe. The film...
History, folklore, and contemporary realities intertwine in Amma ki Katha, Nehal Vyas’ essayistic meditation on national aspiration and how stories become enmeshed in state oppression.
While lovely to look at, Gareth Edwards’ latest doesn’t make the case for why we should stop worrying and learn to love AI.
Ewan McGregor goes from IKEA to maternity in Swedish director Niclas Larsson’s muddled but ambitious debut ‘Mother, Couch!’, a surreal family farce set inside a giant furniture store.
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...
Emmanuelle Devos plays the complicit wife of the famous lawyer and closet pedophile Daniel Auteuil in Joachim Lafosse’s slow-moving family drama ‘A Silence’.
El deslumbrante e imaginativo cuento animado de la directora española Isabel Herguera ‘El sueño de la sultana’ sobre una artista itinerante está inspirado en la pensadora feminista bengalí Rokeya Hossain y su cuento de 1905 sobre Ladyland, un país gobernado por mujeres.
A young woman must deal with the physical and psychological bruises of a sexual assault in Shaylee Atary’s powerful dramatic short, Single Light.
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.
Spanish director Isabel Herguera’s exhilarating and imaginative animated tale about a roving artist is sparked by real-life Bengali feminist thinker Rokeya Hossain and her 1905 story about Ladyland, a country run by women.
Spanish directing duo Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal recreate a dark chapter in Brazilian musical history in their visually ravishing animated docu-fiction hybrid ‘Shoot the Piano Player’.
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.
The road to love is paved with darkly surreal humour for Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed in Greek director Christos Nikou’s uneven but generally engaging low-fi sci-fi rom-com satire ‘Fingernails’.
Achingly poetic and daringly original, Raven Jackson’s first feature ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ chooses to tell the story of a Black girl growing up in Mississippi through atmosphere instead of conventional narration.
Orlando, el extravagante manifiesto del director debutante Paul B. Preciado empuja los límites de los géneros masculino/femenino y también de los cinematográficos.
Godard reaches from beyond with one final film, a coarse and compelling act of montage, an expressive audiovisual treatment for a never-to-be-made made feature, Phony Wars.
If Expend4bles were any more by-the-numbers, it would have a numeral in its title. Oh, wait.
Three films produced and distributed by Film Clinic will represent Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon at the 2022 Oscars® in the International Feature Film category. In Jordan, an independent committee of professional experts selected Amira to represent Jordan at the Oscars....
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.
Germany’s premiere festival platform for rule-breaking indie cinema celebrated its 30th edition with audacious acid-punk UFO comedies, bleak kidnap thrillers and a ground-breaking peek into the multiverse.
Turkey’s chilling political thriller ‘In the Blind Spot’ grabs the Best Film prize at Oldenburg.
A sociopathic amateur film-maker kidnaps the woman he wants to play his fantasy girlfriend role in Truman Kewley’s quietly chilling psycho-thriller debut ‘Beautiful Friend’.
The cruelty of an uncaring welfare state is brought into sharp relief in Jade Hærem Aksnes’s stomach-churning satirical drama about poverty, Grill.
A young boy grieving the loss of his mother forms a bond with a desert drifter in the heart-warming Israeli drama, Seaweed.
Spanish director F. Javier Gutiérrez’s atmospheric but underpowered horror western ‘The Wait’ offers a fistful of familiar supernatural tropes.
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.
A dark, absurdist farce of wicked schemes bred of hardship in smalltown Brazil reveals helmer Carolina Markowicz as a bold talent.
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...
A mother and father are confronted with an agonising dilemma as they attempt to prepare the body of their young transgender child for burial in Ahmad Alyaseer’s ‘Our Males and Females’.
A kidnapping sees the lives and fates of three troubled youths become entwined in Takayuki Hayashi’s serene and solemn feature debut, From Dawn Till Noon on the Sea.
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’.
David Gregory’s entertaining documentary ‘Enter the Clones of Bruce’ chronicles the bizarre explosion in Bruce Lee lookalikes and copycat films that followed the martial arts superstar’s death 50 years ago.
Mladen Djordjevic’s slow-burn Midnight Madness selection has headier things on its mind than blood and guts.
2023 Toronto International Film Festival sparkles with starry debuts and international favorites.
A friendship between a dog and a robot in 80s New York provides the foundation for a beautiful and touching exploration of relationships in Robot Dreams.
A man uses virtual reality to experience and retouch the memory of his deceased daughter in this poignant, thought-provoking Iranian sci-fi, Dream Maker.
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.
‘Homecoming’ is a powerful and poignant look at cultural repatriation.
Axel Petersén conjures a surreal, pure vibes, sun-baked noir that’s equal parts David Lynch and Dashiel Hammett.
Temperatures rise but drama stays stuck in this hellish, apocalyptic vision of Rome.
‘A Happy Day’ is a stylized asylum seeker story that wraps its message inside a frustrating riddle.
Mona Achache brings invention, curiosity and raw vulnerability to excavate traces of three generations of female writers in her family and power abuses in France’s literary scene.
A tentative friendship begins between a cleaner and the woman who employs her in Cleaner, a delicately wrought drama about relationships and their boundaries.
‘Spirit of Ecstasy’ is a sensitive look at coming-of-age through the unique lens of the ruthless world of finance.
Nina Palcek follows Lydia Tár in managing Mahler’s 5th with a spiralling personal life in slow-burn thriller ‘Not A Word.’
The sweet and compassionate ‘Solitude’ is a modest drama with a big heart.
‘Woodland’ is an exploration of generational trauma and healing that feels more like a sketch than portrait.
The best thing about the 80th Mostra del Cinema was a stand-out film that almost all the critics were able to get behind and support wholeheartedly – and it won the Golden Lion for Best Film.
The Awards: Yorgos Lanthimos took home the Golden Lion with his wildly inventive feminist portrait ‘Poor Things’, the most popular film in the festival.
Branagh’s most successful Agatha Christie adaptation to date finds mystery and suspense in period, setting, and another distinguished ensemble.
We opened our Venice dailies with an anniversary salute to both the Biennale’s 80th Mostra del Cinema and The Film Verdict’s entry into its third year. I’d like to end with a few words of gratitude to all the many film festivals that have embraced and supported our...
‘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.
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.”
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
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!’
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.
The miniature beings that starred in an 80s television show slowly unravel in Wander to Wonder, a surreal animation that riffs on an enchanting children’s story trope.
Silent film footage is repurposed in We Should All Be Futurists, a deliciously comic reimagining of Marinetti’s man-machine hybrid as a novel – intimate – cure for female hysteria.
By Liza Foreman Amid the somewhat muted Red Carpet activity affected by the ongoing strikes in Hollywood, sales companies have been ratcheting in deals on smaller as well as bigger titles. Most companies contacted by The Film Verdict were keeping mum on further news...
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’).
VERDICT: Creepy but derivative killer spider thriller is angrier at the world than at arachnids.
The Venice Production Bridge is the multi-faceted market arm of the Venice Film Festival, attended by festival business players. VBP focuses on producers and production than sales. By Liza Foreman When the Venice Production Bridge’s head honcho Pascal Diot started the...
Firedream offers lessons of passionate honesty in work made with love. and creativity even with some shortcomings.
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.
A largely deserted port plays host to subtle drama unraveling at a glacially pace in Xandra Popescu’s strangely beguiling study in stasis, Sentimental Stories.
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 freewheeling independence of the open road is given a Gen-Z spin in the Ross Brothers’ kinetic and affecting hybrid documentary, Gasoline Rainbow.
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...
Mujeres en prisiones chilenas retratan la maternidad y el crudo dolor de la separación en este empático e impresionista documental, de Tana Gilbert. filmado con teléfonos celulares.
Women in Chilean prisons record motherhood and the raw pain of separation in Tana Gilbert’s empathetic and impressionistic, mobile-shot doc of solidarity.
Lumbrensueño da una lección de creatividad y amor al cine aún con algunas deficiencias.
‘On The Pulse’ is an admirable but out-of-touch portrait of the gritty work of investigative TV journalists.
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.
Various installations in the Venice Immersive put their own stamp on the 360-degree viewing experience.
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 ‘Io Capitano’.
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.
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.
Ena Sendijarevi’s “SWEET DREAMS” has been chosen as The Netherlands’ official entry for the International Feature Film award at the 2024 Academy Awards. The film world-premiered at Locarno Film Festival, where, actress Renée Soutendijk won a Best Performance 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.
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...
By Liza Foreman The Hotel Excelsior Venice Lido has long been a focal point for delegates and stars gathered for the annual Venice International Film Festival. For the 80th edition of the festival this week, the beach hotel which houses both the Venice Production...
Richard Linklater’s farce about a phony hired killer is charming and unpredictable, but it would benefit from dropping the “based on a true story” angle.
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.
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.
The inconsistencies of adolescence are the challenges of burgeoning womanhood are central to Leila Basma’s knotty and intoxicating coming-of-age short, Sea Salt.
Director General Cinema and Audiovisual Nicola Borrelli at the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and for Tourism takes time to speak with The Film Verdict before Venice.
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.
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’.
Unspoken traumas are made manifest in Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi’s beautifully drawn and profoundly moving animated allegory, In the Shadow of the Cypress.
Infidelity is followed by murder in glamorous Paris in Woody Allen’s smooth-as-silk 50th film ‘Coup de Chance,’ shot entirely in French.
Una absorbente historia de codependencia edípica ambientada entre los traficantes de droga de Roma, “El Paraíso” cuenta con brillantes actuaciones que superan el sentimentalismo.
An engrossing tale of Oedipal codependence set among Rome’s drug dealers, ‘El Paraiso’ boasts brilliant acting that overcomes sentimentality.
The gilded cage that was Priscilla Presley’s life with Elvis makes a perfect match for Sofia Coppola’s empathetic vision.
David Attenborough and Neil Gaiman are two of the star players in this year’s Venice Immersive lineup.
Selman Nacar’s second feature again examines the gray areas between the law, personal morality, duty and desire.
Starkly opposing views of nature collide in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Evil Does Not Exist’ which, despite its portentous title, is simplicity itself and in a minor key after ‘Drive My Car’.
Renowned for its innovation, for its 30th anniversary this year, the Oldenburg Film Festival has partnered with the MILC Platform and The Film Verdict to take its first virtual steps into the Metaverse. Users can immerse themselves in virtual Oldenburg and its rich...
William Friedkin’s final film sadly lacks the vibrancy and the claustrophobia of his previous stage-to-screen adaptations.
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.
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 Venice Film Festival has made headlines in some quarters for selecting the latest works of Allen, Polanski and Besson
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.
Frederick Wiseman’s latest observational documentary ‘Menus Plaisirs’ is a four-hour look at a French dynasty of chefs at the highest possible level.
‘The Featherweight’ is an inventive faux doc portrait of boxing great Willie Pep who faces his greatest fight yet: his own legacy.
Timm Kröger’s ambitious ‘The Theory of Everything’ tips its hat to the genres of yesteryear, though it’s the atmosphere more than the story that impresses in the end.
Hungarian director Dorka Vermes’ feature debut ‘Arni’ is a slow-burn slice-of-life drama with an exceptional lead performance from newcomer Peter Turi.
The low-key Dutch domestic drama ‘Melk’ doesn’t quite manage to set itself apart enough from its competitors.
The Palace, Roman Polanski’s appallingly bland black comedy about the filthy rich, is set in a fancy Swiss hotel on New Year’s Eve 1999, and not the least bit funny.
Jean M. Prewitt is President and Chief Executive Officer, before joining IFTA, Ms. Prewitt was a Principal from 1994 to 1999 at a major Washington, D.C.-based lobbying and public relations firm, representing some of the world’s most prestigious entertainment and high...
The late Italian filmmaker Ruggero Deodato was at the center of one of Venice’s most
anticipated screenings.
Bradley Cooper’s ambitious sophomore directorial effort, about Leonard Bernstein’s married life, soars and sweeps in some passages while falling flat in others.
Sobre todo de noche, el atrevido y excitante debut de Víctor Iriarte, refrescante aún con una historia dolorosa, se estrena en Gionate degli autori en Venecia 2023
‘Foremost by Night’, the exciting and daring feature debut of Víctor Iriarte, is refreshing even with its painful story.
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.
Director Luna Carmoon’s richly imaginative debut ‘Hoard’ finds filth and poetry in a young woman’s traumatic journey from childhood to womanhood.
Casi 50 años después de la pérdida de un documental sobre la comunidad kuna de Panamá, el director suizo panameño Andrés Peyrot lo localiza y exhibe ante una comunidad emocionalmente comprometida, en este documental fascinante aùn con sus fallas.
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.
A French writer in Japan, played by Isabelle Huppert, struggles with her grief in this mixed bag from director Elise Girard.
Oldenburg Film Festival celebrates 30 years with it's latest selection: Allmen and the Secret of the Koi GER Director: Sinje Köhler Cast: Heino Ferch, Andrea Osvárt, Samuel Finzi, Uwe Kockisch Beautiful Friend USA Director: Truman Kewley Cast: Adam Jones, Alexandrea...
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.
Aardman’s beloved duo Wallace & Gromit return in a demanding but fun VR experience that is part of the 2023 Venice Immersive competition.
Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone reteam for an audacious comic odyssey that defies genre and convention.
Dazzling camerawork and an exceptional trio of teenage actors dangle from a weak narrative thread in Alain Parroni’s intense first feature about underprivileged kids growing up without a future.
A beautifully imagined and played tale of men at war with the elements and each other with just a few screenplay hiccoughs.
Wes Anderson’s second Roald Dahl adaptation packs a feature’s worth of deadpan humor and aggressive visual style into just 37 minutes.
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...
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.
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...
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.
The General Delegate of the International Critics Week Beatrice Fiorentino discusses her philosophy for the Venice sidebar.
‘Upon Open Sky’, a Mexican road movie full of restraint and some surprises, premieres in Venice’s Orizzonti section.
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, 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.
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.
A cielo abierto, road movie mexicana con una controlada dirección y varias sorpresas se estrena en Horizontes in Venecia 2023
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.
TFV talks to the Artistic Director of the Giornate degli Autori, as the Venice sidebar celebrates its 20th edition.
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...
Oceans are the real continents is an exquisite love poem to Cuba, where three generations struggle to survive and dream of escape, depicted in a series of tableaux of daily life in a small rural town.
Los oceános son los verdaderos continentes es un exquisito poema de amor a Cuba, donde tres generaciones luchan por sobrevivir y sueñan con escapar, representado en una serie de cuadros de la vida cotidiana en un pequeño pueblo rural.
Debut director Janis Pugh’s off-beat musical rom-com ‘Chuck Chuck Baby’ is a rough-edged but warm-hearted celebration of working-class dreamers and queer liberation.
Summertime (1955) Campo San Barnaba – Venice, Italy
TFV:A question to you both; how many times or years have you attended TIFF, Toronto for European Film Promotion? SONJA HEINEN: This year, it is EFP’s 25th year at TIFF! We started back then with a small table with a sign on it saying: “The Europeans.” In 2016 we...
Europeans are coming. EFP and eurimages are coming to Toronto
Christian De Schutter, newly Elected EFP Board Members chats with TFV
Publisher and film historian Peter Cowie brings insight and humor to his compact history of the Mostra del Cinema.
Alberto Barbera, director of the 80th Venice International Film Festival, reflects on the future of cinema.
How The Film Verdict has grown since its first public bow in Venice.
European cinema and international films load the Toronto slate.
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.)
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.
The Teacher’s Lounge by Ilker Çatak (if... Productions Film) will enter the race for Germany to the 96th Oscars® in the “Best International Feature Film”category. The choice was decided by an independent nine member jury who were appointed by various associations...
Closing Night Gala offers the World Premiere of “Uppercut,” the American remake of Torsten Ruether’s film that opened at Oldenburg 2 years ago starring Ving Rhames and Luise Grobmann. Uppercut Torsten Ruether USA/Germany 2023, (World Premiere) A former boxer, whose...
“Smoke Sauna Sisterhood” named Estonia’s national entry for best International Feature Film Academy Award
Teona Strugar Mitevska’s surrealistic vision of a Sarajevo dating event turned lab for reconciliation is refreshing and offbeat in grappling with the Siege’s legacy.
‘El conde’, la oscura sátira de horror cómico revela que convertir a un monstruo de la vida real en el protagonista de su propia película de monstruos es una efectiva manera de lidiar con la tragedia histórica.
Elene Naveriani’s wry celebration of feminist non-conformity from Georgia took topped the awards at Sarajevo.
Gergo Somogyvari’s humanistic doc portrait of life in the woods on Budapest’s margins spotlights the criminalisation of LGBTQ+ people and the homeless by Orban’s government.
Emotional highs and lows marked a politically charged Sarajevo edition that saw one day cancelled in solidarity against gender-based violence.
The quietude of a bucolic life, and the deep wordless bonds between a mother and son, lie at the heart of Giorgi Parkosadze’s serene doc, ‘Requiem to the Hot Days of Summer.’
Location Flashback: Verzasca Dam, Gordola, Ticino, Switzerland, James Bond, Pierce Brosnan
Croatian documentary maker Goran Devic charts a decade-long battle for workers’ rights in ‘What’s to be Done?’, an engaging blend of reportage and artfully meta touches.
Sudabeh Mortezai’s caustic, unique take on a shadowy corporation expanding into Albania is part neo-colonial satire, part dystopian thriller.
‘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.
Sarajevo Film Festival shut down its Wednesday schedule to honour a National Day of Mourning after a femicide in Gradacac and protests.
The prize-winning Romanian director discusses his found-footage docu-fiction hybrid film ‘Between Revolutions’, clandestine screenings in Iran, and the political power of cinema.
The long fingers of the Kosovo War reach into the present in Sovran Nrecaj’s patient and stark documentary about Fran and Verka’s isolated life in an abandoned village.
The inaugural Saudi Film Confex, launching in Riyadh will address three main topics: industry trends; global practices and challenges; and opportunities in filmmaking. Thoughtfully designed workshops will be spread over three days, featuring practical training...
Director Nemanja Vojinovic’s visually striking documentary ‘Bottlemen’ finds poetry and beauty among the workers scrabbling to make a living from a giant Serbian trash mountain.
Kumjana Novakova masterfully contextualises archival testimony in her sensitive, formally inventive reckoning with violence against women as a weapon of the Bosnian War.
Belfast-born documentarian Mark Cousins, returning to Sarajevo after 29 years, gave a masterclass on his career and creative inspirations.
Domonkos Erhardt’s student short ‘From the Corner of My Eyes’ uses the malleability of the animated image to great effect to capture a miniature moment of connection.
While Netlfix new film, "Heart of Stone" is shot throughout Europe, it opens with a dizzying sequence that begins in a glamorous casino and ends with Gal Gadot’s special agent parachuting off a 3,000-foot cliff after a high-speed ski chase that was filmed at the...
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 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...
With ‘Lost Children’ Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier have created an aching, poignant and keenly observed depiction of a dislocated father-daughter relationship, premiered in Sarajevo International Film Festival,
An elegant, playful exploration of the consolatory but deceptive nature of image-making across generations, from Catalan director-to-watch Laura Ferres is showing in Sarajevo International Film Festival,
Globally feted Scottish writer-director Lynne Ramsay has carved a slender but unique body of work shaped by uncompromising attitude and aesthetic flair.
“Willie and Me” tells the story of a German housewife who escapes a lifeless marriage to venture on an impulsive journey to Las Vegas to see Willie Nelson's farewell concert. Eva Hassmann's multi-hyphenated directorial debut (as writer/director/producer/actor) is a...
Jennifer Reeder discusses her new mind-bending avant-horror film ‘Perpetrator’, kick-ass gender-queer heroines, and the subversively surreal power of genre cinema. Showing in Sarajevo International Film Festival
Kaufman’s style could be deemed ‘screwball,’ could be deemed ‘surreality,’ and should probably be called ‘Screw Reality’. He is honored in Sarajevo International Film Festival
The personal and the political entangle in Self-Portrait Along the Borderline, Anna Dziapshipa’s excellent essay doc about Georgian-Abkhazian relations through the lens of her own family history. It is competing in Sarajevo International Film Festival
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
The Doc Alliance Award for Best Feature Film, went to “Death of a City“ by João Rosas. The film follows the demolition of an old printing workshop in the center of Lisbon to make way for luxury flats. What starts out as a work-centred film turns out to be an evocative...
Sara Jurincic’s experimental documentary Valerija charts an act of communion with long-deceased relatives, probing playfully at perceptions of remembrance and lineage. It screens in Sarajevo International Film Festival
Critics’ faves by Ali Ahmadzadeh and Radu Jude took home top prizes at a strong Locarno Film Festival.
Critics and public alike applauded the top 76th Locarno Film Festival Awards to Iran and Romania.
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
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.
Estonian director Rainer Sarnet’s ‘The Invisible Fight’ is an idiosyncratic tale featuring monks, metal rock, and a manically superb performance from Ursel Tilk.
Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s loving tribute to theatre teachers, camp and performances is familiar but a little magic all the same.
Once again, the Avant Premiere Series lineup aims to explore the best of regional TV production in Sarajevo International Film Festival
Mátalos a todos de Sebastian Molina Ruiz combina la estética grunge en video con elementos epistolares para explorar el sentimiento adolescente de aislamiento .
A tentative friendship blossoms through video correspondence in ‘Kill ‘Em All’, a deftly observed docudrama filled with youthful uncertainty and poignant loneliness.
A teen comes of age as a troubled Serbia reckons with its direction in ‘Lost Country’, Vladimir Perisic’s sombre yet astute, politically-charged drama.
Una Gunjak’s sensitive, richly textured Bosnian coming-of-ager about a lie’s repercussions questions sexual double standards in a society of repressed fears.
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.
Lynne Ramsay, Charlie Kaufman and Mark Cousins Are Honoured at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival.
Director Nenad Cicin-Sain’s engaging but slightly fawning documentary ‘Kiss The Future’ chronicles Irish rock supergroup U2’s love affair with war-torn Sarajevo during the Balkan wars.
Ali Ahmadzadeh’s third feature ‘Critical Zone’ is an outspoken reflection of the rage in Iranian society today. It is under attack.
In another angry bulletin from Iran in revolt, Ali Ahmadzadeh’s ‘Critical Zone’ hits censorship out of the ballpark.
Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekartík, two of the three filmmakers behind the award winning documentary Velvet Terrorist, have reunited for a film project called Photophobia, shot in Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Both filmmakers arrived in the country in spring...
The Dealing with the Past program at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival is an additional platform for testimonies and stories that can serve as a base for developing film scripts, projects and films. The aim of the program is to initiate dialogue in the countries formed...
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...
American indie darling Bob Byington will please his fans with this minor amusing look at an underachieving English lit professor whose greatest disappointment is himself.
Feted Hungarian Oscar-winner István Szabó has spent his epic career probing Central Europe’s painful, morally complex history of post-imperial trauma and totalitarian tragedy.
Riz Ahmed takes centre stage with Isabelle Adjani in ‘Dammi’, Yann Mounir Demange’s fragmentary, experimental and highly sensorial reckoning with his own bifurcated past.
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.
A man learns of his own imminent death in iNTELLIGENCE, a strikingly graphic meditation on a curtailed life and the allure of immortality.
This biopic of a gamer-turned-racer delivers sports-movie uplift and racing-movie thrills while never letting up on the product placement.
Renzo Rossellini has lived an adventurous life on the cutting edge of movies and politics.
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.
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.
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.
Ten projects based on metaverse, AI, machine learning and augmented reality, among others, to compete in the Zinema Startup Challenge.
From soccer to filmmaking, Premio Cinema Ticino-winner Mohammed Soudani has lit, directed, produced and taught cinema in the Swiss region of Ticino, his home for five decades.
Locarno Pro, the industry event of the Locarno Film Festival, has announced the winning projects
En ‘Todos los incendios’ Mauricio Calderón cumple con el reto de hacer una película coming of age -sensible con interés LGBTQ+ y con un estilo personal.
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.
Lav Diaz returns to Locarno with A-list collaborators John Lloyd Cruz and Shaina Magdayao in ‘Essential Truths of the Lake’, a fiery noir-inflected takedown of the culture of criminal impunity shaping contemporary Philippine society.
The beguiling Night Shift follows two individuals as they meander around venerated institutions after dark, crafting an entrancing portrait of liminal existences.
The President of the Locarno Film Festival for 23 years, Marco Solari makes a graceful bow as he steps offstage.
A factory worker wrestles with a dispiriting future in this short about a fortune-telling tortoise and a desire for self-determination.
Laura Luchetti’s freely inspired adaptation of Cesare Pavese’s novel ‘The Beautiful Summer’ features an impeccable cast in a perennially relevant tale about the consequences of sexual awakening.
Potent pacing and a charismatic lead propel this absorbing Israeli film in which a young soldier deserts his post during a Gaza incursion and escapes to Tel Aviv where he keeps running.
Locarno’s 2023 Raimondo Rezzonico Award goes to producer Marianne Slot, who has brought the best of auteur cinema to discerning audiences around the world.
Awards Watch: International Oscar® Selection
Prize-winning Romanian provocateur Radu Jude shares his thoughts on Jean-Luc Godard and Andrew Tate, the Barbie movie and the thrilling power of bad taste.
If the end of the world really is approaching, Jude may be our most trenchant Cassandra.
Grindelwald, a village in Switzerland’s Bernese Alps, is a popular gateway for the Jungfrau Region, with skiing in winter and hiking in summer. It’s also a base for mountain-climbing up the iconic north face of Eiger Mountain. In this scene, With Anakin Skywalk’s...
Set on the multicultural fringes of Lisbon, Swiss director Basil Da Cunha’s third feature ‘Manga D’Terra’ is a slender but big-hearted blend of social realist drama and Afro-diaspora musical.
Meg 2: The Trench wastes an hour or so before finally delivering what we paid to see: giant, prehistoric sharks eating tourists.
Dimitra Vlagopoulou shines in ‘Animal’, Sofia Exarchou’s sometimes sexy, sometimes poignant second feature film.
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.
TIFF unveils the 10 World Premiere features that comprise the Platform programme for 2023, along with the 2023 Platform jury members: Academy Award–winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins, joined by Cannes Jury Prize–winning director, writer, and actor Nadine Labaki, and 2022...
Espectáculo a diario. 36 filmes en la retrospectiva mexicana en el Festival de Locarno
Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema is a retrospective that comes to the Locarno Film Festival full of diversity, history and joy.
Fiona Gordon and Dominique Abel return with ‘The Falling Star’, another picture more wacky than substantial — and therein lies its charm and limitation.
Locarno celebrates the elegant, contemplative work of renowned Asian filmmaker and artist Tsai Ming-liang.
Oberalp Pass is a high mountain pass at an elevation of 2,044 meters (6,706 feet) above sea level, located on the border of the cantons of Graubunden and Uri in Switzerland through the Swiss Alps. In this scene, James Bond (Sean Connery) keeps his distance while...
Director Bertrand Mandico’s lurid saga of gender-queer decadence and visceral violence ‘Conann’ is a ravishing sensory feast for viewers with strong stomachs.
Artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro show TFV how bold programming makes Locarno a memorable festival.
Roberto Stabile heads the second AVP Summit in Trieste.
The second Audio-Visual Producers (AVP) Summit ended last Friday after three days of panels and discussions tackling topics from the use of artificial intelligence to innovative methods to get indie production projects financed and off the ground, the production of...
Despite its beauty, excellent food, and history, which dates back to 1400 BC, the port city of Trieste is one of the relatively lesser-known Italian destinations. By the second century BC, Trieste was under the control of the Romans, whose emperor Augustus built its...
The Venice Film Festival’s opening film “The Commander” by Edoardo De Angelis, “Enea”, by Pietro Castellitto and “Finalmente l’alba” by Saverio Costanzo, are in the main category competing for the Golden Lion. “Three films shot in Cinecittà in competition at the...
Prepare for the intergalactic spectacle as MILC Platform, in partnership with EPIC Games MegaGrant recipients Gamble Entertainment Group & Ave One Entertainment, sets the stage for the sci-fi indie feature 'Mischief Upon Mischief.' This thrilling film, written &...
Actor Lakeith Stanfield brings human heart to Justin Simien’s mediocre corporate horror comedy ‘Haunted Mansion’.
Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra and Eagle Pictures president Tarak Ben Ammar swapped ideas at a lively encounter at the second Audio-Visual Producers (AVP) Summit in Trieste, Italy.
The German production "THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING" (ma.ja.de Fiction, THE BARRICADES) by Timm Kroeger will be shown in the Venezia 80 competitive section. Set in 1962, the black-and-white thriller is about a soon-to-be doctor of physics who is invited to an...
The Board of Directors of the Locarno Film Festival have approved Maja Hoffmann, founder of the LUMA Foundation. Her name was put forward by the appointment committee tasked with finding a successor to Marco Solari, whose members are Edna Epelbaum and Francesco...
This year's poster image was created by Italian illustrator and artist Lorenzo Mattotti for the sixth consecutive year. The image chosen for the 2023 poster “is inspired by the tradition of on the road movies," explains Lorenzo Mattotti, “and in this way seeks to...
The Dolder Grand opened in 1899 as the Dolder Grand Hotel & Curhaus, and offers 175 luxurious rooms and suites, world-class restaurants, a spa, and an art collection that includes originals from Takashi Murakami and Salvador Dali. In this scene, after helping Mikael...
Audio-Visual Producers Summit (AVPSummit) kicks off The Film Verdict’s Publisher, Eric Mika will moderate an exclusive Fireside Chat with industry leaders Tarak Ben Ammar and Tony Vinciguerra, Sony Pictures
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.
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.
“Sandman” season 2 starring Tom Sturridge, was seen shooting at Durdle Door in Dorset last month, shutting down the popular beach for a few days in the middle of the busy tourist season. During filming, secrecy was a priority and the project was only given a code name...
On Friday the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas announced the 14 titles of Spanish productions (nine feature films, one medium-length film, one short and three TV series) to screen from 22-30 September in the Official Selection and in the New...
With 79 countries represented and 275 films (including 40 straight from Cannes) this year’s feature a selection of global and local films, documentaries, world premieres, exclusive releases, and filmmaker conversations. MIFF is partnering with some of Australia’s top...
Diana Lomis, vice president of publicity at Searchlight Pictures will be leaving after finishing her work on “Flamin’Hot”, “Theater Camp”, and “Poor Things” this summer. After nearly 20 years with the studio, she will be launching a consultation company focused on...
Punk rockers, kick-ass senior citizens and fresh new cinematic voices from Iran to India made for a strong edition of the long-running Czech fest.
Juries at the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival showered awards on the caustic Bulgarian tragifarce ‘Blaga’s Lessons’ and Sweden’s off-beat relationship satire ‘The Hypnosis’.
In his latest forensic documentary ‘Facing Darkness’, French director Jean-Gabriel Périot digs into the rich archive of amateur film footage shot in war-torn Sarajevo.
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...
Director Émilie Brisavoine goes from fear to maternity in ‘Keeping Mum’, an emotionally raw but generally engaging documentary about the mother who abandoned her in childhood.
71st San Sebastian Festival Announces first official selects
Raucous Asian-American road-trip comedy serves up bawdy laughs and star-making performances.
A behind-the-scenes look at the making of a film becomes a moving portrait of place and the healing power of artistic endeavour in Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano.
Swiss filmmaker Thomas Imbach talks about his new documentary ‘Say God Bye’, which screens in the Proxima competition at Locarno.
Actor and screenwriter Lena Góra portrays her own bohemian rock singer mother in ‘Imago’, a baggy but compelling post-punk period piece from Polish director Olga Chajdas.
A flesh-and-blood saint causes chaos for a superstitious mountain community in Georgian director Tinatin Kajrishvili’s darkly satirical, bleakly beautiful fable, ‘Citizen Saint’.
Amid political turmoil in Europe and a push to overhaul Karlovy Vary’s identity for tourists, Russia plays a lesser festival role.
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...
A lively and engaging rock-doc. ‘Scream of My Blood’ chronicles the riotous career of “gypsy punk” band Gogol Bordello, including singer Eugene Hütz’s family roots in war-torn Ukraine.
Hits all the marks of an adrenaline-packed summer spy thriller, with pacing that makes 163 minutes zip right by.
The Korean-Canadian filmmaker is taking her directorial debut ‘Past Lives’ around the world.
There’s no dignity in a market economy, as a scammed pensioner turns scammer in this caustic Bulgarian tragifarce and thriller.
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.
La brutalidad colonial de enfrenta a la resistencia indígena en la historia sobrenatural con hechizos y brujería en esta película chilena situada en Chiloé.
An apparently well-put-together couple begin to come loose at the seams after a hypnotherapy session in Ernst De Geer’s awkward and offbeat satire, The Hypnosis.
From heart-breaking performances to queasy satire, from Pedro Costa to Christopher Lee, there was something for everyone in this year’s KVIFF shorts.
Death is not the end in Czech director Robert Hloz’s stylish and ambitious future-noir Euro-thriller debut ‘Restore Point’.
German filmmaker Jan Soldat explains his fascination with cinematic death scenes and the iconic actors who star in them.
Los Angeles, June 6, 2023 – Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF), one of the most prestigious events in Latino cinema, announced its winners last week. Academy Award®nominated actor Edward James Olmos, founder of the Latino Film Institute, announced...
Behrooz Karamizade’s handsomely mounted drama Empty Nets is a compelling allegorical tale about the tragic loss of innocence at the hands of the powerful.
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.
Europa Distribution returns to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival for a new edition of the Film Distribution Innovation Hub where 30 independent distributors, coming from all over Europe and beyond, are participating, The Film Distribution Innovation Hub...
Naqqash Khalid delivers a blistering feature debut with this fragmentary portrait of an actor that delves into questions of performance and identity, In Camera.
Alexandru Solomon leads an offbeat, high-stakes pilgrimage that connects dark history past and present, interrogating the idolisation of Romanian mystic Arsenie Boca through re-enactment and activist exploits.
The Finnish director is the creative force behind ‘Sisu’, one of the action cinema highlights of the year.
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...
New espionage thriller “The Day of the Jackal”, the contemporary reimagining of Frederick Forsyth’s classic novel, is set to start filming in Budapest. The series follows a professional assassin who is contracted by a French paramilitary dissident to kill French...
Earlier the month, Morocco’s Minister of Youth, Culture and Communication, Mohamed Mehdi Bensaid, visited the filming location of "Gladiator 2" movie in Ouarzazate, following a recent minor fire at the studio. The small fire that broke out was quickly contained by...
A fresh, humanistic period drama that satirises the modernist project of a Czechoslovak factory town, and its sinister demands of conformity on the eve of World War Two.
Earlier this month, Kualoa Ranch, which is a film location, tourist attraction, nature reserve and working cattle ranch, created an awareness promotion on Instagram offering free LEGO® sets from the 30th anniversary collection. LEGO® Jurassic World kits feature...
On August 12, on the Piazza Grande, Locarno will screen Shayda, the powerful debut film from Iranian-Australian Director Noora Niasari, starring Zar Amir Ebrahimi (Best Actress at Cannes Film Festival in 2022) and winner of the Audience Award at Sundance this year....
The San Sebastián Festival is devoting its latest classic film cycle, co-organised with the Basque Film Archive in collaboration with the Japan Foundation and the Etxepare Basque Institute in the framework of the Euskadi-Japan 2023 program, to the director Hiroshi...
The reverie of an adult-free summer quickly becomes a monstrous nightmare in Michèle Jacob’s disconcerting portrait of childhood trauma, The Lost Children.
Moroccan documentary maker Asmae El Moudir blends the personal with the political in her formally impressive, puppet-driven, prize-winning family memoir ‘The Mother of All Lies’.
Kino Lorber has acquired U.S. rights to Academy Award-nominee Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters, winner of the L’Oeil d’Or Award for best documentary at the Cannes Film Festival. The film will screen on the international festival circuit and will open theatrically...
Harrison Ford’s fond farewell to the long-running tomb raider franchise, ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ balances formulaic blockbuster elements with soulful nostalgia and an audacious time-jumping plot.
Familiar and forgettable, this mediocre animated feature is destined to sink to the bottom of the ocean.
The festival’s Midnight Screenings confirm its commitment to versatile global genre cinema.
The Geneva-born director is back in Karlovy Vary with his new William Shatner documentary.
A 13-year-old girl on a Chilean island reckons with colonial brutality in an ominous, supernatural tale of historical oppression and indigenous resistance.
The deliciously wry, gently unfurling tale of a middle-aged Georgian woman who rejects small-town conformity and experiments with love after a near-death experience.
Brash comedy gives way to heartfelt sentiment, but Jennifer Lawrence, whose multifaceted talent gets showcased here, carries the story across the finish line.
Visual delights, a sweet love story, and that potent Pixar sentimentality carry this animated feature past a periodic table’s worth of script flaws.
Backward Glance at Mexican Animation
The world’s foremost animation film festival is back with another ambitious edition.
CineVerdict: Kudos para José Iñesta, fundador de Pixelatl, un porrista de la animación es galardonado con Premio de la Industria MIFA en Annecy
An animation cheerleader wins the Mifa Animation Industry Award.
IMCINE takes a bow: The Mexican Institute of Cinematography comes to Annecy with a full hand.
Rita Basulto
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 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...
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...
Aria Covamonas (he/she), by her own admission, was born in 1979 (Solar Common Era) on Earth, a naturally occurring planet in the solar system. Aria is a self-taught filmmaker, photomonteur, and animator. They are best known for their animated films, which are notably...
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...
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 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...
Miguel Ángel Anaya Borja es un animador mexicano participante con k8 en el Festival de Annecy
Aria Covamonas, artista mexicana de la animaciòn, sus cortos animados participaron en el Festival de Annecy 2023
Diego Huacuja T. es un animador e ilustrador mexicano, sus cortos animados participan en el Festival de Annecy 2023
Marcos Almada en un ilustrador, autor de libros infantiles y cortos animados. Participò en el Festival de Annecy 2023
Patricio Plaza autor de cortos animados, participò en competencia en el Festival de Annecy con Carne de DIos
Rita Basulto, creadora de cortos animados participa en competencia en el Festival de Annecy
Cineverdict: IMCINE el Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografìa llega a Annecy con las manos llenas de sorpresas y animaciones mexicanas
Una mirada retrospectiva a la animación mexicana, exitosa hasta fechas recientes.
Mexican cinema and filmmakers are everywhere at Annecy this year.
CineVerdict: El creador mexicano de animación Jorge Gutiérrez habla con TFV sobre su parte favorita del proceso creativo, lo sorprendente de ganarse la vida con lo que le gusta y tiene además consejos para todo el mundo
The renowned Mexican creator of animation talks with TFV about his favorite part of the filmmaking process and the awesomeness of being paid for something you love to do.
Los cortos mexicanos van al Festival de Animación de Annecy, imaginativos y atrevidos, esperan hacer una gran impresión
With their daring appeal, five Mexican shorts are ready to bowl over the animation festival’s audiences.
Founded in 2008, m-appeal is a dynamic world sales company well- established on the international market. With a carefully curated selection of about 8 films per year, and a focus on original international art-house and genre cinema. They take a particular interest in...
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.
Mexican documentarian Everardo González is at his best in a shockingly brutal film without a drop of blood.
Un documental estremecedor, brutal pero sin una gota de sangre, muestra a un documentalista mexicano en su mejor momento
It might be damning with faint praise, but this reboot finds more fun (and visual coherence) in the toy robots than the five earlier efforts directed by Michael Bay.
Breathtaking maximalism, for fans of ‘RRR’ and ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (not to mention the previous animated Spider-Man movie).
Women filmmakers swept most of the top awards from Competition to Un Certain Regard and Critics’ Week.
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.
Anointed auteurs padded the competition while the scramble for tickets became exhausting.
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.
The latest wondrous creation from Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher casts Josh O’Connor as a grave robber in 1980s Etruria.
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.
The latest feature from South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo, a rather slender drama, closed the Directors’ Fortnight.
Catherine Breillat’s first film in ten years is a more romantic update of the Danish film ‘Queen of Hearts’.
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.
In his minor-key but charming Cannes contender ‘Perfect Days’, German art-house veteran Wim Wenders delivers a poetic paean to Zen and the art of toilet maintenance.
Pham Tien An’s first feature follows a young man’s slow spiritual journey with long takes, magical imagery and rarely seen glimpses into Vietnamese society.
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.
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.
Brazilian newcomer Lillah Halla makes a film full of zest and empathy about a talented volleyball player that resonates in today´s pro-choice panorama.
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.
A sardonic angry look at Iran today, ‘Terrestrial Verses’ approaches the country’s malaise in a series of black comedy skits.
Erwan Le Duc conjures a stylish and swoony look at the quick flame of first love and the lingering, unresolved pain of heartbreak.
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.
“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.
Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzmann and a cast of thousands reach for the stars in director Wes Anderson’s visually ravishing retro rom-com ‘Asteroid City’.
A passionate, big-issue film from revered Spanish maestro Victor Erice, ‘Close Your Eyes” engagingly reflects on art, memory, identity and recapturing time past.
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.
Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s offbeat school thriller about a classroom cult of teenage diet extremists, ‘Club Zero’ is visually delicious but lacks dramatic bite.
Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing’s second entry at Cannes 2023 is an intensely physical portrait of the life and tribulations of Chinese composer Wang Xilin.
In his feature-length debut, Claude Schmitz aims to simultaneously pay homage to, and blow up, film noir tropes, and while that’s not exactly the result, his film is a handsome, largely enjoyable play on the genre that becomes a bit too shaggy by the end.
Aki Kaurismäki’s latest is a largely familiar but lovely new work.
Entertaining and impressive – but not enough to justify Disney’s ongoing effort to turn their traditionally animated features into mostly-CG animated features.
The Film Verdict (TFV) announced today that it has acquired Moving Image Middle East (MIME). “The Film Verdict filled the void to provide film reviews during a time when international reviews dramatically declined, TFV recognized the lack of consistent “trade”...
Back after a long hiatus with his most personal film to date, French writer-director Michel Gondry’s ‘The Book of Solutions’ is a scrappy, self-indulgent but entertaining love letter to asshole artists.
Japan-educated Mongolian filmmaker Zoljargal Purevdash’s first feature provides a sensitive yet sobering account of a teenager’s struggle for his family’s survival, even if it means sacrificing his own future.
Alicia Vikander steps into the robes of Henry VIII’s last queen in a drama more concerned with turning Katherine Parr into feminist icon than is historically believable, yet bold visuals and a fine cast raise the appeal of Brazilian auteur Karim Aïnouz’s first time in Cannes competition.
TFV first met Steven Davenport last March at AFCI Week in Los Angeles, where she sat down to record a podcast with Eric Mika, President and Publisher of The Film Verdict (now available). Ireland is a world-class location for international production with an abundance...
German actress Sandra Hüller plays a woman accused of murdering her French husband in Justine Triet’s latest, an unconvincing and overlong drama.
Cameroonian documentary director Rosine Mbakam makes her fiction debut with this modest look at the life a seamstress in Douala.
The combined talents of Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and veteran indie auteur Todd Haynes are largely wasted on humdrum Cannes competition contender ‘May December’.
TFV first met Nomin Erdine last March at AFCI Week in Los Angeles, where she sat down to record a podcast with Eric Mika, President and Publisher of The Film Verdict (now available). The establishment of the Mongolian National Film Council was made possible through...
Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro compete to out-grimace each other in Martin Scorsese’s latest monumental but lumbering period true-crime thriller ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’.
French-Senegalese director Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s strikingly shot, solid debut set in the Senegalese Sahel features a compelling central figure whose monomaniacal love for her husband sets nature itself against their village.
In this promising feature debut, French writer-director Iris Kaltenbäck has turned what sounds like a high-concept pitch for a Hollywood comedy — a girl tries to pass off her best friend’s baby as her own — into a thought-provoking, emotionally involving look at both...
Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni’s sex comedy, a Critics’ Week title, is always light on its feet.
The director of ‘If Only I Could Hibernate’ on script labs, working with children and bringing Mongolian cinema to Cannes.
‘Sexy Beast’ and ‘Under The Skin’ director Jonathan Glazer makes his Cannes debut with his coldly compelling, boldly experimental Holocaust drama ‘The Zone of Interest’.
The French-Senegalese director of ‘Banel & Adama’, Ramata-Toulaye Sy, talks to TFV about shooting on location, writing, and having a first film in the main competition in Cannes.
No one could have predicted that just five years after cinemas reopened in Saudi Arabia in 2018, the Kingdom would become a hub for entertainment. In fact, as part of HRH Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud’s Saudi Vision 2030, there will be at least 300 theaters...
An enthralling “fictional documentary” by Kaouther Ben Hania exploring the psychological states of a strong-headed Tunisian mother and her four daughters, two of whom joined Islamic State, through staged recreations and interactions with actors playing their roles.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s melancholy, dialogue-heavy rumination on personal responsibility, politics and the weight of provincial isolation is intellectually rigorous and always engrossing but largely lacks the well-earned emotional gifts of his more recent masterworks.
Warwick Thornton’s latest may star Cate Blanchett but newcomer Aswan Reid steals the show in this historical drama.
French farmer-filmmaker Pierre Creton combines his professional horticultural knowledge and his idiosyncratic cinematic language to produce an enigmatic, enthralling and intensely erotic film about a young gardener’s rite of professional and sexual passage in rural Normandy.
A punishing, loud plunge into the brutality of EMT work in Brooklyn’s grittiest hoods that banks on Sean Penn’s stardom but is tone-deaf to its problematic treatment of immigrant communities and women.
Una deliciosa ensoñación sobre cómo escapar de la adormecedora esclavitud diaria del capitalismo y encontrar el verdadero significado de la libertad. Los delincuentes es increíble hechizo de tres horas que seguramente será captado por múltiples territorios.
A delicious reverie on escaping capitalism’s numbing daily drudge and finding the true meaning of freedom, “The Delinquents” is a rare three-hour charmer sure to be scooped up in multiple territories.
TFV first met, Carlota Guerrero Manager at Catallunya Film Commission. in March at AFCI Week in Los Angeles, where she sat down to record a podcast with Eric Mika, President and Publisher of The Film Verdict (now available on spotify). Catalonia hosts an average of...
Paolo Del Brocco has been CEO of Rai Cinema, the production arm of Italy’s public broadcaster Rai, since 2010. He joined Rai in 1991 and was managing director of Rai Cinema from 2007 to 2010. With investments in roughly half of Italy’s film output, Rai Cinema is the...
Wang Bing’s intimate portrait of the Chinese youth who sew the world’s clothing for a pittance, ‘Youth (Spring)’ speaks truth to the global economy.
Nicolas Peduzzi’s doc following a devoted Paris psychiatrist on hospital rounds is as warmly human as it is indignant at the capitalist gutting of public services.
Ever since humans were able to grunt to communicate affection for another person, the world’s greatest minds have grappled with understanding and defining the elusive, unpredictable, and disorienting feeling of desire. If history’s deepest thinkers haven’t been able...
Catherine Corsini’s latest film is a schematic family drama.
TFV first met Bega Metzner last March at AFCI Week in Los Angeles, where she sat down to record a podcast with Eric Mika, President and Publisher of The Film Verdict (now available). Born and raised in New York City by her director father and photographer mother, Bega...
ROAA Media Ventures, Saudi Cultural Development Fund and MEFIC Capital disclosed that they have come together to establish a Film Investment Fund for the Kingdom. The agreement was announced during an exclusive industry breakfast hosted by Saudi Cultural Development...
Italy and China, two ancient lands far away from one another, have historic ties going back centuries. It is generally believed that Marco Polo, a Venetian, was the first Westerner to explore China and chronicle his journey. In more recent times, Italian filmmaker...
A gripping drama — almost a mystery — about ordinary people, ‘Monster’ from Japanese master Kore-eda Hirokazu connects to viewers.
This isn’t merely a sprawling, ridiculous summer blockbuster — it’s the Platonic ideal of the sprawling, ridiculous summer blockbuster, a delight for fans of the loony franchise.
Wim Wenders’ new film is a visually arresting study of Anselm Kiefer, evoking the artist’s preoccupations with history and mythology to craft a suitably elegant portrait.
Malaysian writer-director Amanda Nell Eu’s groundbreaking Cannes premiere ‘Tiger Stripes’ is an offbeat body-horror monster movie with sharp feminist claws.
This riveting courtroom drama distils Pierre Goldman’s complex life into one of its defining moments while crafting a ranging reflection on past and present injustice.
’12 Years a Slave’ director Steve McQueen exhaustively chronicles the Nazi occupation of his adopted hometown Amsterdam in his formally adventurous but lumbering. disjointed documentary ‘Occupied City’.
Maïwenn’s Cannes opener is rich in irony and metatextual commentary, which compensates for the rather superficial treatment of a fascinating historical character.
TFV first met Tristan Albrecht last March at AFCI Week in Los Angeles, when he sat down to record a podcast with Eric Mika, President and Publisher of The Film Verdict (now available on Spotify). “Filming in Valais feels like home, or perhaps even better!” says Mr....
The Critics Week “helps showcase the diversity of the first features’ landscape.”
One of the goals of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious Vision 2023 is to position the Kingdom as a prime location and film hub for the industry worldwide. The two main pillars of this project are AlUla and Neom. AlUla is a historical area near the Hijaz Mountains in the...
As one drives to opening night of the Saudi Film Festival in a festival-branded, air-conditioned car, the iconic Ithra building rises up out of the encroaching desert of the Eastern Province like a mirage. The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture is a magnificent...
The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture – aptly named Ithra, for ‘enrichment’ in Arabic – is Saudi Arabia’s leading center for all things creative and cross-cultural. Ithra opened its doors to the public in 2018 as an ambitious Aramco initiative to empower and...
Actress and filmmaker Ahd Hassan Kamel appeared on the festival scene playing Ms. Hussa in the ground-breaking Saudi film Wajdja, followed by roles in the 2018 BBC2/Netflix series Collateral and a turn co-starring in the 2022 Amazon thriller All the Old Knives...
Already a luminous presence on the Saudi film scene, Fatima Al-Banawi is a multi-talented actress and writer who is now completing her first feature film as a director. She was selected for TIME magazine’s Young Generations Leaders List in 2018 for her storytelling...
Over nine editions, the dream of a film festival in Saudi Arabia has become a reality.
The new General Delegate of the Quinzaine talks to TFV about conflicts of interest, streaming and Quentin Tarantino.
By Caren Davidkhanian Led by Roberto Stabile, Italian Screens was launched jointly by Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Cinecittà for the Directorate General for Cinema and Audiovisual of the Ministry of Culture, and the Academy of Italian Cinema and David di...
By Caren Davidkhanian Italian Screens will be in Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Cape Town this month thanks to Paolo Cuculi, Italy’s ambassador to South Africa, who says that the event will contribute to strengthening the cultural ties between his country and South...
In a groundbreaking collaboration that aims to set a new standard for the convergence of technology and the arts, we are thrilled to announce that the renowned Oldenburg International Film Festival has partnered with the innovative teams at MILC Platform and The Film...
The talent outshines the writing, but these travel companions make for a breezy Italian trip.
Tatsunari Ota’s second feature, the winner of Jeonju IFF’s international competition, teases ravishing visuals and taut emotions out of two strangers’ uneventful walkabout in a small town in Japan.
El premiado documental de Pavel Giroud desentierra imágenes ocultas durante cincuenta años en una crónica lacerante y definitiva del suicidio político del poeta cubano Heberto Padilla.
From “crisis is opportunity” to the joy of discovering impressive new titles, Jeonju veteran Min Sungwook takes us behind the scenes of a beloved South Korean festival.
Lee Chang-jae’s documentary about former South Korean president Moon Jae-in mixes footage of his current incarnation as a gardening retiree with glowing testimonials from his aides, but lacks context for non-domestic audiences.
Shin Dong-min’s monochrome and monotonous three-part drama about a young fashion designer, a rookie actor and a filmmaker came tops at Jeonju International Film Festival’s Korean competition.
Korean filmmaker Jéro Yun reflects on death and its visceral (dis)contents by tracking the demanding routines and discerning perspectives of an undertaker and a trauma cleaner.
Pavel Giroud’s award-winning documentary unearths footage hidden for fifty years in a searing, definitive chronicle of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla’s political suicide.
Kim Hee-jung’s modestly scaled but emotionally potent South Korean-Polish co-production assesses the emotional fallout from a high-school drowning accident, with nods aplenty to late Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski.
The lazy takedown on Love Again is that it’s like a Hallmark Channel movie, but that’s not a fair comparison; I’ve seen Hallmark movies where the romantic leads have better chemistry, where the screenwriters have crafted better banter (and more skillfully summoned the...
Nanni Moretti returns to his forte, sardonic Italian socio-political commentary, in the meandering collage film ‘A Brighter Tomorrow’ (‘Il Sol dell’avvenire’).
Upending the online practice of blurring sensitive content, Narges Kalhor’s short documentary celebrates those bravely sharing uncensored images of Iran’s recent protests.
The sumptuously photographed documentary depicts the realities of a location film shoot while ruminating on filmmaking with the help of Robert Bresson.
Bill Morrison’s latest found footage film uses multiple perspectives to dissect and interrogate the lethal shooting of Harith Augustus in 2018.
This documentary about astronauts and the doctor that administers to them finds quiet profundity within the mechanics of interplanetary bodies.
James Gunn bids farewell to the MCU with a whimper, not a bang.
Alice Brygo’s arresting film is an experiential recreation of the crowds massing around the burning Notre-Dame in 2019 and myriad responses to the catastrophic events.
‘The Film Verdict’ announces its first U.S.-based reviewer.
Young miner-turned-filmmaker Jian Haodong delivers an authentic glimpse of life in China’s rural hinterlands in a semi-autobiographical road movie about a man’s lonely return to his village during the pandemic.
Taiwanese arthouse A-lister Leon Dai and new actor Edward Tan front Singaporean filmmaker Jow Zhi Wei’s visually enchanting, structurally disciplined first feature.
Inspired by the sentiments of Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Seagull’ and mirroring the aesthetics of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’, Macau filmmaker Hong Heng-fai’s first feature offers sensual and sultry drama about love, art and human existence.
Six directors across Africa make shorts for Netflix.
As a lover of African and African Diaspora film, attending the Fespaco film and television festival in Burkina Faso for the seventh time since 2005 was an inspiring experience. As one of Africa's largest and oldest film and television festivals and markets, Fespaco...
Film commissioners from around the world gathered in Hollywood March 27-30 for AFCI Week 2023 – the premier global conference for film commission professionals. Held at the Sofitel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills, the conference brought together more than 125 film...
The 28th edition of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) was an excellent success for Burkina Faso's capital. Thousands of Burkina Faso residents and international festivalgoers packed the Palais des Sports complex in the Ouaga 2000...
Ruggedly beautiful landscapes and elegant monochrome visuals help make up for a thin plot in Australian director Ivan Sen’s politically charged neo-western crime thriller ‘Limbo’.
Thierry Mugler’s steadfast love for his partner, the Polish performance artist Krzysztof Leon Dziemaszkiewicz, lies at the heart of “Leon,” a sympathetic look at what it’s like for a deeply insecure exhibitionist to live in the shadow of the world-famous man he adores.
Lucia Borgonzoni has been undersecretary of Italy’s Ministry of Culture since 2018, the same year in which she won a seat in the Italian Senate for the Northern League party becoming one of her country’s youngest senators. Although Borgonzoni has been involved in...
Noted Bulgarian director Tonislav Hristov turns his camera on an aging beachside charmer whose years as a gigolo for women tourists are nearing their end just as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine make him rethink his future.
The border between documentary and fiction is troublingly blurred in this exquisitely composed immersive story of a young girl living in the flooded plains of the Brahmaputra River who goes to Dhaka in search of her father.
Love is only slightly warmer than death in German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s genre-blending, gender-bending, hit-and-miss crime thriller ‘Till the End of the Night’.
A superficial, ethically problematic documentary about gender-based violence in Syria whose “topic-of-the-moment” theme can’t paper over glaring flaws in structure, scope, and treatment of its subjects.
Michelle Yeoh plays a kick-ass Chinese-American matriarch fighting the forces of darkness across multiple universes in ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’, a wildly inventive, prize-winning philosophical action comedy from writer-director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The winner of 7 Oscars, including Best Picture.
A riveting cine-memoir that breaks through all the pitfalls of film-as-therapy, accompanying artist Lisa Selby as she tries to come to terms with her largely absent heroin-addicted mother as well as her own struggles with addiction, that of her partner, and her fears of continuing the cycle of maternal dysfunction.
TFV talks with Hendrik Hey, the founder of MILC (Media Industry Licensing Content)
Director Daniel Roher’s gripping documentary about the poison plot against Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny gains extra urgency in the light of Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
As more and more international films gain popularity in various Oscar categories, it seems as though the once dominant Italian and French film industries are reexamining their approach to nominating their films. Italy hasn’t been able to take home an Oscar since 2013...
Piera Detassis is the most influential woman in the world of Italian cinema. After a long career covering all aspects of the film industry, from cinema historian to film critic and journalist, as well as organizer of some of the most significant cinema events in...
Edward Berger’s deeply disturbing anti-war film is an unforgettable adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s literary classic, affording a visceral sense of life and death in the trenches of WWI. It won 4 Oscars, including Best International Feature.
Sachiko and Ming share an apartment and predilection for role-play in Cheng Yu’s enigmatic and intriguing exploration of one relationship through the prism of many.
Two Levantine immigrants working in a Lyon café bond in this meditation on friendship and the long fingers of history which claimed the Berlinale Shorts top prize.
Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Mexican visionary Guillermo Del Toro’s first animated feature is a visually ravishing but dramatically wooden update of much-filmed Italian fairy tale ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’.
Despite dark times on the world stage, audiences poured back to Berlin’s first post-COVID festival.
Kristen Stewart’s jury awarded the Golden Bear to the French documentary ‘On the Adamant’, about a floating psychiatric hospital on the Seine.
French documentarian Nicolas Philibert’s latest feature, competing in Berlin, gives voice to the patients in a psychiatric day care centre floating on the Seine.
After years of what can be perceived as an Italian crisis of its films performing internationally, it appears that the crisis is ending and Italian films are on the uptick again, along with coproductions that have been rising after a dip caused by the pandemic....
An outstanding, deeply moving documentary that finally addresses the pandemic not simply as a record of a tragedy but a collective trauma needing to be processed as a community.
From early days in Boston to the height of her stardom and sudden crash, this affectionate documentary made with major family involvement doesn’t probe deep enough or contextualize her career, but it reminds us that Donna Summer was a terrific performer whose talents were minimized by the moniker “Queen of Disco.”
Two young women travel to a remote cottage so one of them can administer a chemical abortion in this languorous vignette of rebirth and sororal care.
Todd Field’s Tár supplement provides compelling extra notes to his masterfully composed film.
Mostly filmed in the Ukraine war zone by brave battlefield paramedics, ‘Eastern Front’ is a raw and immersive reportage documentary that feels like an urgent first draft of history.
Painter-filmmaker Liu Jian’s third animated feature (his second in Berlin competition) lacks the bite to capture the painful realities faced by Chinese art school students as their country opened up to the West and capitalist ideals.
Indian director Sreemoyee Singh’s moving documentary And, Towards Happy Alleys transcends its overly relaxed editing and sometimes dispersive focus.
Festival directors of San Sebastian, the Viennale, Locarno and Berlin talk to TFV.
The latest YA fantasy adventure from Japanese anime master Makoto Shinkai is a beautifully written and animated work of the imagination that incorporates elements of ‘Your Name’ and ‘Weathering with You’ and often sails beyond them.
Passages is a steamy, sensitive, and surprisingly funny look at the complications of modern love.
This companion to Bad Living is a repetitive exploration of deceitful mothers and toxic families that offers no new insights.
James Benning’s latest, bowing in the Berlin Forum, offers a powerful comment on racial politics in the U.S. in a static-shot portrait of the first settlement to be founded and governed by African-Americans.
The feel bad movie of Berlinale is a bleak and punishing look at familial decay that’s both manipulative and dishonest.
This deeply personal documentary follows an Australian Aboriginal man as he escapes the chokehold of the big city to reconnect with Country.
La historia de sobre un niño de 8 años que siente una creciente desesperación de ser percibido como masculino es extraordinaria por su sensibilidad y percepción. Será un parámetro en la discusión fílmica sobre género, sexualidad e identidad.
Christian Petzold is in top form with this intimate summer drama that quietly builds to an unexpected, heart-wrenching finale.
Gianluca Curti grew up in one of the most important dynasties of Italian cinema. He is the CEO of independent Italian producer and distributor Minerva Pictures, a 2,000-title-strong company founded by his grandfather, Antonio Curti, in 1953, and headed by his father,...
This strange and engrossing short blends a surreal and slippery story about a bizarre online relationship with Stephen Vuillemin’s glorious animation.
Portuguese auteur João Canijo is making his Berlinale debut with a Competition/Encounters diptych set in a hotel.
South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo teases all the humour and melancholy out of his young cast in a comedy of awkward manners, bowing in the Berlin sidebar Encounters.
Extraordinary for its sensitivity and perception, Estibollz Urresolo Sologuren’s story of an 8-year-old girl’s growing discomfort with being perceived as a boy is a landmark in the filmic discussion of gender, sexuality and identity.
Payman Maadi gives another outstanding performance in a deeply layered refugee drama that isn’t always the sum of its parts.
A Berlin regular, French documentarian Claire Simon is back in the Forum section with her film ‘Our Body’, chronicling the everyday routines in a gynecological hospital.
Angela Schanelec returns to Berlin with another weird, challenging film destined to thrive only in ultra-art houses and academic spaces based on its austere approach to narrative enjoyment.
French director Philippe Garrel in The Plough is faithful to his intimist style, working with his three children in a classic tale.
Set amidst a landscape of mountainous detritus, Kantarama Gahigiri’s short is an abstract but strikingly powerful rejoinder against the exploitation of Africa.
Japanese director Yui Kiyohara’s second feature combines delicate human drama, mesmerising imagery and a reflection on personal and social history.
Canadian writer-director Brandon Cronenberg’s darkly satirical sci-fi horror thriller about sun-seeking tourists on a clone-killing crime spree, ‘Infinity Pool’ is a deliriously debauched joyride into Hell.
A bold and chilling political thriller of shifting perspectives in which the weight of state-sanctioned terror begins to crush a security agent in eastern Turkey, where trauma and paranoia rip apart the social fabric.
Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s silly single location thriller is too straight-faced to be any fun.
Lois Patiño’s latest contains a fascinating cinematic experience though the work as a whole will likely receive a more mixed reception.
Zhang Lu’s ‘The Shadowless Tower’ is gentle, impressionistic story set in historic old Beijing is a rambling account of complicated family ties and individual loneliness.
This tenderly moving documentary observes a group of Ukrainian children adapting to their new lives, after having been re-homed in former military barracks in Germany.
Bologna-based film curator and director Antonio Bigini is in Berlin with his fiction debut ‘The Properties of Metals’, premiering in the Generation sidebar.
Giampaolo Letta is arguably the most powerful man in Italy’s film industry. He hails from an influential Italian family. His father, Gianni, is a well-known journalist and politician who was undersecretary of state in four Silvio Berlusconi governments. His cousin,...
Tòtem, la segunda pelìcula de la mexicana Lila Avilés se estrena en competencia en el Festival de Berlín.
In Totem Mexican director Lila Avilés shows sensibility and a strong hand. In Berlin Festival competition
A hard-pressed couple in Yemen’s port city of Aden search for a doctor to perform an abortion in Amr Gamal’s excellent, understated yet hard-hitting portrait of a family and their city in desperation.
Frauke Finsterwalder delivers yet another take on the life of Empress Sisi, but can’t escape the long shadow of the much more spirited ‘Corsage’.
Debutant director Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Berlin competition contender ‘Disco Boy’ is a stylish but silly yarn about disco-dancing soldiers and shamanic eco-warriors.
Korean-born Danish filmmaker Malene Choi talks to The Film Verdict about her fiction debut ‘The Quiet Migration’, premiering in the Panorama section.
In Orlando, My Political Biography director and LGTB+ activist Paul B. Preciado extravagant manifesto pushes the boundaries of feminine-masculine genres as well as cinematographic ones.
Vlad Petri’s visually captivating yet structurally slippery found-footage film reflects on the suppression faced by young, idealistic Romanian and Iranian women under self-avowed “revolutionary” regimes.
Margarethe von Trotta’s deeply perceptive study of Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, played by a dazzling Vicky Krieps, portrays the great writer’s struggle to combine freedom and commitment.
Sydney Sweeney shines in Tina Satter’s captivating, word-for-word account of Reality Winner’s FBI interrogation
by Caren Davidkhianan Roberto Stabile, Head of Special Projects of Directorate General of Cinema and Audiovisual-Ministry of Culture at Cinecittà, is the man behind ANICA’s renewed drive to revive and expand Italy’s international film markets, from bringing new luster...
A remarkably delicate, moving romance destined to be a major indie hit, boasting superb dialogue, terrific performances and an insightful understanding of how the what-ifs of life so often dangle around the perimeters of our lives.
This thoughtful compilation film draws our gaze to something unregistered across decades of British cinema and television – the face of a particular extra, Jill Goldston.
Dutch director Sacha Polak and British actress Vicky Knight reunite for an even looser-limbed slice-of-life story after their ‘Dirty God,’ which opened Rotterdam in 2019.
A slick but hollow Netflix actioner about an aging professional assassin balancing work and motherhood, inspired in parts by “Killing Eve” but without the bite.
Babatunde Apalowo’s masterful international debut examines a real Nigerian life engaged in a denial of love and its pleasures.
Álvaro Gago´s first feature Matria is the moving and humorous portrait of a hardworking yet almost powerless woman, in which the myth of matriarchy in Galicia is debunked.
The Teacher`s Lounge Ilker Çatak’s latest, features a great performance from German actress Leonie Benesch (The Crown) in a solid drama about trying to stand upright in a world of changing mores.
‘The Cemetery of Cinema’ conveys an important point about Guinea’s deplorable relationship with film archives, despite its director’s theatricality.
Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody co-star in ‘Manodrome’, director Andrew Trengove’s timely thriller about toxic masculinity and incel culture.
HEADLINE: AMBASSADORS OF AN ART FORM Koen Van Bockstal (1961) is a historian of Ghent University by training. After a short period as a history and aesthetics teacher in secondary education and freelance journalist at De Morgen, he worked for over 18 years in the...
Actor and activist Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman codirect a diary-like travelogue through war-torn Ukraine, highlighted by three brief interviews with Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky.
Cult director Jennifer Reeder’s hallucinatory high-school horror thriller ‘Perpetrator’ puts a queer feminist spin on teen slasher conventions.
Matria la ópera prima de Álvaro Gago es un retrato conmovedor y lleno de humor que es contrario a la idea del matriarcado en Galicia.
The backstory to the creation of the world’s once-most-popular smartphone is much wackier than can be imagined, as evidenced in Matt Johnson’s good-humored rise-and-fall business chronicle.
The acclaimed Italian animator is unveiling his first English-language film at the Berlinale in the Generation section.
La directora Tatiana Huezo regresa a su primer amor cinematográfico con El Eco documental conmovedor y bellamente fotografiado participante en la sección Encuentros en el Festival de Berlín.
Mexican-Salvadoran director Tatiana Huezo returns with The Echo to her first cinematographic love in this moving and beautifully photographed documentary about teenagers in a Puebla community.
Had Henry James been alive and well in the 1980s, it’s unlikely you would have ever seen him getting busy on the dance floor. He probably wouldn’t have even set foot in a nightclub. And yet director Patric Chiha has had the rather novel idea to take one of the...
Born in Belgium, Michel Vandewalle was drawn to the world of entertainment as a very young man. He was part of an international orchestra and participated in theater and dance in school and later as a teenager started working in front of and behind the camera. There...
Director Emily Atef’s Berlin world premiere about a teenage girl’s forbidden love for an abusive older man, ‘Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything’ is beautifully filmed but fifty shades of boring.
The nature and potential of non-human evolution are explored to disquieting effect in Deborah Stratman’s essayistic blend of science fact and science fiction.
Prize-winning Hungarian director duo Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó foresee a bleak future for humankind in their visually striking debut feature ‘White Plastic Sky’, an animated eco-disaster movie with a lyrical fairy-tale edge.
Rolf de Heer’s stripped-down story of a black woman who escapes from a cage and walks through a landscape heavy with racism and pandemic fear aligns with much of his intensely humane films, yet it feels weighed down by the uncertainty of its ultimate message.
Iranian director Sepideh Farsi opens a revelatory and very chilling window on a city under siege by a foreign power in her powerful, animated coming-of-ager, ‘The Siren’.
Opening the Berlin film festival, Rebecca Miller’s quirky New York rom-com ‘She Came to Me’ feels creaky and clumsy in places, but is saved by its fine cast and off-beat charm.
SIMONE BAUMANN DISCUSSES CURRENT AFFAIRS
Vincenzo Mosca's career began in '86, when he was hired at SACIS, RAI's commercial company, with responsibility for program sales to Western European television stations. He was later appointed head of the Paris office of SACIS, with a specific mandate to develop...
The downing of Malaysian Airlines’ passenger flight MH17 in 2014 over Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine becomes a prophetic and highly symbolic event portending the current war and its methods in Roman Liubyi’s doc, whose poetry can seem forced but is still capable of shocking.
Raingou’s first feature, ‘Le spectre de Boko Haram’, is a moving documentary that views the horrors of terrorism through the eyes of children.
The German Films supervisory board, chaired by Philipp Kreuzer announced that the contract of Managing Director Simone Baumann has been extended by another five years. "Simone Baumann has successfully managed the fortunes of German Films since 2019, including during...
As it finally returned from Covid-19 limbo under new artistic director Vanja Kaludjercic, the Dutch film festival reaffirmed its core mission to promote fresh, socially conscious, culturally rich cinema.
Mixing the personal with the political, the Dutch festival made a strong post-pandemic comeback with prize-winning films on Islamist terror, border tensions, jailed teenagers and tender pregnancy dilemmas.
The ghosts of Playland Cafe, Boston’s oldest gay bar pre-demolition, return in this heartfelt, multi-layered tribute to marginalised history, DIY spirit and queer performance.
Prize-winning French novelist Alice Zeniter makes a confident directing debut with ‘Before the Collapse’, a lively mystery drama about bed-hopping bohemians in emotional crisis.
Acclaimed Iranian director Masoud Kimiai pours cinematic rage into his recreation of a 1952 politically-motivated bank robbery that resonates with the protests of today.
A murder investigation in Namibia is haunted by echoes of colonial genocide in Perivi John Katjavivi’s flawed but intriguing supernatural crime thriller ‘Under The Hanging Tree’
A sensitive, intricately layered and hand-crafted portrait of mountain life in northern Albania, women’s labour and ancient laws.
This entertaining rom-com offers a freshly subversive, anti-bourgeois twist on the genre, as a pastor and politician in Helsinki open up their marriage to non-monogamy.
A couple reflect on a failed pregnancy in the midst of the pandemic in Monica Lima’s tactile and delicate drama about the desire to nurture and propagate.
An outlandish, radical trip inside Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s mind, gorgeously realised as a mysterious office of alter-egos and clacking typewriters.
Matti Harju’s debut feature is a hypnotic slow-burning anti-thriller that is more interested in exploring disillusionment and social imbalance than narrative twists or action spectacle.
A young Danish woman mysteriously vanishes in director Martin Skovbjerg’s smart, stylish blend of sensual romantic drama and moody suspense thriller ‘Copenhagen Does Not Exist’.
A cynical private detective becomes enthralled by a woman he is been paid to surveil in this unconventional and tender tale based on Juan Saenz Valiente’s graphic novel.
A street dance craze becomes a way of life for kids live-streaming from the social margins, in this psychedelic celebration of self-expression.
Established in 2020, the Robby Müller Award honors outstanding lifetime achievements in cinematography. Rotterdam has previously bestowed this prestigious award upon Diego García (Mexico), Kelly Reichardt (USA) and Sayombu Mukdeeprom (Thailand), and is now focusing on...
Director Jessica Woodworth’s monochrome anti-war drama ‘Luka’ is visually stunning but weighed down by its ponderous, pretentious tone.
An oblique, inventive anatomy of an investigation and execution in ‘90s Ukraine, and a legacy of Soviet violence passed down to today’s generation.
An ageing footballer reflects on his career in this layered rumination on the nature of the beautiful game adapted from the filmmaker’s own short story.
The Oscar-winning director and Turner prize-winning artist draws parallels between Hollywood’s historic racism and his own father’s lived experience in his latest cinematically huge art-work ‘Sunshine State’.
Actor-director duo Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan make inventive use of vintage lo-fi video technology for ‘New Strains’, a slight but hugely charming pandemic rom-com.
Banishments cannot stave off knowledge in this visually bold fable about a colony of children insulated from death and memory.
Filmed on a tiny camera smuggled into Haiti’s National Penitentiary, this portrait of an inmate is upsetting, enraging, and deeply moving.
The black-humoured snapshot of a disorderly Georgian seaside community where love and crime bring scant reward.
An isolated Danish family encounter spooky doubles of themselves in ‘Superposition’, a twist-heavy psycho-thriller from first-time feature director Karoline Lyngbye.
Revolution is coming in this intricate, densely layered vision of the burning of a forest and the girl who harnesses the technology of dissent.
Jolinde den Haas is the innovative project manager of IFFR Pro immersive, a festival showcasing the most unique and interesting new immersive narrative experiences.
A couple’s farewell dinner in Hanover descends into chaos in this pandemic-era portrait, with a political sting in its tail, of an anxious, divided generation.
Sound and images captured during several years of documentary making form the basis for this haunting essayistic meditation on fear and its effects.
A runaway tiger means extra trouble for a strife-torn married couple in Romanian director Andrei Tanase’s engaging but slight feline chase drama ‘Day of the Tiger’.
Rotterdam’s artistic director savors her first in-person festival with films from Japan, India, Indonesia and even a superhero movie.
Director Ami-Ro Sköld blends live action with stop-motion animation in ‘The Store’, an impressive social drama which takes place in a Swedish supermarket.
Unexpected formal flourishes can only spice up conventional ideas on tormented genius in this take on the life of Norway’s Expressionist painter Edvard Munch.
Valeria Hofmann’s uncanny and unsettling film explores the collisions between a video game and the real world, when a young woman attempts to call out online harassment.
Using photos, footage, and fragmented clips, the mononymous director Lina presents an account of the Syrian Crisis as both a national and interpersonal tragedy.
The 52nd IFFR kicks off its first full-scale, physical edition since the pandemic, amid heightened industry scrutiny after a controversial restructure.
For her first stab behind the camera, veteran Belgian actress Veerle Baetens, who’s best known for co-starring in the Oscar-nominated country music tearjerker, The Broken Circle Breakdown, certainly hasn’t taken the easy road. By adapting writer Lize Spit’s 2016...
The filmmaker touches on the challenges of making a film about revered Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and his iconic painting, ‘The Scream’.
La directora venezolana Patricia Ortega habla de su viaje de autodescubrimiento y los placeres del sexo en ´Mamacruz´en la competencia de Sundance.
In ‘Animalia’, Sofia Alaoui’s gorgeously shot debut feature, ideas of spirituality mix with commentary on class and religion in a package that refuses to easily yield the keys to its own meaning.
Danish director Lin Alluna talks about her seminal encounter with Aaju Peter, the Inuit activist who inspired ‘Twice Colonized’.
The director of ‘Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’ explains the origin of her film to Max Borg.
Venezuelan director Patricia Ortega talks about her journey of self-discovery and the pleasures of sex in ´Mamacruz´, competing at Sundance.
Jakub Piatek’s classical music documentary covers the prestigious Chopin Competition, presenting a group of talented kids in a story that starts slow but becomes truly buoyant in its final third.
Danish documentary filmmaker Lin Alluna’s feature-length debut veers away from the political to reveal the internal conflicts tearing at the Greenland-born, Denmark-educated and Canada-based Inuit civil rights activist Aaju Peter.
A timely and compassionate Sundance documentary premiere, ‘The Stroll’ puts a highly personal spin on New York City’s hidden history of black transgender sex workers
Sweden-based documentarians Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck’s first joint feature has lofty ambitions but fails to make any kind of coherent argument.
An intimate, visceral immersion into the rituals of the Estonian smoke sauna, a healing space where women confide in one another.
Lithuanian director Marija Kavtaradze’s second feature is an involving drama that centres on a new relationship, tackled in a refreshingly honest and complex way.
Kiti Manver interpreta a una abuela religiosa que accidentalmente descubre el porno en Internet, dando lugar a una comedia que empodera a las mujeres mayores al tiempo que ironiza sobre la disminución de fieles católicos en España.
Kiti Manver plays a religious grandmother who accidentally discovers online porn, igniting a comedy that empowers older women while poking fun at Spain’s dwindling Catholic faithful.
Low-key but engrossing, this study of Jewish and Palestinian women who take a beginners’ filmmaking class together sidesteps the threatened stereotypes, as Orit Fouks Rotem creates an atmosphere of quiet realism in her first feature film.
Hilma, Lasse Hallström’s beautifully crafted biopic brings to life an almost unknown Swedish painter who was an avant gardiste, spiritualist and theosophist.
Dusan Milic’s psychological thriller-cum-horror set in post-war Kosovo excels in creating an unsettling atmosphere, but its conclusion doesn’t quite deliver on its promise.
Palestine’s Oscar submission is an uneven story of a depressed man hoping to get his neighbor to bump him off, told in a vaguely black comedy manner.
Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s conventional but compelling documentary ‘Shot in the Arm’ examines the anti-vaccine movement before, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Colombian writer-director Laura Mora’s prize-winning road movie ‘Kings of the World’ is a messy but big-hearted love letter to the loveless.
Sweden’s shortlisted International Oscar hopeful, formerly known as ‘Boy from Heaven’, is a solid though cautious, slow-burn loss-of innocence tale wrapped around the struggle between State versus Religion, designed for Western consumption.
Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie lead a starry cast in ‘Babylon’, Damien Chazelle’s huge, ambitious but flawed love letter to Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties.
As a quick perusal of The Film Verdict’s Oscar coverage shows, the Academy Awards are no longer an exclusively or even a mostly American thing. With our reviews, interviews and profiles, we have tried to capture the world-wide excitement of filmmakers and producers...
“I can believe in cinema again!” The Indian director of ‘Last Film Show’ talks about making an ode to celluloid in the digital age.
The Estonian filmmaker talks about the unwittingly timely release of ‘Kalev’.
The celebrated Belgian director is once again representing his country in the Oscar race.
The Czech director discusses the challenges of making the multilingual biopic ‘Il Boemo’.
Bosnian director Aida Begic gives a 21st century feminist remix to a 19th century folk story in her baggy but formally ambitious ‘A Ballad’, the Oscar entry from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Cristèle Alves Meira’s feature debut is an uneven work that combines anthropological and documentary details with more supernatural elements.
The plight of the indigenous Ayoreo, the last tribe to avoid contact and reclaim its territories in the Paraguayan Chaco Forest, is painstakingly and poetically rendered in this drama premiering at Rotterdam.
La difícil situación de los indígenas ayoreo, la última tribu en evitar el contacto y reclamar sus territorios en la selva del Chaco paraguayo, se plasma de forma minuciosa y poética en este drama que se estrenó en Rotterdam y es candidata al Oscar Internacional 2023 por Paraguay.
A subtle character study successfully explores guilt, filial duty and labor relations between a young farmhand and his boss, set among the vast soybean plantations along the Uruguay Brazil border.
Un sutil estudio de personajes que explora con éxito el sentimiento de culpa, el deber filial, y las relaciones laborales entre un joven peón y su patrón, ambientado en las vastas plantaciones de soja a lo largo de la frontera entre Uruguay y Brasil.
El drama de Santiago Mitre sobre el Juicio a las Juntas hace justicia a este importante hito de la historia argentina.
The Polish filmmaker discusses his bond with the animal star(s) of ‘EO’.
Santiago Mitre’s drama about the Trial of the Juntas does this important milestone in Argentina’s history justice.
El segundo largometraje de Carla Simón es una mirada novelesca pero poco sentimental sobre una familia rural catalana.
Carla Simón’s second feature is a novelistic yet unsentimental look at a rural Catalan family.
French director and documentarian Alice Diop makes a bright debut in fiction filmmaking with her complexly layered, multi-prize-winning ‘Saint Omer’, exploring the dark side of motherhood.
A beautifully shot, rigidly ice-cold story of love, disease and crushed dreams that will play best with festival crowds and highly selective art houses.
Ali Abbasi’s Iranian-set noir, based on a real serial killer of prostitutes, explores the social and religious culture that is often used as an excuse for violence against women.
Talented filmmaker Houman Seyyedi takes a ride on the dark side in Iran’s Oscar entry, ‘World War III’.
The Norwegian director talks about his very personal epic ‘War Sailor’.
Laura Mora entrega con Los reyes del mundo –primera colombiana en ganar la Concha de oro– una épica caótica y onírica que es ahora la candidata colombiana a los Oscares.
Laura Mora became the first Colombian director to win the Golden Shell at San Sebastian for her chaotic, dreamlike epic, ‘The Kings of the World.’ It is now Colombia’s Oscar hopeful.
La premiada road movie de la escritora y directora colombiana Laura Mora es una carta de amor desordenada pero con gran corazón para los que carecen de afecto
The UK’s official Oscar submission is a sweetly knowing homage to classic cinema, especially the modern masters of Iran.
Oscars voters have always had a soft spot for movies about movies – and Last Film Show should very much fit their bill as they survey the candidates for the Best International Film Academy Award. India’s submission for the category is a lushly-lensed feature aimed...
A manual day laborer is selected to play Hitler in a film, but this stroke of “luck” leads to terrible tragedies on the film set in Houman Seyedi’s expertly crafted, realistic/metaphoric tale about authoritarian society.
Mario Martone directs an emotional terror tour through Baroque, Camorra-ridden Naples, where actor Pierfrancesco Favino has a rendezvous with destiny.
The busy Italian filmmaker, who is concurrently a veteran stage and opera director, describes the genesis of Italy’s international Oscar submission.
The Singaporean director recounts his full immersion in the Oscar promotion process and looks ahead to remakes.
In Costa Rica’s Oscar entry, magic realism meets environmental degradation in the austere tale of a widower’s resistance against ruthless developers.
El realismo mágico se encuentra con la degradación ambiental en un austero relato costarricense sobre la resistencia de un viudo contra los constructores sin escrúpulos.
An intriguing and seldom-told WWII story gets the standardized treatment in this epic-scale Norwegian drama.
Alejandro González Iñárritu, the celebrated director returns to his homeland with a brilliant, excessive, quasi-autobiography that will represent Mexico in the International Oscar race.
CINE VERDICT Alejandro González Iñárritu, el célebre director regresa a su país con una quasi autobiografía brillante y desmesurada que representa a México en la carrera internacional por los Óscares
Mexican master Alejandro G. Iñárritu (‘Birdman’, ‘The Revenant’) takes time off for a very personal project with autobiographical and cinematic undertones.
El maestro mexicano Alejandro G. Iñárritu (‘Birdman’, ‘The Revenant’) hace un paréntesis para un proyecto muy personal con matices autobiográficos y cinematográficos.
Venice Golden Lion winner Lorenzo Vigas talks to TFV about his latest film ‘The Box’ (‘La caja’), which has been submitted by Venezuela for the International Oscars 2023.
El ganador del León de Oro de Venecia, Lorenzo Vigas, habla con TFV sobre su última película, La Caja, que ha sido presentada por Venezuela como candidata para el premio Oscar Internacional 2023.
Lorenzo Vigas continúa con su visión crítica de las figuras paternas y las implicaciones más amplias de la ausencia paterna en esta sutil historia de madurez anclada en la excepcional presencia de su joven protagonista.
Léalo en español The box in the title that young Mexican teen Hatzin (newcomer Hatzin Navarrete) picks up containing his father’s remains may look like a simple mini-casket, but the emotional baggage that goes with it is far weightier than what’s inside. In the third...
It’s a year of diversity at the Academy Awards, with striking entries from both veteran directors and newcomers.
Estonia’s official Oscar submission ‘Kalev’ finds timely modern echoes in a true sporting saga that took place during the dying days of Russian occupation.
Un complejo thriller basado en un escándalo verdadero de abusos sexuales que involucra a políticos chilenos, sacerdotes, empresarios y niños desamparados, donde nadie es totalmente inocente o culpable.
The Moroccan director and screenwriter of ‘The Blue Caftan’ talks about the personal origins of her films.
A young Pakistani director sets records with his first feature film.
He Shuming’s feature debut ‘Ajoomma’, Singapore’s Oscar hopeful, is an amusing look at life’s second act with a warm, winning performance by Hong Huifang.
Sundance estrena un fascinante retrato de la vida en los Andes bolivianos, donde una sequía amenaza el sustento de una pareja de ancianos quechuas y su rebaño de llamas.
Lebanese actress Carole Abboud brings a sense of wistful loneliness to the role of an independent woman estranged from her adult daughter in Bassem Breche’s sketch-like feature debut.
Competing forms of victimhood expose a rotten racist society in Slovak director Michal Blaško’s prize-winning Oscars submission ‘Victim’.
A modern and glam festival continues under new management.
Firas Khoury’s notable feature debut ‘Alam’ about Palestinian teens living in Israel fought off the competition to win Cairo’s main prize.
Jealousy, betrayal and revenge weave through Sergio Machado’s sultry, fatalistic melodrama set in the Amazon, where a woman becomes the object of desire of three passionate brothers.
The toxic privilege of Algeria’s ministerial elite is the target of Merzak Allouache’s fitfully successful mix of class satire and political thriller.
Documentaries by Lea Glob, Simon Chambers and Angie Vinchito, all major prizewinners, show the diversity and topicality of the post-pandemic Dutch festival.
Cairo awarded its best documentary prize to this broadly appealing fly-on-the-wall documentary about a group of musicians from countries bordering the Nile who go on a demanding hundred-day-tour of the U.S.
As we stand on the edge of increasing digital frontiers, Katharina Pethke’s thought-provoking film explores the mechanics and implications of creating a virtual doppelganger.
A past tragedy haunts the Slovak woodlands in this eerie mystery-horror in which a woman labelled a witch by villagers reclaims her power.
Writer-director Firas Khoury refreshingly normalizes the lives of a group of Palestinian teens in Israel and then adds a political overlay in this notable debut that deserves more attention than accorded in Toronto.
Ana Bravo-Perez searches for the demons released by the extraction of fossil fuels from her native Colombia in this disquieting hybrid documentary.
Danish director and anthropologist Christian Suhr’s feature documentary offers a respectful yet compelling peek into the surprisingly diverse communities of Sufi worshippers within the Islamic tradition of Egypt.
Lea Glob’s ‘Apolonia, Apolonia’, an exploration of what’s at stake in an artist’s life, wins the International Competition at IDFA 2022.
Luis De Filippis’ laid-back tale about an embattled but loving family on vacation pops with a riveting Carmen Madonia as the trans sister.
Ahmad Abdalla’s latest is a handsomely produced, effective drama about a redundant Cairene house guard, the sole resident of a dilapidated mansion, trying to stave off the encroaching collapse of his world.
Alain Kassanda connects Congolese history to family history in this revealing debut documentary.
Young actress Lyna Khoudri sparkles as an Algerian dance student forced to reorder her priorities after she is physically assaulted in an emotion-clad feminist drama directed by Mounia Meddour (‘Papicha’).
The rise and tenure of Germany’s first female leader gets favourable treatment in this politically star-studded documentary by Eva Weber.
Lena Ndiaye’s documentary may be the most important contemporary document on Francophone Africa’s malignant economic relations with France.
After a muted few years of Covid caution, the 63rd edition of My Big Fat Greek Film Festival was back in full Dionysian mode.
Greek-British director Spiros Jacovides transforms an eccentric Athens family’s secrets and lies into warm-hearted comedy in his prize-winning debut feature ‘Black Stone’.
Lauren DeFilippo and Sam Soko examine a newfangled Western method of aid to Africa and return with predictable answers in this largely agreeable fare.
In stunning images, Alexander Abaturov’s debut shows global warming heroes in far-flung northeastern Siberia, abandoned by the Russian government.
Simon Chambers’ family-filming-family masterpiece is a tender and often funny chronicle of a dying man who secretes his brilliant charisma every moment the camera finds him awake.
Valentina Maurel’s dysfunctional father-daughter drama is the big winner at Thessaloniki.
A youthful gathering in a sunny Greek villa becomes an orgy of sex, drugs and violence in ‘Bastards’, a flawed but lively debut feature from director Nikos Pastras.
A fascinating and troubling behind-the-scenes look into the work of female stuntwomen, who must frequently portray victims at the hands of violent men.
A profoundly disturbing found-footage assemblage portraying a young Russian live-streaming generation brainwashed by militarised education and normalised violence.
A multi-layered, intensely personal exploration of what’s at stake in an artistic life, through a sprawling portrait of French painter Apolonia Sokol.
Writer-director Asimina Proedrou’s grimly compelling debut feature ‘Behind The Haystacks’ is a contemporary Greek tragedy about family conflicts and border tensions.
A Ukrainian paramedic wrestles with personal tragedy and public injustice in Christina Tynkevych’s powerful, prize-winning fiction-feature debut ‘How is Katia?’
A Greek-Cypriot family fall apart against a backdrop of terrorism and racial tension in ‘Iman’, a glossy thriller from writer-director duo Corinna Avraamidou and Kyriacos Tofarides
Director Ehab Tarabieh’s debut fiction feature ‘The Taste of Apples is Red’ is a brooding slow-burn thriller about long-buried family secrets returning to haunt a close-knit Druze village in the Golan Heights.
A highly stylised, thought-provoking meditation on being stared at without being truly seen, as female immigrants to the Netherlands reflect on their experiences across generations.
Simon Liu utilises his familiar febrile aesthetic as a way to explore and represent Hong Kong’s tumultuous recent history, to deeply disquieting effect.
A grieving family struggle to move beyond tragedy in Martijn de Jong’s poetically filmed debut feature ‘ Narcosis’, the official Dutch submission to the Oscars.
The artistic director of IDFA speaks his mind to TFV critics Oris Aigbokhaevbolo and Carmen Gray in an interview that reveals profound thinking about what a film festival is and its importance in times of war and political despair.
A powerful, accessible blend of animation and archive that bears witness to the Armenian genocide through the eyes of survivor and Hollywood silent star Aurora Mardiganian.
Director Spiros Stathoulopoulos reimagines the ancient Greek drama ‘Electra’ as a World War II revenge thriller in ‘Cavewoman’, a boldly experimental mix of close-up acting and rich sound design.
A father and son share a tense, creepy mountain holiday in Swiss director Leon Schwitter’s minor-key but atmospheric debut ‘Retreat’.
The head of the Mexican Film Institute on how IMCINE has fostered the growing number of women filmmakers in Mexico and on the launch of TFV’s Spanish language reviews in Cine Verdict.
La directora del Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía habla sobre cómo el IMCINE ha fomentado el creciente número de mujeres cineastas en México y sobre el lanzamiento de las reseñas en español de TFV en Cine Verdict.
En Endangered las documentalistas Heidi Ewing y Rachel Grady hablan con urgencia pero sin sensacionalismo al reportar los peligros que enfrenta la prensa en lugares sin conflicto armado declarado.
In Endangered documentarists Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are urgent but never sensationalistic in reporting on the dangers faced by the press in places where there is no official armed conflict.
Catalonian director and horror specialist Jaume Balaguero’s latest offering is a messy and almost incoherent tale of demonic uprising.
La más reciente película del director catalán y especialista en horror Jaume Balagueró es una desordenada y casi incoherente historia de surgimiento diabólico.
Women directed most of the Mexican films in Morelia this year, diving into tough subjects like violence, the position of women and LGBTQ issues.
Eichelmann Kaiser’s feature, which bowed at Venice and Morelia, is a modest but promising debut.
Mexican writer-director Anabel Caso’s debut is a languid, beautifully observed coming-of-age story.
My home is somewhere else, is a bilingual “animentary” uses the voices of Mexican immigrants, both legal and undocumented, to reveal their fears and dreams through imaginative drawings that allow for greater intimacy and understanding.
Mi casa está en otra parte es un documental bilingüe que utiliza las voces de los inmigrantes mexicanos, legales e indocumentados, para revelar sus miedos y sus sueños a través de imaginativos dibujos de animacion que permiten una mayor intimidad y comprensión.
The Film Verdict (TFV) is proud to announce the debut of CINE VERDICT, a section featuring Spanish language content written by Spanish language critics for the international marketplace. CINE VERDICT is conceived as a tool for Spanish language professionals who buy,...
A fascinating if uneven story of motherhood and body horror from Mexico.
Theo Montoya’s debut feature ‘Anhell69’ featuring the queer young generation in Colombia wins the International Competition at DOK Leipzig.
The 65th edition of East Germany’s longest-running independent film festival offered a lively mix of parties and premieres, critical voices and formal experiments.
An offbeat, multi-layered “documentary fairytale” in which a film crew help a bi-gender ornithologist enact Twin Peaks-inspired fantasies in the woods outside Moscow.
Polish director Lukasz Kowalski celebrates a different kind of pawn star in his prize-winning docu-comedy debut ‘The Pawnshop’.
This observational documentary follows the travails of a female driver who is part a grass-roots public transit system connecting the villages of northern Colombia.
French director Mickaël Bandela reassembles his broken family history into a multi-media memory mixtape in his messy but stylish bio-documentary ‘One Mother’.
Prize-winning Serbian director Mila Turajlic unearths a fascinating lost chapter in Cold War history in her latest archive-heavy documentary ‘Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels.’
Two of Iran’s biggest actors, Taraneh Alidoosti and Navid Mohammadzadeh, play double roles in Mani Haghighi’s chilling, fast-paced thriller with allegorical overtones about life in contemporary Iran.
Life is seen through the eyes of a mysterious creature living beneath the soil in this curious but at times unsettling underground animation from Jeffrey Zablotny.
A searching and honest recalibration of one family’s narrative, as the director reinterprets her father’s obsessive home movies from her mother’s perspective of domestic unfulfillment.
Gala Hernandez Lopez’s essay film addresses the incel phenomena from a position of fascination and empathy, seeking to understand the pain of isolation in a connected world.International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film
Canadian diplomat’s daughter Sofia Brockenshire assembles a rich mosaic of memories from her family’s globe-trotting history in her visually impressive essay-film debut ‘The Dependents’.
Afro-German documentary director Brenda Akele Jorde’s debut feature ‘The Homes We Carry’ is a touching family saga of love and loss, historic betrayal and mixed cultural identity.
This atmospheric animated documentary uses collage and fleeting rotoscoped drawings to convey the brutality and dislocating effect of state care in the GDR.
The life and work of German palaeontologist Johannes Weigelt is itself placed under the microscope in this inventive and unexpectedly charged miniature portrait.
In her prize-winning documentary ‘A Bunch of Amateurs’, director Kim Hopkins finds hope, humour and heart-warming humanity in an ailing amateur film-making club in northern England.
A few months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country began, a group of five young Ukrainian men and women, not all of whom were professional actors, collaboratively developed a theatrical production. They examined their experiences of armed conflict and...
This warm and inquisitive documentary is both a portrait of activist and self-taught scientist and the spit of land she’s called home for forty years.
Mike Day’s gently ambling documentary offers a fragmentary look at the unique tradition of cowboy poetry.
Featuring a strong ensemble cast including Tom Burke and Jenna Coleman, Neil Maskell’s directing debut ‘Klokkenluider’ is a chilling comedy conspiracy thriller about whistleblowers on the run from mortal danger.
Director Maria Schrader’s timely and gripping newsroom drama ‘She Said’ stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as the campaigning reporters who helped bring Harvey Weinstein to justice.
Martin Boulocq’s timely drama exposes a complex web of family, class, and economic codependency in modern Bolivia, where evangelical churches recruit and exploit indigenous communities.
In ‘Pretty Red Dress’, the vibrant debut feature from British writer-director Dionne Edwards, a troubled family of black Londoners learn to express their true selves with a little help from Tina Turner and a fabulous frock.
Three women struggle for independence in an increasingly conservative society in Belmin Söylemez’s award-winning drama set in an Istanbul acting workshop.
A man’s search for redemption after participating in a group murder neatly exposes a community’s moral rot in Ozcan Alper’s rugged mountain thriller, winner of the best Turkish film award at Antalya.
German-Turkish director Fatih Akin’s Wagnerian hip-hop biopic ‘Rheingold’ tells a lively but familiar raps-to-riches story.
A nomadic tribe clashes with mysterious monsters in director Andrew Cumming’s gripping, stylistically bold Stone Age survivalist horror thriller ‘The Origin’.
Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s latest is slow but thoughtful and strangely engaging on the subject of a young Chinese woman on the verge of making a potentially life-changing decision.
French veteran director Christophe Honoré’s latest is a study of grief and teenage exploration with great performances but a somewhat messy screenplay.
A cocky 14-year-old rebel becomes a mother in Pilar Palomero’s closely observed and vibrant tale, whose mixed pro/non-pro cast is convincingly upbeat.
San Sebastian celebrated its 70th anniversary with grace and good programing.
Director Manuel Abramovich’s controversial docu-fiction portrait of Mexican porn star Lalo Santos, ‘Pornomelancolía’ is empathetic and absorbing, despite being disowned by its leading man.
For the 100th film of his career, Liam Neeson switches from action thriller to classic film noir in a flyweight but generally entertaining post scriptum to Raymond Chandler’s immortal detective series, co-starring Diane Kruger and Jessica Lange.
San Sebastian’s top prize went to a Colombian coproduction for the first time in its history, and to a woman director for the third year running.
Writer-director Marian Mathias celebrates small acts of kindness and empathy in her opaque but haunting debut feature ‘Runner’.
Emotions are delicately explored over drinks in South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s beguiling and deceptively simple relationship tale.
Oscar-winning director Sebastien Lelio’s handsome literary mystery thriller ‘The Wonder’ stars Florence Pugh as a kick-ass nurse fighting fake news and dubious miracles in 19th century Ireland.
Set in the barrios of Buenos Aires, Diego Lerman’s classroom drama movingly praises a dissatisfied young lit teacher who can’t help but interfere in his students’ lives.
Brexit Britain offers only hellish horrors to exploited migrant workers in ‘Great Yarmouth – Provisional Figures’, a bleakly compelling social-realist thriller from Portuguese director Marco Martins.
The life and loves of 18th century Czech opera composer Josef Myslivecek, and his dazzling Italian career and fall into obscurity, are lovingly and authentically reconstructed in Petr Vaclav’s sumptuous period production.
Carmen Jaquier’s powerful debut feature ‘Thunder’ chronicles a stormy collision between religious faith and sexual rapture in early 20th century Switzerland.
The emphatically indie small-town German fest continues to make a big splash with its eclectic mix of art-house, cult, experimental and left-field genre movies.
Screening in San Sebastian competition after it was pulled from Toronto, Ulrich Seidl’s most controversial film to date underlines the sleaze and creepiness of pedophilia so forcefully it is painful to watch.
Katrin Brocks’ feature debut takes full advantage of its exotic setting in a highly dramatized if not always convincing story about a devout young woman who’s about to become a nun when her violent brother turns up at the convent.
Actor turned director John Connors makes a powerful statement with his debut dramatic feature ‘The Black Guelph’, a gritty Irish crime thriller about secrets, lies and trauma passed down the generations.
The atmosphere is thick in this humid Andalusian-set drama in which a teenage boy encounters the first pangs of his burgeoning homosexuality.
Lucid dreaming and entangled destinies give an otherworldly aspect to Kalani Gacon’s intoxicating and bittersweet tale of romantic longing in Kathmandu.
Director Baatar Batsukh raises the bar for Mongolian genre cinema with his twist-heavy, visually impressive psycho-horror debut ‘Aberrance’.
Director Alberto Rodriguez grippingly reconstructs the post-Franco years, using historical riots and prisoners demanding human rights as a microcosm of Spain as it made a screeching transition from fascism to democracy.
A silly joke on a quiet weekend away becomes a painful indicator of impending doom in this low-key Norwegian break-up drama.
Years of guilt and shame are exorcised in Davit Pirtskhalava’s stagy drama tracking the aftershocks of bullying.
Jose Maria Cabral’s historical drama about the appalling 1937 ‘Parsley massacre’ in the Dominican Republic is a well-mounted but utterly harrowing picture of atrocity.
Debutant director Juri Padel’s low-budget cyberpunk thriller ‘Junk Space Berlin’ elevates its scrambled plot and fuzzy intentions with dazzling digital glitch-art visuals.
Director Colin West’s soulful sci-fi comedy drama ‘Linoleum’ balances its sentimental message with sharp jokes, strong performances and deft plot twists.
This ambiguous single-take drama poignantly depicts a mundane morning in a family home, subtly exploring grief and the ways we hold on and move on.
Revenge is not so sweet in ‘Our Father, The Devil,’ director Ellie Foumbi’s gripping, horror-tinged thriller about African immigrants with a shared history of violence.
Social tensions and strange cosmic disturbances collide in French director Cédric Ido’s imperfect but admirably ambitious genre-blurring thriller ‘The Gravity’.
An 11-year-old girl has a sexual awakening when she joins an older girls’ football team, but she struggles to understand and control taboo desires.
A complex thriller based on a true sexual abuse scandal involving Chilean politicians, priests, businessmen and homeless children, where nobody is wholly innocent or guilty.
A gory, suspenseful debut from Kazakhstan’s Darkhan Tulegenov offers a moody, pessimistic take on the crime thriller that interrogates class inequality and hypocrisy.
Jung Woo-sung’s accomplished directorial debut is a South Korean actioner brimming with inventive flash that marks him as a filmmaker to watch.
A vague, dreamlike lyricism is prioritised over socio-political critique in Rob Rice’s collaboratively-minded doc-fiction portrait of a family facing uncertain futures in the Californian desert.
A young Filipina migrant worker in Hong Kong dreams of dancing her way to freedom in Stefanos Tai’s imaginative photo-montage musical ‘We Don’t Dance for Nothing’.
Steven Spielberg solidifies his legendary origin story playing with truth, fiction, and the magic of moviemaking.
Javier Bardem and Chris Rock star in this febrile melodrama, directed by Sally Potter, about an explosive moment in a relationship.
Reviews of the XR experiences on offer in Venice.
Strongly worded films with clear social and political attitudes took the prizes at the 79th Venice Film Festival, led by Laura Poitras’s Golden Lion winner ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.’
Laura Baumeister’s feature debut is a critical and compassionate portrait of lives on the precarious edge of Nicaraguan society.
A crowded, often frustrating reset of the first post-Covid festival partly obscured the high-quality programming.
A caustically funny and sharply perceptive portrait of adolescence and the toxic perils of obsessive cinephilia.
Director Carlos Lechuga sends a powerful farewell letter to a country adrift in depression and despair in this heartbreaking chronicle of the post-Cuban revolution.
The world premiere of Jafar Panahi’s simple but militantly engrossing ‘No Bears’, which comes to grips with the thin line between art and reality, took place in Venice competition while the director remained in prison in Tehran after his second arrest on July 11.
The sixth feature from French actor-director Roschdy Zem, co-written by co-star Maïwenn, feels like it’s on autopilot most of the time.
Inspired by Schubert’s song cycle Die schone Mullerin, Christopher at Sea is a dizzying animated odyssey into solitude and obsessive, unrequited desire.
Susanna Nicchiarelli’s biopic of Saint Clare seems less interested in religion than a lesbian-nun spectacle like Paul Verhoeven’s ‘Benedetta.’
A harmless ruse to enable some teenage fumbling upsets the equilibrium of a relationship in Kawthar Younis’ pointed chamber piece.
Steve Buscemi makes a rare return to directing for ‘The Listener’, starring Tessa Thompson, a well-meaning but slender single-person drama about hurting and healing in a post-Covid world.
Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s reinvention of the western is a cutting political allegory, a taut revenge tale and a visual extravaganza rolled into one.
The Venice Film Festival was the first major film festival to dedicate a special section to Virtual Reality (VR) that wasn’t an ad-hoc event. The entire VR community of producers, artists, buyers, sellers and exhibition people now congregate in Venice each year to...
A family is forced to make an unthinkable sacrifice in this stomach-churning dystopian tragedy about the chilling effects of social control.
Pre-release hype will be the biggest friend to this mess of a pseudo-biopic that reduces Marilyn Monroe to a disturbed child-woman with Daddy issues, never offering a glimpse of the screen magic notwithstanding Ana de Armas’ impressive recreation.
A teenage boy’s worldview is unsettled by a confusing encounter with an older woman in this riveting Mongolian coming-of-age drama.
A shattering drama that courageously portrays Iran as a violent Big Brother police state, Vahid Jalilvand’s third film is a shrill, breath-taking mind-trip driven by between two exceptional actors, Navid Mohammadzadeh and Diana Habibi.
Fyzal Boulifa’s sophomore feature after festival hit ‘Lynn + Lucy’ is too narrow in scope and yet not precise enough.
French playwright-turned-film director Florian Zeller (‘The Father’), again adapts his own play, here starring Hugh Jackman, and the result is a solid drama that unravels in the home stretch.
Alice Diop’s superb fiction debut is a marvel of control and depth, using the trial of a Senegalese woman guilty of killing her infant to honestly explore the complexities of motherhood while foregrounding it all within France’s racist currents.
Debuting director Theo Montoya offers up an ambitious slice of atmospheric and resonant queer punk.
Award-winning documentary team Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel plunge deep into the heart of the adult daughter of spaghetti western star Giuliano Gemma in a wonderfully touching film portrait that tips its Stetson at the illusory side of documentaries.
Director Gianni Amelio recreates a dismaying but true story from 1960’s Italy, when a brilliant writer who does little to hide his love for young men is persecuted and put on trial by a laughably outmoded justice system.
A young woman’s first love turns out to be a bad dream in the final film of South Korean master Kim Ki-duk, a visually striking if (for Kim) restrained relationship film that was posthumously completed by Estonian producer and director Artur Veeber.
Joanna Hogg’s latest exploration of mother-daughter relations sees Tilda Swinton playing both roles in an etiolated ghost story whose artificiality kills its characters despite Swinton’s admirable performances.
Philippine auteur Lav Diaz offers a damning and doomed critique of the violent state of his country through the on-screen physical and psychological disintegration of a policeman weighed down by the guilt of his officially-sanctioned murderous past in ‘When the Waves Are Gone’.
A young couple dealing with the tragic loss of a child finds their love for each other challenged in a deeply original drama from Koji Fukada (‘Harmonium’).
Writer-director Carolina Cavalli paints a charming picture of a charmless heroine in her confidently quirky debut feature ‘Amanda’.
The latest comedy-drama from Martin McDonagh, which reunites the stars of ‘In Bruges,’ Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, is darkly entertaining but never quite believable.
Italy’s premier documaker Gianfranco Rosi turns his attention to Pope Francis and his non-stop foreign travels, stressing the ecumenical core of his messaging as he comments on the world’s horrors.
In a career-best performance, Brendan Fraser turns Darren Aronofsky’s apartment-bound drama about an unhappy English teacher crippled by obesity and his daughter’s distance into a classic piece of filmmaking whose emotions are truly immense.
Penélope Cruz is a joy as a 1970s mother whose free spirit is frozen by her husband’s stereotyped insensitivity, yet other elements of Emanuele Crialese’s film, which is equally focused on the daughter’s certainty she was born the wrong gender, are less transcendent.
An old-fashioned historical epic on steroids in which a bloodthirsty corsair makes an alliance with the King of Algiers but then determines to conquer the ruler’s headstrong wife.
Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest drama stars Viriginie Efira (‘Benedetta’) and incisively explores issues of parenthood and generational transmission.
This deft and low-key drama uses fires raging in the Amazon to explore how a young woman is drawn to religion in search of some form of stability.
A teenage girl’s sense of isolation is writ large across the screen in this frosty Macedonian coming-of-age short that is warmed by a compelling lead performance.
A 1963 BBC interview with James Baldwin, and conducted by Peter Duval Smith, is recreated in this polished and energising narrative short.
Two men share in intimate and intense moment on a deserted shoreline in this short drama about violence, emancipation, and the fine lines between the two.
Story Chen’s Palme D’Or-winning short is a mesmerising journey through memory and melancholia as a woman takes a farewell tour of her hometown.
Touches of magical realism aren’t enough to hold together this well-meaning yet clumsy story of an adolescent girl in war-torn Damascus whose father refuses to accept that changed circumstances make his pose as the family guardian irrelevant.
A timely occasion to foreground the growing role of American extremists like the Proud Boys is largely manqué in Paul Schrader’s unconvincing story about a marked man trying to redeem himself, starring Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver.
Georgia Oakley’s debut feature is at times a little clumsy but it’s also the work of an interesting new voice in British cinema with a flair for expressive images.
Artist Nan Goldin’s activism in holding the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis is seen as a natural extension of her rebellious, freely lived and proudly messy life in Laura Poitras’ well-structured, powerful documentary.
Sébastien Lifshitz’s latest documentary explores a U.S. hideout for cross-dressing men and trans women but beyond the subject itself, which is interesting, not much of the director’s usual rigour can be found.
An eye-popping, eardrum-piercing action film in which the more serious social and mythical elements are pretty on the nose.
Whatever its structural defects, Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp’s documentary is an important document of political tyranny in this decade.
Luca Guadagnino again proves his understanding of the yearning for a fellow soul that defines all feelings of difference in this beautifully played road trip movie which uses cannibalism as metaphor.
Midlife crisis meets coming-of-ager in this sensitive, elegant first film set in Rome and directed by Italian actress Monica Dugo.
Abel Ferrara’s total misfire aims to merge the story of a 1920 class-related massacre with the contemporaneous crisis of faith of Italy’s most popular 20th century saint, but the poor script, bad acting and overall lack of cohesion make this just a time-waster.
A monologue on love, marriage, devotion and utter deception that will play best to fans of either Leo Tolstoy or Frederick Wiseman — perhaps to both.
A wicked French thriller that goes overboard but does it in fun and clever ways, with nods to both Hitchcock and Chabrol.
War and patriarchy deprive Azerbaijani women of their sons in an intimate, courageous drama that intertwines personal and political plot lines, directed and acted by first-time director Tahmina Rafaella.
A finely controlled film about a woman of flawed greatness, portrayed by a rarely-better Cate Blanchett.
A supposedly straight man finds himself in a drag wonderland that feels strangely sanitised in Florent Gouëlou’s debut feature.
Noah Baumbach and an inspired cast headlining Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig enjoyably bring Don DeLillo’s “unfilmable” novel about America in the Eighties to life with retro gusto, while straining to make it relevant.
Paris-based Lebanese filmmaker Wissam Charaf’s second feature takes a delicately droll and deadpan approach in depicting social malaise in Beirut, as seen by a migrant Ethiopian maid and a bomb-surviving Syrian refugee.
A rare fictionalized look at a Nigerian sex worker in Italy that celebrates its subject, flaws and all, with a spirited central performance and a laudable sensitivity destined to find welcoming arms worldwide.
Mark Cousins’ thought-provoking examination of the rise of Fascism through a detailed analysis of a 1922 propaganda film that signaled the start of a far-right ideology whose insidious roots continue to find fertile ground.
The Balkan region’s prime cinematic gathering bounced back from pandemic shutdown with a strong film program, starry guests and plenty of party attitude.
Director Kilian Riedhof’s deluxe weepie ‘You Will Not Have My Hate’ is based on a best-selling memoir about a Parisian family dealing with the aftermath of terrorist violence.
Croatian director and actor Juraj Lerotic was the big winner at Sarajevo, taking home both the Best Film and Best Actor prizes for his sensitive and devastating feature ‘Safe Place’.
This debut feature from Bianca Lucas is an unusual portrait of contemporary America and an incredibly intimate, heart-wrenching depiction of grief.
The past is a foreign country full of shadowy horrors in ‘The Eclipse’, Serbian director Nataša Urban’s prize-winning documentary about unreliable memory and collective amnesia.
Farah Hasanbegovic uses a beautifully simple hand-drawn animation style to bring to life this meditation on physical limitations and finding acceptance in our own bodies.
Atmosphere is everything in this ambiguous, slightly absurd short that leaves a great deal left unsaid, but perfects a lingering sense of melancholy.
This engrossed fly-on-the-wall style documentary follows a group of Bulgarian football hooligans, detailing their highs and lows in a changing world.
A rebellious teenage mother gives her newborn baby daughter up for adoption in Noemi Veronika Szakonyi’s emotionally raw, elegantly shot drama ‘Six Weeks’.
Two unlikely Balkan bikers and a Slavic Pixie Dream Girl share an eventful road trip in ‘Riders’, director Dominik Mencej’s slight but sweet semi-homage to ‘Easy Rider’.
This portrait of a musical prodigy brims with the same energy as its subject’s piano playing while depicting the boy as well as the talent.
Serbian director Mladen Kovacevic finds echoes of the current Covid pandemic in Europe’s last smallpox outbreak in his artful, atmospheric found-footage documentary ‘Another Spring’.
Raw, authentic emotion and inventive lyricism combine in Juraj Lerotic’s sensitive, devastating reckoning with an acute mental health crisis in the family.
This personal essay film inflected with horror movie motifs delves into childhood notions of bogeymen and the sobering truth behind them.
A murder cover-up in a corrupt town is the catalyst for an inept police chief’s crisis of conscience in Paul Negoescu’s downbeat portrait of masculinity in meltdown ‘Men of Deeds’.
The 75th edition of the Locarno Film Festival reinforced what’s been apparent for some time: programming a major festival largely composed of world premieres that falls between Cannes and Venice is no easy task. Embracing its cinephilic reputation with more conviction...
This deceptively simple documentary explores the nature of creation by juxtaposing the work of Ukrainian sculptors who’ve turned their hands to the war effort.
Brazilian director Julia Murat’s bold, brave and important feature ‘Rule 34’ (‘Regra 34’) walked off with the Pardo d’oro for best film at Locarno in a surprise win.
The celebration of a forthcoming marriage is depicted with poignancy and subtlety in Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier’s intimate short.
A twisted sister at an all-girl Catholic school pushes her fanatical faith to dangerous extremes in Ruth Mader’s gripping psycho-horror thriller ‘Serviam – I Will Serve’.
Complex and a bit obscure, Ery Claver’s directing debut is a clever contemplation of religion, power, and politics in Angola.
Swiss director Eva Vitija gets up close and personal with much-filmed thriller author and queer icon Patricia Highsmith in her well-crafted documentary ‘Loving Highsmith’.
Julia Murat’s film about a law student with a pornographic pastime is a brave, immoral, and important work.
Director Santiago Fillol revisits the brutal political climate of 1970s Argentina through the lens of cinema in his dry but elegant period thriller ‘Matadero’.
Award-winning documentary director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest exquisitely composed opus looks at the global garbage crisis, from Maldive palm groves strewn with plastic to festering landfills, encompassing community rubbish collections and recycling plants in a cinema-essay style whose noninterventionist approach caters to audiences already committed to the cause.
Past the rather dull international title, Jean Paul Civeyrac’s ‘A Woman’ is a serviceable drama with thriller-esque features and Sophie Marceau in the lead role.
A troubled teenage girl finds love and liberation in the nightclubs of 1980s Paris in director Sylvie Verheyde’s slight but charming autobiographical retro-drama ‘Stella in Love’.
There’s much to admire in Valentina Maurel’s dramatic depiction of a dysfunctional father and daughter relationship, chiefly its terrific performances
Debuting director Julie Lerat-Gersant imbues tremendous sympathy for her 16-year-old pregnant protagonist in this unpretentious, heartfelt drama whose overall predictability doesn’t detract from its modest strengths.
Jeff Rutherford’s debut feature film is enlivened by a screenplay packed with truths about the damage parents and partners can cause.
Debut director Thomas Hardiman’s off-beat single-shot murder mystery ‘Medusa Deluxe’ is a dazzling catwalk show of spiky comedy, fluid camerawork and fabulous hair.
Alexander Sokurov indulges his fascination with the corrosiveness of power in this mesmeric, bewildering and often tedious phantasmagoria combining deep fake technology with the graphic arts.
Backed by Vasco Viana’s superb cinematography, Carlos Conceição’s film about a squadron of soldiers in pre-independence Angola rises above its narrative gaps.
An intriguing though not always well-integrated attempt to engage with different forms of storytelling, including traditional Malaysian folklore, at the service of a feminist revenge tale.
A pair of eccentric bohemian sisters build a machine that can change the future in Irish director Andrew Legge’s flawed but admirably ambitious lo-fi sci-fi oddity ‘Lola’.
A misfire of perplexing obliviousness, in which we’re meant to believe that Udo Kier’s character once bore a striking resemblance to Hitler. The best that can be said about this limp comedy is that it could have been far more offensive.
Class inequality, corruption and power dynamics between the sexes is the background to this working-class Malayalam drama anchored by the nuanced female lead, played by Divya Prabha, and mesmeric images in a latex glove factory.
Brad Pitt plays a laconic hit man in director David Leitch’s ‘Bullet Train’, a laborious action comedy about mayhem and murder on an Oriental express.
Japanese director Masaaki Kudo turns a compassionate eye on a 17-year-old nightclub hostess with a toddler, sent skidding toward prostitution in a heart-felt story set on Okinawa.
Director Jake Paltrow’s multi-character drama about the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, ‘June Zero’ is a bold but muddled patchwork.
Signe Baumane’s animated feature is so brilliant in presenting a female perspective on love and marriage that you forgive its need to tell us the science behind romance.
Ambiguity abounds in Emmanuel Tardif’s elusive Québécois drama about a family’s self-imposed isolation after an unexpected event and the spreading fractures in their fragile status quo.
Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s debut is a propulsive drama employing folkloric elements and mythic overtones in its portrayal of a man trying to navigate a provincial criminal underworld.
Spanish director Jonas Trueba reunites his favorite actors for a 64-minute chamber piece, in a relaxed, engaging, free-wheeling exchange of moods and ideas between two 30-something couples.
The masks were off and the parties were on at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (July 1-9) in a 56th edition brimming with street music, audiences hungry for edgy new movies and civilian crowds gaily mixing with festival-goers in what felt like the first...
CRYSTAL GLOBE COMPETITION Grand Prix – Crystal Globe SUMMER WITH HOPE Directed by: Sadaf FOROUGHI Special Jury Prize YOU HAVE TO COME AND SEE IT Directed by: Jonás Trueba Best Director Beata PARKANOVA for WORD Best Actress (jointly awarded) Taki...
Cruel and delicate, this Icelandic drama shows troubled kids as the product of the actions and inactions of adults.
Two cultural titans, Jean-Luc Godard and Ebrahim Golestan, exchange online messages in director Mitra Farahani’s scrappy but sporadically charming documentary ‘See You Friday, Robinson’.
Andreas Horvath’s observational documentary offers a different, meditative view of animals in captivity, whose uneventful lives without a human audience inevitably recall our own experience with the pandemic.
Director Nina Menkes attacks cinema’s long history of sexism, including some canonical male directors, in her timely and enjoyably polemical filmed lecture ‘Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power’.
The nature of loss both personal and planetary become intertwined in Ramzi Bashour’s mordantly comic drama about a man returning home after his father’s death.
Canadian-based filmmaker Sadaf Foroughi (‘Ava’, 2017) revisits the theme of teenage rebellion in middle-class Iran in a drama full of danger and nervous energy.
Austrian director Magdalena Lauritsch’s sci-fi eco-disaster movie ‘Rubikon’ is an admirably ambitious but dramatically flawed debut.
The Covid ward of a hospital in a town in western Bulgaria is the subject of this clear-eyed observational documentary about the perseverance of both its staff and patients.
Iranian director Dornaz Hajiha pushes maternal and paternal sentiment to anguishing extremes in an intriguing and intensely acted debut feature, but the ending is missing.
Drugs, rap music and reckless hunger for fame prove to be a potent cocktail in Czech writer-director Adam Sedlák’s enjoyably cartoonish comedy thriller ‘Banger’.
The women’s toilet in a nightclub becomes the site of miniature disasters and minor catastrophes in Angelika Abramovitch’s multi-stranded and surprisingly affecting short.
Tomasz Wasilewski’s oblique new drama is a slowly unwinding puzzle in which a couple’s life is thrown into disarray when one of them brings her ill son to live with them.
Actor-director Christos Passalis draws on his Greek Weird Wave roots for ‘Silence 6-9’. a cryptic but mostly impressive debut feature.
A layered, mellow rom-com follows an aspiring, insecure actress torn between two love interests and careers in modern-day Madrid.
Ofir Raul Graizer’s sophomore feature is a novelistic exploration of duty and companionship that is as vibrant and colourful as it is humane.
A wild documentary ride through the selection process at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where the teaching staff brainstorms to test the hidden talent of young applicants, and future artists do their best to make the undefined grade.
Director Alexandre Philippe’s undisciplined but insightful documentary ‘Lynch/Oz’ explores the influence of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ on David Lynch’s surreal cinematic universe.
Jonathan Glazer’s lockdown short embraces the urge to dance, re-framing a 16th century madness into an infectious ode to perseverance in the pandemic era.
A couple decide to broaden their sexual horizons with increasingly complicated results in Tomasz Winski’s knotty and intimate examination of honesty within relationship dynamics.
A young Georgian woman struggles to overcome stifling sexism and emotional trauma in director Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze’s worthy but muted chamber drama ‘A Room of My Own’.
A family celebration in 1980s Yugoslavia turns out to be anything but in this unnerving chamber piece that peppers farcical notes into an otherwise stomach-churning thriller.
A small-town notary and his unbending wife put honor and honesty first in an uplifting if under-dramatized story from the Czech Republic’s Communist past, directed by Beata Parkanova.
Baroque stylings and meticulous composition create a hermetically sealed world in Eduardo Casanova’s ornate tale of overbearing matriarchal control.
Noomi Rapace is among the moving female cast of Goran Stolevski’s Macedonian folk tale about blood-sucking, shape-shifting witches who offer body horror at its scariest, yet it’s also full of poetry, with a lot to say about women and life on Earth.
Argentinean director Marco Berger turns his queer eye on the straight guys in ‘Horseplay’, a darkly funny critique of homophobic machismo.
Tsai Ming-liang is a master of the meditative short and he’s on exemplary form again with this nocturnal moment of rest in a restless Hong Kong.
A woman seeks a fortune teller’s guidance about her ailing love life in this discursive but affecting portrait of generational trauma and self-love.
Engrossing and full of credible Euro SFX, the Lithuanian-French sci fi fantasy featuring Raffiella Chapman as a 13-year-old, self-taught scientist looking for a way out of a socially and environmentally sick world, seems targeted at imaginative YA audiences.
Polish director Anna Kazejak chronicles scenes from a collapsing marriage in her darkly comic holiday-from-hell psychodrama ‘Fucking Bornholm’.
Brazil’s first manned rocket launch provides a catalyst for transformation and a leftfield opportunity for escape in Carlos Segundo’s bittersweet and dryly absurdist short.
Felix Herrmann’s hybrid film is an occasionally dry but frank examination of faith, feminism, and ambition in the modern world.
German writer-director Carolin Schmitz takes a journey from here to maternity in her fresh but slight docu-drama hybrid ‘Mother’.
Maksym Nakonechnyi’s carefully calibrated drama about a young Ukrainian woman soldier who returns home in a prisoner exchange, tortured and pregnant, projects a more human, less heroic view of the Ukraine-Russia war while it affirms a woman’s right to choice vis-à-vis maternity.
Katharina Woll handles her delightful debut feature film with the grace and sensitivity of a much more experienced filmmaker, with a hand from lead actress Anne Ratte-Polle.
A random tragedy exposes the dark heart of a rural Irish community in ‘It’s In Us All’, the absorbing debut feature from actor-director Antonia Campbell-Hughes.
Claudia Müller’s dense, cerebral exploration of the Austrian Nobel winner’s life and politics confirms her unique and complex place in European letters.
An otherwise solid examination of a young man’s masculinity dircted by newcomer Oliver Grüttner isn’t quite sure if it seeks to praise or condemn.
A grieving young woman tries to make sense of her shattered life in director Pola Beck’s sensually rich literary adaptation ‘All Russians Love Birch Trees’.
Class and race intersect in a suspenseful drama set in the Dominican Republic, where loyalties get tested when a Black nanny raises the spoilt brat of a wealthy white family.
A richly satirical sci-fi allegory with an edge of biting social commentary, writer-director Sophie Linnenbaum’s impressive feature debut ‘The Ordinaries’ is anything but ordinary.
Teenage rebels confront the sexually abusive leader of a cult-like commune in German director Christopher Roth’s timely, engrossing, based-on-reality drama ‘So Long Daddy, See You in Hell’.
Actress Kika Sena takes director Marcelo Gomes’s story of a young trans woman to another level as Paloma, a romantic mother and farm worker who dreams of a formal church wedding,
In writer-director Anna Jadowska’s sensitive whydunit, veteran Polish actress and Tribeca winner Dorota Pomykala plunges the viewer into psychological depths in her deftly nuanced portrait of a 60-year-old who tries to rob a bank with a kitchen knife.
Ordinary Ukrainians — soldiers, civilians and volunteers — make gripping subjects in Volodymyr Tykhyy’s utterly realistic doc, depicting life in post-apocalyptic Kyiv as the populace braces for a very long war.
Director Rita Baghdadi’s engaging, ear-bashing documentary ‘Sirens’ chronicles the emotional and political struggles of Lebanon’s first all-female thrash metal band.
Director Alexandre Philippe’s latest essay-film ‘The Taking’ is a thoughtful, visually ravishing, politically charged rumination on American cinema’s oldest rock stars.
A transgender man whose teenage daughter is about to learn his well-kept secret is at the heart of a serviceably shot but deeply felt Iranian drama directed by Sepideh Mir Hosseini.
Along with the shiny gold button given to badge-holders celebrating Cannes’ 75th glorious anniversary, this year’s festival can justly be hailed as a return to normality after the Covid-19 pandemic canceled it in 2020 and severely truncated it in 2021. Whether it’s...
With a deft hand for black comedy, Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli takes his examination of modern narcissism to its body-horror extreme.
Palme d'Or TRIANGLE OF SADNESS directed by Ruben ÖSTLUNDGrand Prix (jointly awarded) CLOSE directed by Lukas DHONTSTARS AT NOON directed by Claire DENISBest Director PARK Chan-wook for DECISION TO LEAVE Best Screenplay Tarik SALEH for BOY FROM HEAVEN Jury Prize...
Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret’s film is a solid debut indebted to the impressive performances of its child actors.
WINNER OF THE CAMERA D’OR IN CANNES FOR BEST FIRST FILM. ‘War Pony’, from first-time directing duo Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, deeply immerses the viewer in the roughshod coming-of-age drama of two teenage boys who live on the fringes of the law on a Native American reservation in South Dakota.
Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravi?ius was killed by Russian soldiers after shooting footage for this gritty and unnerving documentary about life in the besieged, bombed-out Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
Sex and love don’t always make for ideal bedmates, and the strain one places on the other is at the heart of Swiss writer-director Jan Gassmann’s latest feature, 99 Moons. Provocative but also thought-provoking, this story of a couple that meets through a Tinder-like...
Director Serge Bozon offers up a dour, quirky Don Juan (played by Tahar Rahim) for the age of #MeToo.
Documentary director Lotfy Nathan’s prize-winning dramatic debut ‘Harka’ is a powerful if slightly heavy-handed take on injustice and protest in the Arab world.
Sergei Loznitsa’s latest archival cinema essay, inspired by W.G. Sebald’s book and organized within a quasi-symphonic structure, lays out the brutality of fire bombings in World War II and the ways the war machine refused to acknowledge the human costs.
Thomas Salvador’s beguiling second feature innovatively combines a realistic first half with fantasy elements in the second without losing its earlier spirit, achieved through unpretentious storytelling, a superb visual eye and excellent special effects.
Clément Cogitore is less known in France as a feature filmmaker than as young and highly coveted visual artist, with shorts like the Siberia-set documentary, Braguino, and the crunk dance battle/opera piece Les Indes galantes — both released in 2017 — sealing his...
Magisterial in the manner of 19th century epic novels and visually influenced by that era’s photography, Hlynur Pálmason’s third feature is a stunning, psychologically rich tale set against Iceland’s awe-inspiring landscapes.
CANNES GRAND PRIX – JOINTLY AWARDED, REVIEWED MAY 26 Set in Central America, Claire Denis’ second English-language film is more straightforward than most of her works but is unmistakably hers in the way she suspends her complex characters in the sweaty grasp of a tropical setting.
CANNES GRAND PRIX, JOINTLY AWARDED – REVIEWED MAY 27 Lukas Dhont’s gut-wrenching second feature is a stunning ode to adolescent same-sex friendship and a powerful critique of the ways society normalizes aggression while demonizing physical tenderness.
PALME D’OR IN CANNES, REVIEWED MAY 22 Swedish social satirist Ruben Östlund returns to Cannes with ‘Triangle of Sadness’, another sprawling but roaringly funny attack on wealth, beauty and privilege.
A father and son make daily parachute jumps from their cliffside home to sell ice in João Gonzalez’s gripping and poignant animation.
Prize-winning French writer-director Léonor Serraille plots a multi-decade family saga in her ambitious but uneven second feature ‘Mother and Son’.
Winner of the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard, Sadiq’s delicate first feature explores the destructive force of patriarchy in a Pakistani family and the fallout from a long-unemployed man’s work at an erotic dance theatre.
Newcomers Marie Perennes and Simon Depardon’s documentary looks at feminists across France whose posters and slogans try to reclaim public spaces and denounce sexism, violence and femicides.
A teenager cares for her younger siblings in this delicate portrait of familial love and the desire to hold on to a semblance of childhood.
After her award-winning ‘Adam’, writer-director Maryam Touzani affirms her strong storytelling skills in a hugely touching love story set in an old Moroccan medina, where Lubna Azabal battles illness to be with her homosexual husband Saleh Bakri.
Michelle Williams reunites with feted indie writer-director Kelly Reichardt for ‘Showing Up’, a modest but moving portrait of frustrated artists and dysfunctional families.
A young woman wrestles with the duality of her private self and her public persona in this brief but highly effective South Korean animation.
Two boys struggle with the loss of their older brother in this liminal and haunting Ghanian drama from director Amartei Armar.
It’s the end of Europe as we know it, but stars Vincent Lacoste and Sandrine Kiberlain feel just fine in this breezy, rather trite French caper flick.
María Silvia Esteve’s new short is a bombastic and overwhelming voyage of colour and sound that conveys the psychological sensation of spiraling hypochondria.
Laetitia Wright and Tamara Lawrence play twisted sisters in director Agnieszka Smoczy?ska’s uneven but beguiling true story ‘The Silent Twins’.
An offbeat comedy about family dysfunction ultimately becomes a touching examination of how we deal with scars left on us by our histories.
Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu’s first film lensed in South Korea, about a well-intentioned gang who sell motherless babies, is a minor work with only distant echoes of his 2018 Palm d’Or winner Shoplifters, but still imbued with the filmmaker’s militant humanism.
Louis Garrel’s latest feature as an actor-director is a romp reminiscent of the crime comedies from Stanley Donen.
Spanish director Albert Serra’s slow-burning, suspenseful Tahiti-set tale pitches Benoît Magimel’s quasi-colonial official against nuclear conspiracies.
Baz Luhrmann restores The King to his throne in his subjective but generous, imaginative and visually opulent rock’n’roll biopic ‘Elvis’.
Emin Alper’s best film to date is a searing drama of corruption in a small Turkish town that deftly tackles populism, environmental destruction and, surprisingly, homophobia.
Pepi Ginsberg’s riveting drama tackles the combustible nature of repressed sexuality when a spot of wild swimming takes an unexpectedly dangerous turn.
The outlawing of physical contact creates a cauldron of unexpressed sensuality for the burnished and browbeaten shipyard workers of Evi Kalogiropoulou’s eerie dystopian short.
Swiss director Lionel Baier directs a comedy-drama about a mother, her son and the European Union’s refugee crisis that’s unexpected, to say the least.
Director Saeed Roustaee (‘Just 6.5’) takes a hard turn into social drama with his epic saga about an Iranian family trying to claw its way out of poverty, beautifully shot, directed and acted.
Actor turned director Owen Kline’s assured debut feature is a slimy, grimy comedy of failure and awkwardness.
Lebanese artist-filmmaker Ali Cherri delivers a visually mesmerising and quietly political first feature, set among Sudanese bricklayers working on the biggest hydroelectrical dam in Africa.
Shuli Huang’s intensely personal and moving diary film is like a heart-wrenching exploration of – and possibly coda to – his relationship with his mother.
A gently appealing choral work from Tunisia with a strong understanding of rhythm and balance that marks a strong first feature for documentary-trained Erige Sehiri.
Director Brett Morgen’s overstuffed hot mess of a documentary ‘Moonage Daydream’ celebrates David Bowie’s legacy as a live performer, spiritual thinker and living work of art.
The latest from the Belgian Dardenne brothers is yet another one of their dramas of stripped-back social realism, this time about two immigrant minors who try to pass as siblings.
Gender construction is denounced in a raw, slow-burning exposé of toxic masculinity among Colombia’s street thugs.
In this first-time feature from Colombia, a group of convicted juvenile criminals are stranded in a remote country estate, where they undergo a bizarre rehabilitation process while providing free labor for a gang of shady correctional officials. It’s an intriguing...
Ethan Coen’s first solo directing project without brother Joel. ‘Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind’ is a retro-rock documentary with a whole lotta shaking going on, but not much else.
Legendary cult director David Cronenberg’s first film in eight years, ‘Crimes of the Future’ is an ambitious but unconvincing return to familiar body-horror themes.
Korean cult director Park Chan-wook takes us on the rollicking ride of a deconstructed murder investigation, complicated by obsessive love and betrayal.
Director David Ernaux-Briot and his mother, novelist Annie Ernaux, dive into the family’s Super-8 footage collection for this gentle rumination on times past.
Death hovers over director Emily Atef’s fifth feature, More Than Ever (Plus Que Jamais), in unsettling ways. First, it fuels this solemn and emotionally gripping story about a woman in a relationship who's diagnosed with a rare lung disease and faced with her imminent...
Emmanuel Gras’ aesthetically minded short is an abstract vision that blends planetary movement and physical intimacy, playfully meditating on where exactly we come from.
Documentary magicians Paravel and Castaing-Taylor turn their cameras to the human body and the hospitals in which they are treated in their provocative new film.
The second feature as a director from in-demand screenwriter Léa Mysius tries to be about five different films at once, and ends up being one right mess.
Jessie Buckley and multiple versions of Rory Kinnear co-star in writer-director Alex Garland’s impressively weird feminist folk-horror thriller ‘Men’.
There’s a lot of raw energy in Davy Chou’s second feature, set in Korea, but the lead character is just too exhausting to watch.
Rebellious Russian filmmaker Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s directorial debut offers dynamic imagery and damning commentary about her stifled generation.
Actress-director Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s feature about young actors studying under Patrice Chéreau (Louis Garrel) is her best work to date.
Prolific French absurdist Quentin Dupieux delivers low-tar laughs and comic-book gore in his fun but disjointed tenth feature, ‘Smoking Causes Coughing’.
French rookie director Simon Rieth’s feature debut contains some arresting images and ideas, but doesn’t quite fully come together.
Quebec actress-turned-director Charlotte Le Bon’s feature debut as a filmmaker is a sensitive, gorgeously filmed and performed coming-of-age story.
Cristian Mungiu’s excoriation of xenophobia in multiethnic Transylvania is a classic example of the director’s dedication to naturalism and boasts several superb sequences, but it tries a bit too hard to encompass more topics than it can comfortably handle.
Though nothing like Patrizio Guzmán’s fabled ‘The Battle of Chile’ or ‘Nostalgia for the Light’, this energizing doc is still a master class on Chile’s recent nation-wide uprising for democracy and social justice.
Alice Winocour’s fascinating if occasionally problematic drama follows a woman’s emotional and psychological journey in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.
Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton star in ‘Mad Max’ creator George Miller’s ambitious but misfiring fairy-tale romance ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’.
Writer-director Charlotte Wells combines great performances, poetic visuals and bittersweet personal memories in her dazzling debut feature ‘Aftersun’.
Arnaud Desplechin’s latest is a hard-to-like drama that stars Marion Cotillard and Melvil Poupaud as siblings divided by intense hatred.
Dominik Moll directs this fascinating story of an unsolved French criminal case in a solid but workmanlike way.
Mikko Myllylahti’s impressive debut feature is a poetic and perplexing look at a man facing the diminishing of his life’s work with otherworldly stoicism.
Hinging on two compelling performances, this is an absorbing drama that blends the cat-and-mouse tension of a thriller with police procedural to gripping and haunting effect.
A solid though cautious, slow-burn loss-of innocence tale wrapped around the struggle between State versus Religion set (but not shot) in Cairo and designed for Western consumption.
Experimental lo-fi director Mark Jenkin finds a rich seam of pagan folk-horror buried in the rocky terrain of England’s weird wild west in ‘Enys Men’.
The first feature from Japanese female director Chie Hayakawa seethes with violence under its soft-spoken exterior.
Director Emmanuel Nicot’s assured debut feature ‘Love According to Dalva’ navigates dark subject matter with compassion, warmth and great performances.
Director Marie Kreutzer and star Vicky Krieps give a famous 19th century Austrian empress a subversive feminist remix in their joyously imaginative Cannes premiere ‘Corsage’.
An immersive portrait of writer-director James Gray’s family in 1980s Queens, N.Y. is woven around the young protag’s dawning social consciousness.
Léa Seydoux stars in feted French auteur Mia Hansen-Løve’s slender autobiographical rumination on love and loss ‘One Fine Morning’.
Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s mix of beauty and bombast makes a donkey of a promising premise of making audiences observe a chaotic, cruel world through a braying animal’s eyes.
Mathieu Vadepied’s affecting portrait of paternal love hinges on intensely involving performances by Omar Sy and Alassane Diong, as an African father who goes to war to protect his conscript son.
A fiery and timely reflection about a dark episode in French history at the risk of being written out of the books with the normalisation of far-right politics in the country.
Writer-director Lola Quivoron’s debut, Rodeo, belongs to a recent class of French films made by and about young women, with stories that combine the coming-of-age genre — what the French call un film d’initiation — with elements of a Hollywood thriller or horror...
Emily Watson plays a troubled Irish matriarch in ‘God’s Children’ a handsome but heavy-handed family psychodrama from directing duo Seala Davis and Anna Rose Holmer.
Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch adapt Paolo Cognetti’s novel for the big screen and while the film takes too long to get going, its final hour impresses.
Pietro Marcello’s disappointing follow-up to “Martin Eden” combines uncharacteristically saccharine visuals with a weak narrative and treacly score.
A disappointingly anemic take on the great composer’s unfortunate marriage, gloriously shot by Vladislav Opelyants yet hampered by Kirill Serebrennikov’s less than penetrating narrative.
Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton look back on their ground-breaking feminist comedy hit ‘9 to 5’ in this timely documentary from directors Camille Hardman and Gary Lane.
‘The Artist’ director Michel Hazanavicius tackles the zombie comedy genre for his Cannes opener and delivers the laughs, if not quite something substantial.
Tom Cruise returns to his career-making role as a hotshot U.S. Navy pilot in director Joseph Kosinski’s shallow but action-packed sequel ‘Top Gun: Maverick’
Toronto photographer Louie Palu’s unstructured yet immersive trip into the Donbas war zones in 2016 makes a skin-crawling intro to the current invasion of Ukraine.
Fashion icon Vivienne Westwood and her son Joe Corré attempt to reclaim punk’s radical roots in director Nigel Askew’s scrappy but engaging documentary ‘Wake Up Punk’.
Hossein Tehrani’s gently melancholy first feature about poor farm laborers, which won Tokyo’s Asian Future competition, reveals a strong new Iranian voice.
The age-old Faroe Islands tradition of slaughtering pilot whales for their tasty meat gets pushback from animal rights activists in a documentary that raises more complex questions.
Scottish director Jono McLeod’s debut documentary ‘My Old School’ is a highly entertaining account of an outlandish fraud and its lingering aftershocks.
In a West Bank documentary that begins like a thriller and ends like a drama, Daniel Carsenty and Mohammed Abugeth introduce a new path into a conflict that never leaves the news.
Éric Baudelaire riffs on the music and musical sensibility of Alvin Curran in this absorbing archival documentary about the revolutionary fervour of mid-century Rome.
In this collaborative rumination on the nature and limits of political protest, Bassem Saad weaves together performance, found footage, and on-screen text with playful results.
A phenomenal archive of cataclysmic imagery is the main attraction in Sara Dosa’s doc about star-crossed volcanologists, but it’s also imbued with their zeal.
Filipa César and Sónia Vaz Borges explore the decolonising power of education in this tale of rebellious scholarship in the tangle of Guinea-Bissau’s mangrove swamps.
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED OCT. 9, 2021 Stephen Graham gives a raw, red-meat performance as a troubled chef in this sizzling single-shot ensemble drama now on Netflix.
CINANDO AND THE FILM VERDICT REVITALIZE THE FILM REVIEW WITH AN EXCLUSIVE DIRECT ACCESS BUTTON TO FILMS ON CINANDO CINANDO and THE FILM VERDICT (TFV) announce an innovative new feature that will make the TFV film review a more valuable tool for film distribution...
A simple premise yields increasingly complex results in Marie Suul Brobakke’s dissection of a romantic relationship between two actors rehearsing a scene.
In partnering with Google’s Image Recognition AI, Jeppe Lange has constructed a 100mph frenzy of match-cutting that is strange, rhythmic and at times somewhat profound.
Golden Alexander Award - International competition A HOUSE MADE OF SPLINTERS (Denmark-Finland-Sweden-Ukraine) by Simon Lereng Wilmont Special Jury Award - International competition YOUNG PLATO (UK-Ireland-France-Belgium) by Declan McGrath and Neasa Ní Chianáin Golden...
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED OCT. 13, 2021 Kenneth Branagh won the Academy Award for best original screenplay for this warm, funny, visually sumptuous autobiographical drama.
Iranian filmmaker Faeze Azizkhani portrays the hazards of making a movie about yourself in a self-referential drama packed with anxiety and irony.
An often poetic and fragmentary course on what it means to be a woman, Tiziano Doria and Samira Guadagnuolo’s The Bride is a demanding project that resists conventional storytelling and yet manages to be engaging.
Fabrizio Maltese’s new documentary is both an artfully captured portrait of Mauritania and a road trip guided by an elusive filmmaker and a watching spirit.
Following a man from Somaliland who journeys from Finland back to the country of his birth, Inka Achte’s documentary is engaging and often entertaining—with an unexplored darkness lodged within its heart.
Sonita Gale’s documentary is an important examination of Britain’s devastating immigration practices over several decades.
Irish writer-director Kate Dolan’s prize-winning debut feature ‘You Are Not My Mother’ is a rich witches’ brew of psychological horror, social realism and creepy Celtic folklore.
Vera Krichevskaya’s lively documentary ‘F@ck This Job’ chronicles how a rebellious gang of champagne-loving Moscow socialites ended up running the last independent TV news channel in Putin’s increasingly repressive Russia.
A career-spanning documentary on Norway’s most successful pop band, ‘A-ha: The Movie’ is an earnest but mostly absorbing study of fame, friendship and midlife angst.
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED SEPT. 13, 2021 Ukrainian activist Oleh Sentsov directs a hard-boiled gangster tale set in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, whose over-the-top violence is starkly undermotivated.
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED SEPT. 3, 2021 An intimate visit to the Donbas trenches, where men (and one oddly portrayed woman) become the latest soldiers in history to experience trench warfare.
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED ON OCT. 25, 2021 Elie Grappe’s sober drama about a teenaged Ukrainian gymnast sent abroad for her safety mixes sports and politics with coming-of-age elements, and represented Switzerland in the Oscar race.
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED OCT. 21, 2021 Writer-director Natalya Vorozhbit’s insightful documentary play-turned-film was Ukraine’s Oscar submission.
A emotionally fragile schoolgirl spends a revelatory summer with foster parents in director Colm Bairéad’s haunting, prize-winning, Irish-language debut feature.
Communal mythologies and the importance of historical forebears are explored in Marina Herrera’s quietly humorous hybrid documentary about a rebellious Indigenous woman.
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Debuting director Flávia Neves throws far too many elements into her overstuffed Gothic-tinged plot, intriguing enough to hold attention but too convoluted to withstand criticism.
Musician Colson Baker, aka Machine Gun Kelly, plays a drug-damaged pop star in director Tim Sutton’s ‘Taurus’, a stylishly sleazy but self-indulgent depiction of toxic fame.
Evgenia and Maxim Arbugaeva’s astonishing documentary captures the annual arrival of thousands of walruses on a remote beach in the Russian Arctic in awesome intimacy.
A young woman learns her family is linked to the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate and other horrors in an authentically harrowing drama shot in Calabria.
Millie foolishly lies low but the film should stand tall given how well it captures the excruciatingly relatable tribulations of a young New Zealand woman who digs herself into a very deep hole while attempting to preserve other peoples’ expectations.
Apocalypse anxiety, discomfort in the childhood home, and the effects of enforced isolation make for a heady brew in Maria Estela Paiso’s multimedia fever dream.
Akuol de Mabior’s first feature-length documentary isn’t quite cohesive, but it offers a partial portrait of a troubled country and one of its female leaders.
Cyril Schäublin’s Berlin prize-winner ‘Unrest’ is a playful, gently subversive, precision-tooled drama about anarchist watch-makers in 19th century Switzerland.
The band of rowdy construction workers at the heart of Serbian director Milos Pusic’s dark new dramedy are not your typical Working Class Heroes, and the film’s title is meant to be taken somewhat ironically, or at least with a sizeable grain of salt. They are,...
Jöns Jönsson’s intriguing slow-burner about a charismatic fabulist occasionally challenges our suspension of disbelief, but its exacting evocation of atmosphere nicely plays on the tension between normality and disruption.
The latest from Swedish documentary director Magnus Gertten (‘Becoming Zlatan’) has an incredible true romance at its heart that is almost overwhelmed by less interesting material.
Mexican director Alejandra Marquez Abella’s latest is a robust rural drama that’s nonetheless lean and mean.
The rapidly changing social mores in Iran are highlighted in the dilemma of a single mother and her baby, directed by Ali Asgari with thriller-like tension.
A new documentary from Lucrecia Martel explores communal creativity and expressive performance by bringing together marginalised artists in the north of Argentina.
Anastasia Veber’s prize-winning drama is an evocative exploration of the lives of young people in contemporary Russia caught between aggression and eroticism, isolation and intimacy.
Taylor Taormina’s experimental second feature captivates without telling a traditional story — or any story at all.
Hong Sang-soo’s 27th feature, and his third in competition in Berlin in as many years, offers his trademark acerbic humor, anchored by veteran Korean actress Lee Hye-young’s caustic turn as an embittered writer.
This grainy, tender, and contemplative film by Sofia Georgovassili approaches a potentially traumatic coming-of-age drama through a fable-like, quotidian lens.
On his first completely solo flight directing without his late brother, Paolo Taviani pays a stirring salute to Sicily’s great novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello.
Through a triptych of stories, Kivu Ruhorahoza offers a critique of masculinity and patriarchy in his most accessible film to date.
Another documentary subtly but clearly discouraging African migration, with the good sense to find camera-friendly subjects who imbue the film’s trite theme with humour and energy.
Maggie Peren’s evocation of young, reckless Jewish forger Cioma Schönhaus during the dark days of Hitler’s Berlin is strong on physical atmosphere but can’t balance his devil-may-care spunk with a sense of what awaits should he be caught
French-Canadian director Denis Cote’s latest dives into the lives of three hypersexual women and their summer-retreat therapist in fascinating ways.
Spanish director Isaki Lacuesta’s powerful eyewitness drama ‘One Year, One Night’ chronicles the shattering aftershocks of the 2015 Bataclan theatre attack on one young Parisian couple.
An experimental, hybrid film that in its disjointed way expresses nostalgia for nicotine, Kaffeehaus culture and family bonds, set in present-day Vienna.
A gang of tough queer women controls an illicit oil refinery in this grim neorealist documentary drama, set in Brazil’s largest shanty town.
The truth lies in the spaces between recorded history in Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflânc?’s austere and through-provoking silent documentary.
Magnum photographer Micha Bar-Am’s life and work is powerfully, sometimes painfully recounted through still images and offscreen voiceover in Ran Tal’s multilayered documentary that questions the psychological effects of shooting atrocities.
Li Ruijun’s deeply felt portrait of mature love between two socially unvalued Chinese peasants is beautiful to look at, but labors to catch the emotional wave it promises.
French director Mikhaël Hers falls short of his Rohmer-esque ambitions in ‘Passengers of the Night’, a sprawling family drama set in 1980s Paris.
Men talk about sex in director Ruth Beckermann’s latest documentary, but the results aren’t very impressive.
Japanese filmmaker Emma Kawawada takes the humanist cue from her mentor, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and adapt it to her warm and engaging directorial debut, in which a Kurdish-born Japanese teenager struggles to keep her life and dreams afloat when the authorities threaten to deport her family from the country.
Through colourful, chemically contaminated found footage, Rafael Castanheira Parrode evocatively excavates the trauma of the 1987 radioactivity disaster in Goiânia, Brazil.
A joyful, transgressively liberating ode to cinema and the way an unexpected passion can make societal barriers disappear, Nicolette Krebitz’s intelligently written and expertly crafted love story about an older woman and a much younger man is a delight.
When it was announced that Egyptian producer and screenwriter Mohamed Hefzy would be on the World Cinema Dramatic Competition jury at Sundance this year, following his recent jury stints at Venice and BFI London, we saw it as not just a recognition for the producer,...
An anonymous collective of Burmese filmmakers delivers a powerful statement of defiance against the murderous military dictatorship that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government on February 1, 2021.
There’s not much new in this lovingly made impressionistic documentary about New York’s very well-chronicled Chelsea Hotel, but the place and its tenacious residents still have a pull.
Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver play abortion rights activists in director Phyllis Nagy’s worthy but timid debut feature ‘Call Jane’.
An indomitable Turkish woman living in Germany battles to free her son from imprisonment in Guantanamo in Andreas Dresen’s no-surprise recreation of a true story.
French screen heavyweights Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon trade bruising blows in ‘Both Sides of the Blade’, a conventional but gripping love-triangle drama from veteran Gallic auteur Claire Denis.
Gen Z’s creative use of video and chat powers Kurdwin Ayub’s knowing take on a teenage girl in Vienna forced to negotiate the tensions and expectations arising from her Kurdish identity.
Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack form a winning pair of performers in Sophie Hyde’s watchable story of sex positivity across age categories.
Indonesian director Kamila Andini’s gently feminist historical drama ‘Nana: Before, Now & Then’ is visually exquisite but tastefully timid.
French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s work has often toed the line between narrative and the avant-garde, with plots that are chopped and screwed into a melee of images, sounds and music — the latter often beautifully composed by Bonello himself. His movies are less...
France-based Cambodian director Rithy Panh returns with a hard-hitting film that’s part figurines, part shocking archive footage, much like his Oscar-nominated ‘The Missing Picture.’
A punishing film of unrelenting cruelty which seeks to draw attention to the plight of enslaved Central Asian workers in Russia, but its overstuffed plot and taunting hopelessness is more alienating than galvanizing.
Australian rock duo Nick Cave and Warren Ellis bring their recent lockdown albums to life in Andrew Dominik’s handsome music documentary.
Super 8 footage of an idyllic holiday destination provides the serene surface for Wilbirg Brainin-Donnenberg’s probe into the darker elements of history both political and personal.
Elliot Page’s attachment as executive producer will spur interest, but “Into My Name” stands on its own as a sensitive, humanist portrait of four young F to M trans Italians coming into their own.
Cult director Peter Strickland’s culinary art-world satire ‘Flux Gourmet’ is enjoyably weird but ultimately undercooked.
Motherhood is de-glamourized in this gentle, honest account of parenting during stressful times, shot in Spain’s Basque country by director Alauda Ruiz de Azúa.
Austrian actor Michael Thomas memorably embodies an off-season hotel singer who drinks to stave off loneliness in Ulrich Seidl’s arch, wintry and ultimately bleak reflection on human failings.
Less gore and more psychology should broaden the audience for Dario Argento’s kinky but strangely staid horror film about a slasher out to kill a blind prostitute.
Egyptian queer experimental cinema comes into its own with this playful, visually inventive sex-positive short feature that repurposes “One Thousand and One Nights” using gay Arab cultural signifiers.
Ursula Meier’s latest is a bruising family drama starring Stéphanie Blanchoud and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.
French prankster Quentin Dupieux takes a detour into midlife melancholy with his latest gloriously absurd comic fable ‘Incredible but True’.
Rafiki Fariala’s history-making film shifts to a more intimate story towards its end, which one wishes he had pursued from the start.
Editor Natalia López Gallardo’s first feature looks gorgeous but is so elliptical, it has more holes in it than a sieve.
Gerard Ortín Castellví’s film about the mechanised standardisation of plant products in an industrial greenhouse is both hypnotic and unsettling; meticulous documentary and dreamlike fantasy.
The latest offering from French oddball director Alain Guiraudie (‘Stranger by the Lake’) fails to impress.
French director François Ozon pays artfully twisted homage to Fassbinder’s torrid queer classic ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant’ in this stylish glam-rock remake.
Once again dealing in dance, Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai follow a group of hip hop-loving kids striving for academic success in a Parisian school.
A young girl adopts a rambunctious piglet and must navigate puppy classes and survive the annual sausage-making competition in this delightful stop-motion animation.
The 72-year history of the Berlin Film Festival has been shaped by many people, but arguably none have left a greater mark than Erika and Ulrich Gregor, the founders of the Arsenal Cinema and creators the festival’s influential Forum section. And it’s not just a...
The first fiction feature from Mexican director Juan Pablo González impresses most as an immersive mood piece.
A young woman struggles to process personal trauma and wider social injustice in Norwegian director Anders Emblem’s slender but quietly haunting drama A Human Position,
Ágata de Pinho impresses both in front of and behind the camera in this visceral drama about a woman who believes she will disappear on her 28th birthday.
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’s documentary is a multifaceted exploration of complex questions around the combating of European perspectives in cinema about Africa.
Canadian filmmakers Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk pay tribute to Stan Brakhage, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard and Pedro Costa in an intriguing experimental exercise looking at the history of cinema and old-school political activism.
Our prehistoric relationship to the forest is atmospherically invoked in this documentary about a small Indian village and the tales its inhabitants tell of the whispering trees.
French director Mabrouk El Mechri’s screwball action comedy about domestic violence, Kung Fu Zohra is admirably audacious but misses the target.
Yan Wai Yin’s diaristic documentary uses the interplay of posters and graffiti on a local footbridge to explore and evoke intense social unrest in Hong Kong.
Alberto De Michele artfully deglamorises the gangster film, constructing instead two interlaced stories around a man’s complex relationship with his father and the latter’s plans for one last heist.
The vestiges of politically-instigated past trauma come back to trouble an older couple in their second marriage as they begin ruminating on their demise in Gao Linyang’s subtly crafted, detail and performance driven feature debut.
A captivating, shapeshifting excavation of the vampirism of Christopher Columbus and the colonial project filtered through the weed-fuelled mythology of artist and singer, Oba.
The history of Hong Kong and its seething democratic movements is interwoven with a cryptic ghost story in Clara Law’s challenging film about memory and political struggle.
French debutante director Morgane Dziurla-Petit returns to her home village for the playful and poignant docu-fiction hybrid Excess Will Save Us.
Korakrit Arunanondchai’s deeply moving film combines elements of mysticism, ecology, and politics to form some kind of understanding in the face of painful personal loss.
Shaunak Sen’s Sundance World Documentary winner is a gorgeous portrait of two New Delhi brothers who look after the city’s increasingly in-trouble kite population.
French auteur Jacques Doillon returns to form in this endearing, small-scale chronicle of abuse and friendship between two kids from different social classes.
Gessica Geneus’s debut feature is a superb meditation on sisterhood, motherhood, and what it means to love a failing nation.
Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s new essay film is a heady examination of the history, impacts, and social equality of standardised measurement.
A bittersweet chronicle of Miao farmers who form a Christian choir in the remote mountains in China, and who are recruited to perform nationally while gradually losing their lands, autonomy, and identity.
Focusing on the plight of both working-class locals and migrant labourers in a small town, Juichiro Yamasaki’s third feature powerful chronicles the greying fortunes of Japan’s depopulated provinces.
Hsu Che-yu’s examination of a political assassination combines digital and physical reconstruction techniques to understand the life of a mobster, assassin, and film producer.
Retired pop star and former anarchist Dunstan Bruce tries to rekindle his youthful punk rage in the charmingly offbeat music documentary I Get Knocked Down.
Pedro Neves Marques follows 2019’s The Bite with another sci-fi-infused relationship story in this thought-provoking meditation on traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.
Eugenio and Mara Polgovsky gently comment on the cycle of life in an observational documentary shot through a window in Mexico City.
An innocent farm boy experiences first-hand the horrors of the Nazi occupation of the Baltic states when he becomes a collaborator in Maria Ignatenko’s sensitive but over-aestheticized reflection on war.
Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov finds tragicomic humour in Assault, a bleakly stylish thriller about a snowbound high school under terrorist attack.
An utterly captivating found footage collage that pieces together a sensuous history of intimacy in Iranian post-revolution cinema where depictions of physical contact are prohibited.
Amanda Kramer recreates a 1970s-style variety TV special to comment on a certain kind of diva celebrity, but the results are tediously self-indulgent, clueless about camp affect, and open to claims of disingenuousness.
The Greek weird wave meets film noir in this quirky crime drama from first-time feature director Christos Massalas.
A little lie to the police threatens to change a teenager’s life in Sam De Jong’s insightful and sometimes distractingly overdriven film.
This fictionalized portrait of a trans woman’s emotional journey towards selfhood tries to cover too many bases in the psychological process, but Raphaëlle Perez’s sympathetic performance and the film’s overall sensitivity make up for some of its flaws.
Brett Michael Innes’ third film, set mostly at a gym in Johannesburg, goes down easy and would be fun for the family—as long as you keep the kids away.
A pleasant though minor queer-skewed indie slice-of-life look at Millenials in Chile, using a ghost device as a way of concretizing the niggling concerns within a struggling actor’s subconscious.
Andrea Riseborough, Harry Melling and Demi Moore celebrate the hidden queerness of vintage Hollywood in Amanda Kramer’s WTF retro-musical Please Baby Please.
This frequently perplexing sci-fi musical has a lot to say about the politics of race, but its true triumph is its music and gorgeous visuals.
This involving documentary captures the plight of the Uru-eu-wau-wau community fighting for its land in the Amazon.
Robinson Crusoe goes musical in a deliciously disorienting brain-teaser from feted Romanian animation director Anca Damian.
A potentially familiar story of a Syrian construction worker living in Lebanon is turned on its head in Dania Bdeir’s sensual and soulful evocation of freedom.
Olive Nwosu’s delicate drama explores the difficulty of confronting complex notions of identity while also traversing a tender story of first love lost.
Siblings Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste mine the archive to visualise the transformation of 1960s French Guiana by a new space centre in this poetic documentary.
‘Babysitter’ steers clear of preachiness in its half-scolding and often amusing examination of sexual and sexist attitudes in the wake of #MeToo.
Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing’s first feature-length documentary offers a mellow and intimate portrait of two midwives – one a Buddhist, the other Muslim – who defy the deadly inter-communal conflict around them to become friends and health care providers for their poverty-stricken communities.
A paper-pushing official searches for a woman in red in José Luis Aparicio’s noirish short set in an oppressive, dystopian Cuba afflicted by strange, sluglike creatures.
An excellent, nuanced performance by Parizae Fatima anchors Seemab Gul’s tense depiction of a teenage girl navigating the dangers and dilemmas of an online relationship.
Fans of slasher films will revel in this darkly comic subversion of the genre premiering at Sundance, where an obese, bullied teenager gets her revenge on the village mean girls.
Three high school girls in Finland pursue love and orgasm in Alli Haapasalo’s frank and often warmly emotional tale aimed at teen audiences.
Young American missionaries from the Church of the Latter-Day Saints set off to convert the dubious inhabitants of Finland in Tania Anderson’s paradoxical but respectful documentary.
A powerful documentary chronicle of children left abandoned by the conflict in Ukraine won the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.
First person testimonies and 3D modelling are effectively combined in Moïse Togo’s harrowing short documentary about the horrific violence faced by albino people across Africa.
The inner life and fragmenting psyche of a secret police agent form the basis of Hugo Covarrubias’s exemplary and sinister stop-motion animation set during the Chilean military dictatorship
This colorful portrait of a golden-aged Florida dance troupe doubles as a statement on friendship and female liberation.
Adapted from Lizzy Gordon’s feted book Meet Me in the Bathroom, this archive-heavy rock documentary is a bohemian rhapsody for a lost New York.
Animal rights activists will applaud this Sundance premiere set in Chile’s rainforest, a lyrical fable that mixes ecological apocalypse, gender transition and phantasmagorical rebirth.
Sundance premieres a spellbinding portrait of life in the Bolivian Andes, where a drought threatens the livelihood of an elderly Quechua couple and their herd of llamas.
A young woman navigates the Cordilleran highlands to seek fame in the big city in Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan’s mysterious, Western-tinged drama.
The bloody military coup that shook up Chile in 1973 would not be as well known around the world without the remarkable documentary trilogy made by Patricio Guzman, The Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile). After the coup, Patricio was imprisoned in the infamous...
When a Danish couple visits a Dutch couple they barely know, polite discomfort dissolves into horror as Christian Tafdrup’s social comedy of manners goes Gothic dark.
Ilinca H?rnu? gives a captivating performance in Carina Gabriela Da?oveanu’s restrained but perceptive drama about a taxi driver longing for romance amidst a faltering marriage.
Director Kathryn Ferguson’s engaging music documentary Nothing Compares explores Sinéad O’Connor’s legacy as both icon and iconoclast, with input from the scandalous singer herself.
A female bodybuilder tries her hand as an escort in order to pay for her steroids and supplements in this beautifully calibrated, exceptionally well-played feature that digs deep inside its characters, forcing audiences to upend initial conceptions while weaving a memorable, lingering spell.
Notwithstanding truly impressive visuals by D.P. Sviatoslav Bulakovskyi, “Klondike” underwhelms with its unilluminating look at the Donbas region conflict in Ukraine, seen through a reductionist gendered lens where women nurture and men achieve nothing but destruction.
A masterful Bill Nighy, director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro relocate Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru to post-war London in the quietly powerful remake Living.
Martika Ramirez Escobar’s audacious first feature is a maniacally meta love letter to Philippine cinema, but its films-within-a-film structure and nods to wildly different genres suffer from the lack of a substantial story.
Jonatan Schwenk follows the award-winning ‘Sog’ with another beguiling animated short that wordlessly meditates on our relationship to the natural world via a group of axolotls and the people that eat them.
Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz questions his own country’s foundational myth with a harrowing investigation of the state-sanctioned cover-up of the killings of hundreds of civilians in a Palestinian village in May 1948.
Affirming our commitment to review the finest of world cinema regardless of length, The Film Verdict is proud to announce a new Short Films column which will make its debut during the Sundance Film Festival and will be a notable feature of our coverage in Rotterdam...
An insightful exploration of youth, ambition, romance, and meaning through the lens of a young woman you both identify with and love to hate.
In his diaristic portrait of grief during the isolation of lockdown, Fabrizio Maltese has crafted a personal documentary full of universal poignancy.
Originally reviewed Oct. 12, 2021 – NOW ON APPLE TV Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand and a solo Joel Coen turn Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty classic Macbeth into a ravishingly beautiful game of thrones.
Through its boisterous main character, Shamira Raphaëla’s ‘Shabu’ represents a break from the clichéd images of Black experience in the West.
Winner of the Academy Award for best international feature, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’ is the story of how love survives death in a long, measured, ultimately mesmerizing examination of the human soul.
Belgium’s shortlisted entry for the 2022 Oscars is a remarkable examination of childhood, social belonging, and family ties—with implications outside of the school playground.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a pathological liar whose romance with an Australian girl unveils a horrifying backstory of racism in Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s genre-bending pleaser.
An immersive, sensorial plunge into a young Iraqi refugee’s desperation as he evades capture by anti-immigration vigilantes in a Bulgarian forest, filmed with taut suspense and anchored by a stand-out performance from Adam Ali.
Boasting stunning imagery and a great back story, Bhutan’s first film to make the Oscar shortlist works a well-trodden premise into a beautiful, humanist and accessible picture.
Jessica Kingdon’s prize-winning, Oscar-shortlisted documentary Ascension is a disjointed but fascinating portrait of contemporary China as consumer capitalist superpower.
George Clooney directs Ben Affleck in The Tender Bar, a warm-hearted but flat coming-of-age drama.
A sobering look at African migrants waylaid between their homelands and the dangerous trek to Europe.
Family life in rural Myanmar is intimately explored in this earnest if somewhat obtuse chronicle.
Aicha Macky’s superb documentary about the impoverished citizens of Zinder, in the Republic of Niger, bends towards compassion for a neglected people.
The winner of Morelia’s best documentary award is a raw, honest chronicle of the violence afflicting Mexico, seen through the lives of the filmmaker’s own family.
Workers in an outdated sugar cane factory in Guadeloupe read from the transcripts of an 1842 trial against a slave owner in Sylvaine Dampierre’s powerful act of reclaiming history, Words of Negroes. Stunningly shot by Renaud Personnaz in crisp, vivid images, the film...
The act of exile is never a single-generation event; its ever-mutating ramifications shift down the family tree, undergoing a change as each generation grapples with questions of identity and belonging. Given that the person who flees their country often rejects...
The most fascinating aspect of Marco Bellocchio’s guilt-streaked revisitation of the suicide of his twin brother in 1968 is the insight it offers into the Italian master’s creative font–his own family.
The unsettled protagonists of Hamzah Jamjoom’s “Rupture” seem to be literally pulled through past, present and future in this Italian-inspired thriller in which a woman’s sanity is disturbed by her pregnancy and a malevolent concierge (played by Billy Zane) with his own unsavory baggage.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel ‘The Lost Daughter’ strays too far from Italy to be convincing, but a stunningly good Olivia Colman saves the day.
A keenly observed if somewhat underwhelming chronicle of divorce, and how it upends the life of a teenage girl.
In his exploration of a man’s descent into madness during the present pandemic, director-actor Nejib Belkadhi makes a rare of-the-moment drama, inflected with humor and surrealism, that captures our unease in ways likely to outlast COVID’s grip on our psyches.
Panama’s Oscar-shortlisted drama eloquently portrays class divides, as a bereaved upper-class architect seeks redemption in her friendship with a homeless, street-smart boy.
Cheating on a high school exam for a good cause gives top Iraqi Kurdish writer and director Shawkat Amin Korki (‘Memories on Stone’) a fertile moral field to examine the traps surrounding female empowerment.
Denmark’s shortlisted Oscar contender Flee is a warmly personal animated coming-of-age documentary about an Afghan refugee coming to terms with his sexuality and painful family history.
Saudi Arabia takes a big step forward with an international culture event in Jeddah that, for all the glitches, showcased the modern and rapidly changing face of its society.
Noomi Rapace stars in Iceland’s boldly original Oscar submission Lamb, a twisted folk-horror thriller about fantastic beasts and family trauma.
A haunting low-fi meditation on memory, social class and political protest that won the Golden Eye documentary award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Hany Abu-Assad’s best work toys with questions of moral absolutes, yet his dissatisfying “Huda’s Salon” is hamstrung by a weak script and ill-advised editing choices that fail to build characters or tension, despite an interesting premise.
What on the surface appears to be a formulaic road movie thriller about a couple of siblings tormented by a white Jeep on a desert road turns into a surprising critique of the Saudi old guard in which the younger generation declares its liberation from toxic patriarchy.
An omnibus of women-directed Saudi shorts that acts as a calling card for the diversity of rising talent in the Kingdom, offering five largely strong entries highlighting the ways women negotiate traditional female and non-female spaces.
‘Waltz with Bashir’ director Ari Folman’s animated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary makes some valid points but takes a few too many creative liberties.
Director Firouzeh Khosrovani’s own parents embody the lacerating split of Iran into modern liberals and Islamic fundamentalists after the 1978 revolution, in a personal doc of startling clarity and impact.
Voted best film at the London BFI festival and Mar del Plata, an offbeat Iranian roadie launches the filmmaking career of Jafar Panahi’s son Panah in style.
Turkish director Emre Erdo?du’s compelling social drama The List of Those Who Love Me highlights hidden tensions among Istanbul’s arty celebrity set.
The fears and longings of four Lebanese boys on their way to lose their virginity is conveyed in interior monologues in George Peter Barbari’s poignant and deeply original first film.
The grand old lady of Middle Eastern film festivals has matured into a modern, major cultural event for Egypt, whose emphasis is more on filmmakers than the red carpet.
Palestine’s 2022 Oscar submission is a brooding story of lives in limbo in the Golan Heights, stunningly shot and wrenching in its moving evocation of a man mired in self-loathing and paralyzed by the physical and existential no-man’s land resulting in the Israeli occupation and the disaster in Syria.
One of the best-selling instrumentalists of all time is both unaware and charming in Penny Lane’s engaging documentary.
Director Adam Donen’s messy but ambitious debut feature Alice, Through the Looking brings together Lewis Carroll, Jean-Luc Godard and Monty Python in a hellish post-Brexit London.
A Chilean family sail into stormy waters in director Nicolás Postiglione’s tense, gripping, politically charged suspense thriller Immersion.
Rashid Masharawi’s upbeat lockdown documentary set in Montmartre is a one man show full of charm and humanity.
A well-calibrated debut with a fine central performance, weaving together notions of class and familial betrayal when an impoverished mother sells her son’s kidney to a well-off family in exchange for a better life.
In the bitter drama of a human rights lawyer struggling with mental illness, well-known actor Dhafer L’Abidine directs, produces and stars in a passionate plea to Tunisians to reclaim their revolution.
Jane Campion’s bold cinematic interpretation of Thomas Savage’s novel about cattle ranchers in 1920’s Montana is a sensuous, aestheticized Netflix release, whose meticulous detail and gay subplot are admirable but a little tiring.
France’s most famous rap duo gets an energized if standardized biopic in this first of two projects to tackle the legacy of hip-hop group Suprême NTM.
Before its last day was cancelled, IDFA often proved it had found a sweet spot between a filmmaker’s vision and a challenge for its audience.
Celebrating its 25th edition with a strong post-Covid comeback, the boutique Baltic festival served up a feast of monochrome Cold War nostalgia and colourful experimental fare.
Predictably stereotyped characterizations still deliver some enjoyable moments in this female empowerment story that unfortunately also plays to the region’s homophobia but will be a crowd-pleaser in the Arab world.
Director Andreas Kleinert’s prize-winning Cold War bio-drama Dear Thomas pays compelling but indulgent tribute to East German literary outlaw Thomas Brasch.
This disturbingly voyeuristic look at the ancient tradition of bride kidnappings, which happen at an astounding young age, won IDFA’s best director nod for Diem Ha Le.
Abbas Kiarostami’s trailblazing ‘Homework’ (1989) gets a brilliant update in a documentary that is equal parts hilarious and saddening in its portrayal of Iranian schoolkids.
Tea Tupajic’s documentary will find its audience among those for whom Srebrenica and other European brutalities have never really ended.
With sensitivity and devastating last-scene irony, filmmaker and poet Granaz Moussavi cinematically embeds the viewer in children’s lives in the heart of war-torn Kabul, in Australia’s Oscar hopeful.
An outcry against man-made environmental disasters, tracking the long-term effects on the survivors of the biggest dam collapse in Brazil.
Mali-born filmmaker Seydou Cissé comes at the theme of African immigration through the lens of spirituality.
Dutch director Alex van Warmerdam takes darkly comic gloom to a new level with his audaciously weird tenth film, Nr. 10.
The second film in Kamar Ahmad Simon’s ‘Water Trilogy’ is redeemed by its selection of characters.
In his skillfully helmed first feature, Isaac (Izaokas), Lithuanian writer-director Jurgis Matulevicius delves into his country’s turbulent past under both Communism and Nazism, following a trio of friends in the 1960s whose lives are overshadowed by a massacre that...
Russian director Kyrill Sokolov’s high-octane action comedy No Looking Back involves three generations of women from the same dysfunctional family.
A young Filipino immigrant in Greece with special healing powers is the focus of Araceli Lemos’ assured drama delving into questions of spirituality, belonging and sisterly bonds with a distinctively creepy edge.
The pitch of the documentary Where Are We Headed seems tailor-made for international festivals, as it offers a look at colourful and fascinating creatures from all layers of Russian society through the prism of the Moscow subway system. With a clearly defined space...
Debut feature director Francesco Sossai’s deadpan cannibalism comedy is charming, original and surprisingly humane.
A melancholic, intimate exploration of the personal cost of migration, told by the filmmaker’s father, who left the island of Réunion in his youth.
Chinese director Liao Zihao’s debut feature Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey is a dramatically muddled but exquisitely shot monochrome fairy tale.
A high-end gay sex worker in China longs for the family affection he felt as a child in C.B. Yi’s beautifully crafted if not always satisfying debut that showcases the talents of actor Kai Ko.
The hypocrisy of high school slut-shaming is the core theme of this strong feature debut boasting two exceptional performances and a layered script that’s distinctly Macedonian but with international resonance.
Kosovo’s Kaltrina Krasniqi makes an impressive feature debut with this beautifully measured drama about a once-compliant 60-something widow who attempts to deflect the malevolent traditional patriarchy in a nation on the edge of change.
Filled with enough gyrating dead corpses to cast the next Zack Snyder movie several times over, director Péter Bergendy’s Hungarian horror flick Post Mortem is high on gore and jump scares, low on convincing storytelling and originality. It displays a solid level of...
The sense of relief that suffused the 62nd Thessaloniki International Film Festival could be felt throughout the city’s repurposed old port, not just in the festival locations but in the favorite bars, restaurants and hangouts of the cinema crowd who palpably relished...
Festivals with a national competition offer something quite unique in that it’s possible, in a week or ten days, to take the pulse of a country’s cinema and, by extension, the country itself. Which themes speak to filmmakers — or which themes do filmmakers think...
Two young Mexicans are desperate to feel something in Jorge Cuchí’s impressive but hard-to-watch film about suicidal teens.
A gloriously extreme Oscar submission, French writer-director Julia Ducournau’s prize-winning erotic thriller about a gender-blurring serial killer with a fetish for sex with cars is funny, fast and furious.
Bahman Ghobadi’s latest Kurdish story, shot in Istanbul, hovers between tragedy and humor without hitting the emotional high note it aims for.
Ace actress Anajosé Aldrete stars as the desperate mother of a kidnapped son in Claudia Sainte-Luce’s modest but powerful film.
Diana Cardozo looks at the world of Mexican adults from a child’s point of view in this charming and nuanced film.
An impressively staged indie that explores the idea of success on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border.
Moumouni Sanou’s award-winning documentary about the reality of working girls in Burkina Faso is marred by its lack of discretion.
A sly, humorous take on the detective genre, set in a placid Uruguayan town where hidden passions rage.
Jide Tom Akinleminu brings a light touch to a personal but political project that could easily feel overwrought in other hands.
In Io sto bene, Luxembourg’s submission to the Oscars, Donato Rotunno movingly chronicles how present-day Europe has become more diverse and tolerant, but still presents obstacles for new arrivals and leaves the elderly isolated and lonely. In one eloquent scene, an...
Feted Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s latest Oscar contender is a classy but underpowered drama about moral complexity and social media shaming.
A Ghanaian woman makes an anti-migration decision her friends and family disagree with.
Cambodia’s Oscar submission is a semi-autobiographical critique of how the country’s rampant capitalism frays the traditional social fabric, told with sympathy yet short on dynamism.
Few people outside eastern Nevada will have even heard of White Pine County, a rural area on the border with Utah that’s home to just over 10,000 inhabitants. If it has any especially distinguishing characteristics outside ones stereotypically associated with rural...
Though it does not quite hold together, this Dok Leipzig premiere is a frequently fascinating docu-fiction debut from Austria-based director Aleksey Lapin.
Juan Carlos Rulfo has composed his own “Love in the Time of Covid”, a deeply moving chronicle of Mexico’s pandemic response.
Rahul Jain follows up his festival mega-hit ‘Machines’ with an apocalyptic vision of Delhi’s life-threatening pollution that floods the screen with present-day disasters.
Mati Diop's Atlantique (Atlantics) kicked off the 27th FESPACO, the Pan-African Film and Television Festival that takes place bi-annually in the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou, in a screening that foreshadowed a couple of features of the 2021 festival. One of...
The city of Rio de Janeiro lies on the western shore of Guanabara Bay, the location of Murilo Salles's hymn to working class toil, A Bay (Uma baía). Salles excelled as cinematographer in such Brazilian film classics as Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and has directed...
Costa Rica dancer Wendy Chinchilla Araya gives an eerie, riveting perf but it only goes so far in this unstructured tale of magic realism and female power from debuting director Nathalie Alvarez Mesen.
A great deal of attention is about to accrue to Egyptian director Mohamed Diab, who’s just finished shooting on the Marvel franchise series Moon Knight, slated for release sometime in 2022. That’s a good thing, because it likely means his Venice premiered...
You can’t say no to a relationship this mismatched in Juho Kuosmanen’s warm-hearted but melancholy voyage to nowhere, starring Russian actor of the moment Yuriy Borisov and Seidi Haarla as the Finnish tourist who stumbles across him.
Everything about Ali El Arabi’s Captains of Za’atari seems custom-made to appeal to a broad public. After all, who doesn’t love an underdog story, this one involving a couple of Syrian teens in a Jordanian refugee camp whose skills at football (European; soccer for...
The town of El Gouna is a purpose-built gated community on Egypt's Red Sea coast just north of the popular resort city of Hurghada. It’s a place of privilege, where rolling green lawns and intensely colored bougainvillea grace pleasingly designed villas varied enough...
Controversial LA musician Annie Hardy plays an obnoxious American tourist battling demonic forces in the English countryside in director Rob Savage’s profane, provocative, hilarious found-footage horror comedy Dashcam.
You can only fall in love with someone for the first time once… unless you are in the same position as one of the protagonists of Sanremo, Slovenia’s Oscar hopeful in the International Feature Film category. In this whisper of a film, an elderly man and woman living...
Documaker Renato Borrayo Serrano offers eye-opening glimpses into the harrowing and chaotic life of a modern Nenets woman that overturn stereotypes about Arctic life.
This small film from Rwanda looks too cheap to succeed on a large scale—but its filmmaker is worthy of attention going forward.
Tawfik Baba almost ruins a good story about two Africans in a desert with a confusing ending and on-the-nose politics.
Jeremiah Lemohang Mosese has made a masterpiece that showcases the great talent of the late Mary Twala and announces his own genius.
‘Murina’, which won this year’s Camera d’Or in Cannes for first-time director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic, extols female rebellion but walks a dangerous tightrope connecting the male gaze with the body of a rebellious 17-year-old girl.
Blerta Basholli’s debut feature is a modest but strongly acted human drama that puts Kosovo on the international Oscar shortlist.
Chuko and Ari Esiri’s Eyimofe, which is competing at Fespaco, combines two semi-overlapping stories of Nigerians on the edge. The first story is titled Spain, the second Italy. The idea in both titles is destination. In both stories, the Nigerian characters have come...
The 65th London Film Festival was a welcome return to pre-Covid notions of cinema as communal celebration and politically conscious art form, but a bumpy ride for press and industry professionals.
You don’t need to hold a doctorate in Freudian psychology, or to have labored through all 750 pages of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, to know that big towers built by ambitious men usually are, in one way or another, substitutes for their penises. And yet, in the highly...
Teresa Camou Guerrero’s poetic, heartbreaking documentary follows an indigenous Mexican family displaced by violent drug traffickers who struggle to return to their homelands.
James Bond star Lashana Lynch joins a large ensemble cast in debbie tucker green’s powerful stage-to-screen drama for the Black Lives Matter era.
In the 19th century, a 14-year-old Danish girl struggles between her will and God’s in Tea Lindeburg’s impressionistic period drama, winner of the best director nod in San Sebastian.
Nollywood’s most famous director has made a period piece for Netflix that, while good to look and with all the right politics for today, doesn’t quite come alive and yet stays on too long.
Turkish writer-director Tayfun Pirselimoglu’s prize-winning thriller Kerr is a surreal small-town murder mystery with echoes of Kafka and Lynch.
While still clearly finding their voice, three young Nigerian directors serve up entertaining vignettes of African life derived from popular made-in-Africa superstitions.
Indian cineaste Aditya Vikram Sengupta delivers a slow-burning and delicate ensemble drama about the corrupted state of his hometown.
A beautifully textured travel diary disguised as a highly personal quest — or is it the other way around? Either way, Mariner of the Mountains (Marinheiro das Montanhas) from director Karim Aïnouz — whose swoony feminist melodrama The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão...
Raul Ramon’s first feature as a director is a sweet utopian fable that imagines a peaceful, united Mexico where solidarity and honesty prevail.
Quirky surprises abound in a stylish, suspenseful thriller set in 1970’s Argentina, when lesbians were persecuted and abortion was outlawed.
Idris Elba, Regina King, Jonathan Majors and LaKeith Stanfield strap on their six-shooters for Jeymes Samuel’s boorishly enjoyable African-American western.
The conservative new social order sidelines an old-school zookeeper in Emre Kayis’s closely observed, metaphoric first feature about Turkish society, winner of the Fipresci award in Toronto.
A complex, cryptic, compelling film in which Miguel Coyula’s surreal images portray a sci fi Cuba that attempts to mold young minds through genetic engineering.
The 25th James Bond film is bloated and plodding in places, but it ultimately delivers the goods and sends Daniel Craig out in a blaze of glory.
Three little girls grow up in a village terrorized by the drug cartels in Tatiana Huezo’s dreamy and terrifying first feature, which won San Sebastian’s Latin Horizons crown.
Slovakia’s former Oscars submission recreates the courageous real-life exploits of two Jewish prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz and alerted the world to the horrors of the Holocaust.
The crowds were back at the 69th San Sebastian International Film Festival (around 90% compared to 2019 levels), but not the carefree atmosphere of leisurely walks with friends, meetings in the crowded pintxos (snack) bars, and swims on La Concha beach, for which the...
Trapped in a violent family, a young woman rebels in Alina Grigore’s assured and absorbing first feature, another gift from contemporary Romanian cinema.
A good pitch, such as the one behind the French aviation thriller Black Box (Boîte noire), can only travel so far when the characters provide little fuel for the story. At some point, usually toward the middle of the second act, the movie stutters, stalls and then...
In her many novels, plays and movies, author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras would often make herself a character in the stories she was telling, mixing autobiography and fiction into a seamless blend that the French called autofiction. It was writing with a capital I,...
Javier Bardem is the main attraction as a smooth-talking factory owner in Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s drawing room social satire about modern labor.
Quentin Tarantino explains his love for Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Westerns and reveals a lot about his own work in the process in Luca Rea’s irresistible, eye-opening documentary.
A small-town misfit takes a new job breaking bad news to bereaved families in Bent Hamer’s droll, elegantly filmed tragicomedy The Middle Man.
Award-winning Spanish filmmaker Icair Bollain chillingly dramatizes the real-life encounter between a strong-minded widow and the repentant Basque terrorists who murdered her husband.
The life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon movingly expresses the traumas of war and love in one of writer-director Terence Davies’ finest creations.
Zhang Yimou ironically salutes the movies and their fervent audiences during China’s Cultural Revolution, in a stylistic pastiche that drags a little.
Life is more than a little hectic for the protagonist of Full Time (Temps plein), a single mother of two who’s trying to keep down one job while trying to find another as traffic strikes wreak further havoc on her ability to juggle all her duties. This naturalistic...
A burly Belgian farmhand working in Scotland loses his memory in Nobody Has to Know, the fifth feature as a director from Belgian actor-director Bouli Lanners (The Giants, Eldorado). Though hushed and sober in tone, this unusual love story has several unexpected...
A wealthy young Polish couple are forced to confront their own moral bankruptcy during a luxury Italian vacation in Silent Land, Aga Woszczy?ska’s elegantly bleak exploration of First World Problems.
When Roberto Cicutto, president of La Biennale di Venezia, admitted on stage at the 78th awards ceremony that the last two Venice Film Festivals came close to not happening, he put his finger on the miracle on the Lido. A huge, unwieldy Italian festival got through...
There are two movies in Miracle, Bogdan George Apetri’s uneven, beautifully shot drama divided between a young religious novice’s ordeal when seeking an abortion and the police investigation that follows her brutal rape. The first part, characterized by an admirable...
In 2015, craggy-faced actor Vincent Lindon won the Cannes Best Actor nod for his role as a laid-off employee in The Measure of a Man, directed by Stéphane Brizé in their third collaboration. In 2018, they reunited again for At War, in which Lindon played a man...
A Venice competition slot seems like a strange place for On the Job: The Missing 8, a punishingly long corruption thriller from Filipino genre master Erik Matti that’s soon to be seen as an HBO Asia Original six-episode mini-series. Following on – but not actually a...
Riz Ahmed stars in this stylish sci-fi chase thriller as a troubled military veteran battling his own demons as well as extra-terrestrial enemies.
Elio Germano plays a mild-mannered dentist who discovers a girl is tied up in his basement in Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo’s (‘Favolacce’) absurdist psychological thriller.
The first shot of Leave No Traces may make you think you’re at a retrospective of one of the great Polish filmmakers from forty or more years ago, so perfect is the recreation. It takes place in a shadowy Warsaw bedroom in 1983, and the stillness, warm tonalities and...
Partly inspired by real events, Otar’s Death is a fractious Georgian family drama with breathless thriller elements and a deep streak of black comedy.
Joaquin del Paso’s intense Mexican drama spirals out of control, just like its protagonists.
Stefano Mordini’s unconvincing ensemble drama searches for the origins of evil that provoked the Circeo massacre of two girls in 1975 and rattled upper class Rome.
Finnish filmmaker Teemu Nikki’s story about disability moves you for a long list of complicated reasons.
In a vividly dystopic 1938 Leningrad under Stalin’s Great Purge, a young NKVD torturer tries to save his soul, in co-directors Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov’s high-energy parable ‘Captain Volkonogov Escaped’.
There’s a reaction shot in Mel Brooks’ The Producers when the open-mouthed audience watches the “Springtime for Hitler” number in shocked disbelief, amazed that something so crass and campy could have made it on Broadway. The scene is hilarious because Brooks knows...
Slovak documentary director Peter Kerekes (Velvet Terrorists) makes the jump into the (semi-)fictional realm with 107 Mothers (Cenzorka), which explores the world of mothers behind bars through the stories of several female inmates and a warden at an Odessa jail....
Leading a double life is no longer the dominion of spies in French director Antoine Barraud’s mystery-cum-character study Madeleine Collins, in which a woman tries to keep two families with kids going in two different countries at the same time. It’s a tough balancing...
A student in 1960s provincial France has to deal with an unwanted pregnancy in a very hostile environment in Happening, the intimate but hard-hitting second feature from filmmaker Audrey Diwan. This adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical novel is...
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED SEPT. 7, 2021 Ukrainian filmmaker Valentyn Vasyanovych follows up his Venice Horizons-winning ‘Atlantis’ with ‘Reflection’ (‘Vidblysk’), a perturbing true horror tale of his country’s war with Russia.
A psychotic girl with lethal powers walks anywhere she pleases at night in Ana Lily Amirpour’s occasionally amusing but mostly treadless fantasy, ‘Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon.’
There’s a shot, quite late into Xavier Giannoli’s lengthy adaptation of Balzac’s Lost Illusions, that sees the protagonist, a broke young writer, get out of bed naked after having slept with a former lover, a lady from the provincial aristocracy. It is crystal clear...
The controversy stirred up by Michel Franco’s previous film ‘New Order’ will be partly placated and partly reignited in ‘Sundown’, the story of English tourists (Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Mexico.
Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas and Oscar Martínez headline a delicious comedy about the acting profession directed by Argentinians Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn.
The symbiotic relationship between people of the land and their environment is the basis of all Michelangelo Frammartino’s work, most strikingly seen in his 2010 second feature Le Quattro Volte, a surprise international arthouse success. His hallmarks – unfussy,...
Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke deliver an emotionally raw but refreshingly nuanced take on female desire.
A girl’s exhilarating mind-trip through swinging London of the Sixties turns wild and woolly and full of zombies in ‘Last Night in Soho’, Edgar Wright’s multi-genre treat, co-starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie.
Produced by Steve McQueen, Bianca Stigter’s experimental essay film is a rigorous exercise in forensic historical excavation commemorating Polish Holocaust victims.
Bored and blustery youths looking for something that makes them feel rebelliously alive is a storytelling cliché almost as old as the movies. So it is particularly exciting to see a film like the sun-blasted, water-sprayed spectacle that is Atlantide, which takes this...
There must be a reason Frank Herbert’s sci fi masterwork Dune defies cinematic adaptation, the latest attempt being director Denis Villeneuve’s attentively lensed but humorless actioner aimed at teen fans of the book and Timothée Chalamet.
There’s an extraordinary scene early on in Spencer in which Princess Diana, played by Kristen Stewart, rips off her pearl necklace during a Christmas-Eve dinner with the royal family, sending pearls everywhere. She hates the necklace because her husband, Prince...
Jake Wachtel’s Critics Week opener in Venice is a brash hybrid of near-future sci fi and timeless Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation.
Paolo Sorrentino reflects on his Neapolitan youth in an autobiographical film whose first half is replete with signature baroque touches but then loses its way.
One of Paul Schrader’s most complex and profound reflections on personal traumatic memory bleeds into the American tragedy of Abu Ghraib in an anguishing drama starring Oscar Isaac, Tye Sheridan and Tiffany Haddish.
There are so many good ideas in Leyla Bouzid’s second feature A Tale of Love and Desire, so many rarely-addressed issues deserving attention, that it’s especially frustrating how faintly the sparks fly between her two main characters, university classmates at the...
Young Hungarian writer-director Hajni Kis delivers a highly assured debut feature with non-professional actors in the lead roles.
Almodóvar’s latest offers an exciting if not entirely smooth mix of new and familiar elements, including his muse Penélope Cruz.
"I reject the cynical view that politics is inevitably or even usually dirty business,” Richard Nixon said in a televised address more than a year into the Watergate scandal. It is the kind of quote that French director Thomas Kruithof (The Eavesdropper) might have...
This cat-and-mouse chase thriller offers an opaque commentary on love as a form of psychosis and the paranoid political mood in post-Soviet Lithuania,
This superior pulp-noir thriller has a reality-bending look that draws heavily on vintage German Expressionist art.
Olmo Omerzu’s Czech boardroom farce is an absurdist comic parable about lives ruined and families divided by too much focus on money.
The distinctive vision that Omar El Zohairy brought to his two prize-wining shorts is much in evidence in his meticulously crafted absurdist feature debut Feathers. It’s amusing to imagine how he pitched the project at the start, given the narrative’s unlikely...
The big prize-winner at Karlovy Vary film festival, As Far as I Can Walk is a modern migrant story with historic literary echoes.
Clio Barnard’s slightest and most conventional film to date, but also her most optimistic.
A newly appointed school counselor in Croatia tries to keep her head above water in the shark tank that is The Staff Room (Zbornica), an auspicious if somewhat meandering feature debut from filmmaker Sonja Tarokic. Less a character study than the portrait of a...
Onoda Hiroo was the name of the famous Japanese soldier who refused to believe that WWII had ended, so he remained in hiding on a sparsely populated island in the Philippines for almost three decades. His story of endurance, as impressive as it is insane and as...
Over the past decade or so, the French city of Marseille has worked hard to clean up its image, gentrifying a significant area around its touristy Vieux-Port, opening a brand new museum and conference center — both architectural marvels — and attracting a swatch of...
Claire Denis sublimely explored the sweaty, dust-coated bodies of French legionnaires in one of her best movies, Beau Travail, which focused on a platoon of lonesome fighters marooned at a remote outpost in East Africa. In Our Men (Mon légionnaire), the second feature...
Director Qiu Jiongjiong uses a traditional theater troupe to spin out three long hours of dreamy reflections on Chinese history in the 20th century.
