A young medical student creates a sinister diet drug to fight her own eating disorders in ‘Saccharine’, a deliciously disgusting feminist body-horror shocker from writer-director Natalie Erika James.
Austrian documentarian Ruth Beckermann delves into Ethiopian history by looking into a specific building in the engrossing ‘Wax & Gold’.
Extracting more drama from the life of MercyMe frontman Bart Millard proves difficult for this unnecessary sequel.
Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz satirises the lurid psycho-sexual absurdities of a deeply dysfunctional dynasty in his shallow but stylish Euro-comedy reboot, ‘Rosebush Pruning’.
Documentary director Grant Gee’s debut dramatic feature ‘Everybody Dogs Bill Evans’ offers a lyrical, fragmentary portrait of a troubled jazz icon at a crucial career crossroads.
Based on a true story pregnant with contemporary moral questions, ‘The Red Hangar’ is the gripping portrait of a courageous Air Force captain forced to draw the line, during Chile’s military coup in 1973 that overturned the Salvador Allende government and democracy.
The lineup of Berlin 2026 boasts some major US titles, but are they really what the festival needs?
Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë offers the sumptuous trash that has become the auteur’s trademark, but her departures from the original story fall flat.
This year’s Rotterdam took a free-wheeling approach to genre pieces, particularly global horror.
Artistic frustrations are the throughline in the Lebanese omnibus film ‘Home Bitter Home’, set in present day Beirut.
Social satire meets (literal) toilet humor in the gruesomely entertaining Brazilian horror comedy ‘Bowels of Hell’.
A demon feeds on a mother’s grief in ‘Talking to a Stranger’, a powerful and unsettling piece of Mexican horror.
A parent-child bond is tested in a supernatural manner in the highly entertaining South Korean film ‘My Daughter Is a Zombie’.
The collaboration between three filmmakers to re-enact sexual assaults suffered by Russian women, Second Skin, is a staggering and imperative act of bearing witness.
Political upheaval is the backdrop for a fact-based dark comedy in the shape of Samuli Valkama’s ‘The Kidnapping of a President’.
Cult indie director Alex Cox gives Nikolai Gogol’s classic satirical novel ‘Dead Souls’ a surreal Wild West makeover in this uneven but enjoyably bizarre love letter to the spaghetti western genre.
The “one-stop-shop for all things European” at Sundance is the warm and welcoming Europe! Hub space for sales, promotion and networking.
The human beings are just as bloodthirsty as the zombies in this latest entry, directed by Nia DaCosta with both delicacy and verve.
Gerard Butler and family are on the road again in this sequel that’s less action thriller and more wistful contemplation of the post-apocalypse.
The writer-director of ‘Beyond Silence,’ which scooped the narrative short prize at Tribeca, discusses giving voice to victims of abuse and the overwhelming reaction of audiences.
Henrianne Jansen gives a remarkable debut performance in Marnie Blok’s intimate and powerful chamber piece about the pressures heaped on victims of abuse, Beyond Silence.
Sure, it’s earnest and more than a little corny, but what better way to celebrate the songs of Neil Diamond and the musicians who cover them?
Beyond the visual silliness and the knockabout physical comedy, this sweet adaptation of the long-running TV hit sneaks in a lovely message about what it really means to be a man.
2025 was a calamitous year in many ways, but there were always worthwhile movies to see.
Soapy, glossy trash delivered with wit, style, and indelible performances makes for a satisfyingly old-fashioned thriller with bite.
James Cameron once again dazzles the eye without engaging the brain or the heart.
The nights seem to grow longer and duller in this pointless sequel.
Writer and director Anselm Chan talks about his year of researching the funeral business for his career-changing film ‘The Last Dance’, Hong Kong’s Oscar submission, and the importance of telling local stories.
The highest-grossing local film of all time in Hong Kong, Anselm Chan’s ‘The Last Dance’ is an involving family drama set in Hong Kong’s unique funeral business, where modern parlors coexist with traditional Taoist rites.
The director of the award-winning ‘Breathing Underwater’ talks turning his social drama into a teachable moment.
Carla Juri is riveting in the evocative drama ‘Breathing Underwater’ about trauma and female solidarity.
The comedy and character design remain top-notch in this animal kingdom, even when the metaphors once again become muddled.
‘A Fox Under a Pink Moon’, the emotionally charged collaboration between veteran Iranian documentary maker Mehrdad Oskouei and his teenage niece, Soraya Akhalaghi, won IDFA’s international competition while another Iranian film, ‘Past Present Continuous’ by filmmakers Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani, won the Envision competition.
Under new Artistic Director Isabel Arrate Fernandez, the world’s largest documentary festival IDFA screened a strong program of political films, intensely personal stories and dazzling visual artistry.
Nordin Lasfar has made a decent, anodyne documentary from flammable material in ‘Mohammed & Paul – Once Upon a Time in Tangier’.
Matabeleland may be her first feature documentary but Nyasha Kadandara juggles romance and politics across Zimbabwe and Botswana like a pro.
A charming and frustratingly tangled take on AI’s encroachment on reality.
An Israeli stand-up comedian turns the hate and anger of her divided homeland into tragicomic humour in the timely, irreverent documentary ‘Coexistence, My Ass!’
Armed only with a phone camera, a troubled young Afghan woman films her attempts to illegally cross the border to Europe in the visually beautiful collaborative documentary ‘A Fox Under a Pink Moon’
Andreas Pichler’s whistle-blower documentary ‘Elon Musk Unveiled – The Tesla Experiment’ is a convincing expose on Musk’s self-driving Teslas that could use less politics and more numbers.
Harrowing memories of domestic abuse are recounted over striking images of the natural world in Rahhala: Hayya ala Hayya, Lujain Jo’s beautiful and brutal reckoning with trauma.
Lasse Linder’s equine documentary, Air Horse One, is a quiet portrait of a champion thoroughbred – a behind the scenes peek that is meditative though never profound.
If great men deserve great documentaries, director Eugene Jarecki’s exhaustive profile of Julian Assange, ‘The Six Billion Dollar Man’, could hardly be bettered.
One woman’s sexual assault is a stand-in for every woman’s in Belgian director Sien Versteyhe’s tightly focussed chamber documentary.
A pair of deeply eccentric twin brothers and a talking cow are the stars of Czech director Miro Remo’s mischievous, tragicomic, prize-winning documentary ‘Better Go Mad in the Wild’.
Tracking his nieces for two decades, from girlhood to womanhood, documentary maker Massoud Bakhshi’s ‘All My Sisters’ is a quietly subversive, deeply personal insider portrait of gender politics in Iran.
IDFA’s new Artistic Director Isabel Arrate Fernandez on running the world’s largest documentary festival, the dangers of AI, and a controversial new ban on state-funded Israeli films.
Glen Powell’s running man is in fighting shape in Edgar Wright’s remake, but given how slack the story becomes, the running time could stand a trim.
Sometimes silly but always propulsive, this franchise entry dares to give us an empathy-generating Predator, even if Elle Fanning’s robot steals the show.
History and colonialism form the basis for Gregor Brändli’s engrossing ‘Elephants & Squirrels’, screened at DOK Leipzig.
Paleontology comes to the screen from a child’s point of view in Marcel Barelli’s family-oriented feature debut ‘Mary Anning’.
A relationship is put to the test in Lisa Blatter’s tender sophomore feature directorial effort ‘Traces of What Remains’, screened at the Zurich Film Festival.
Bruce Springsteen has always known how to tell a story, but writer-director Scott Cooper falls short when it comes to capturing the Boss at a personal and artistic crossroads.
Horror sequel feels fresh and exciting before giving way to tired tropes, turning Ethan Hawke’s chilling villain into a copy of a copy of Freddy Krueger.
Disney’s cyber-sequel plays like a series of chase scenes strung together by technobabble, but viewers of the large-format 3D version will feel like they’re in one of the studio’s theme-park dark rides.
It’s a glorified press kit/listening party for Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, designed to bring her faithful fans back to the multiplex.
Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt grapple with barely-there characters in a sports biopic that leaves out nearly all of the “bio.”
From the cloister to Gaza, powerful films and opinionated audiences make themselves heard at San Sebastian.
Spanish director Alauda Ruiz de Azua won San Sebastian’s best film prize with her witty, paradoxical and often quite moving ‘Sundays’.
Spanish director Agustín Díaz Yanes delivers a gripping, action-packed but intellectually hollow thriller about an undercover woman police officer who infiltrates the Basque terrorist group ETA.
In wheatfields dotted with 800-year-old stone statues, hidden female desires burn in Zhang Zhongchen’s engrossing magical realist tale from the Chinese hinterlands.
Sleek, sophisticated and certifiably scary in parts, ‘Hidden Murder’ is a Spanish-Argentinian psychological thriller premiering in San Sebastian’s RTVE Galas sidebar.
Spanish-Brazilian director Sergio Oksman uses Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ to reflect on the ghosts of his own life in the slender but intriguing hybrid documentary, ‘A Scary Movie;’.
Love, lust and old age coalesce in the layered, emotionally charged queer comedy-drama ‘Maspalomas’, part of San Sebastián’s Official Selection.
Gently engaging the viewer with whimsical tales of two couples and reflections on the artistic process, Shô Miyake’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner ‘Two Seasons, Two Strangers’ skillfully plays a wide range of chords from melancholy to amusing, tragic to poetic.
Autenticidad y buen humor en las manos de José Luis Guerin hacen de estás Historias una contendiente fuerte a la Concha de oro.
The authenticity and good humor in José Luis Guerin’s documentary ‘Good Valley Stories’ won it the Special Jury Award at San Sebastian.
Following the success of ‘Tasio’ on the festival circuit last year, the Basque Film Archive will present the restored versions of four 1980s medium-length feature at San Sebastián.
Colin Farrell gives a high-energy performance as a boozy con man gambling his life away in the casinos of Macau in director Edward Berger’s stylish but shallow thriller ‘Ballad of a Small Player’.
Nayra Ilic Garcia’s minimalist, somewhat impenetrable coming-of-age tale about a 15-year-old Chilean girl, ‘Cuerpo Celeste’, is set during the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
La vida de una familia española de clase media se convulsiona cuando la hija de 17 años considera convertirse en monja de clausura en la astuta, divertida y frecuentemente conmovedora película ‘Los domingos’ de Alauda Ruiz de Azua.
Las tensiones de la maternidad se desbordan en Las corrientes, un drama existencial y visualmente expresivo.
El debut de Kim Torres es un coming of age sobrio y sensible que se estrena en el Festival de San Sebastián.
Kim Torres’ first film is a sober and sensitive coming-of-ager.
A holiday homicide triggers a family crisis in Olmo Omerzu’s compelling psychological thriller ‘Ungrateful Beings’, which is clunky in places but saved by its intriguing premise and strong cast.
A new-old take on a not very believable serial killer haunting Japan, ‘SAI Disaster’ emphasizes the ordinary, dull, problematic lives of his victims in Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase’s unremarkable second collaboration.
A wildfire out of control in rural Turkey threatens the house, livestock and resourcefulness of a little girl and her motherless family in Seyhmus Altun’s low-key, high-anxiety drama ‘As We Breathe’.
The San Sebastián Retrospective, devoted to Lillian Hellman, is even more timely now than when it was announced.
Music and obsessive love are the center of the compelling new Arnaud Desplechin film premiering in competition at SSIFF.
Grandes actuaciones y buena realización salvan un guion previsible in ‘Los tigres’.
Great performances and good direction save a predictable script in Alberto Rodriguez’s thriller ‘The Tigers’, bowing in competition at San Sebastian.
A working class father and daughter belong to a close-knit group of traditional wrestlers in an unexpectedly flamboyant, emotionally pitch-perfect story set on the Canary Islands, ‘Dance of the Living’.
La película de Iván Fund – minimalista y en tono bajo- sobre una joven argentina con un don especial se centra en atmósfera y matices.
Women are prominently featured at San Sebastián 2025, from the poster to the subject of the Retrospective, and beyond.
François Ozon gives much-loved Albert Camus novel ‘L’Étranger’ a chic retro-modernist polish in this sumptuously shot adaptation of a French literary classic.
Joachim Lafosse tells the story of an unusual vacation in the autobiographical and subtly surprising ‘Six Days in Spring’.
Sprawling and intimate, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest takes on sweeping political and personal ideas with equal assurance.
The Oscar field narrows in Toronto as protesters scrutinize programming.
The prolific Danish screenwriter and director, Anders Thomas Jensen, talks about his latest wander into the weird with Mads Mikkelsen, ‘The Last Viking.’
An impressive ensemble of young actors and taut filmmaking makes this adaptation of Stephen King’s death-march saga gripping and grim.
Addiction and religion clash in ‘Our Father’, a powerful drama about getting clean under the eye of God.
German director Joscha Bongard discusses the commodification of intimacy and the influencer industry as his debut fiction feature ‘Babystar’ bowed in Toronto.
Lesley Manville sees history unfold in front of her eyes in the uneven Cold War thriller ‘Winter of the Crow.’
The tensions of motherhood overflow in the existential, visually expressive drama ‘The Currents’.
Valentyn Vasyanovych imagines post-war Ukraine with both hope and fear in the compellingly meta drama, ‘To the Victory!’
Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja take on edgelord media with an inventively comic touch in ‘Egghead Republic’.
Polish director Agnieszka Holland discusses ‘Franz’, her “punky” Toronto-bowing take on the novelist Kafka.
A family falls apart into each other’s arms in Hlynur Palmason’s distinctive ‘The Love That Remains’.
Blending MCU levels of fan service with British baking-competition levels of coziness, this final entry in the beloved historical drama satisfyingly brings gentry and staff alike into the 1930s.
The once-scary paranormal franchise finally gives up the ghost – and none too soon.
The head of EFP’s Film Sales Support speaks frankly about the challenges facing European film sales at home and abroad.
The Venice bow of the restored version of Tsai Ming-liang’s Golden Lion winner ‘Vive L’Amour’ is just the latest stop on Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s festival tour, showcasing Taiwanese cinema, history and culture.
Amanda Seyfried is on a mission from God in writer-director Mona Fastvold’s audacious, ambitious and mostly excellent avant-garde feminist musical about a real-life 18th century messianic female religious leader ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’.
Marianne Faithfull died while making the arty swansong documentary ‘Broken English’, which is hampered by too much stylistic trickery but still delivers a rich mixtape of music, memories and boho-rock royalty.
A farcical crimefest with a dark side, Park Chan-wook’s ‘No Other Choice’ amplifies the inhumanity of modern industry and the utter ruthlessness of salaried work in an engaging film full of unexpected twists.
Toni Servillo shines in a memorable, tragi-comic performance as the president of Italy in Paolo Sorrentino’s crowd-pleasing Venice opener ‘La Grazia’, an often funny, sometimes moving tale of the Numero Uno’s loneliness, inner doubts and obsessions and his inability to make up his mind on difficult legislation like euthanasia.
Darren Aronofsky’s violent screwball tragedy might be his most “mainstream” movie to date, but it displays the intensity and darkness that’s become his calling card.
Stefan Dordevic’s sensitive doc portrait of grief won top honors at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival.
Past traumas are at the center of Zijad Ibrahimovic’s documentary ‘The Boy from the River Drina’, screened in Locarno’s Panorama Suisse section.
Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan reteam for an amiably laugh-filled comedy that brings the body-switch hi-jinks to a new generation of misunderstood teenagers.
The gags fly fast and furious as Liam Neeson and director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer revive the outrageous film and TV franchise from Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker.
Marvel’s original superhero team once again falters in a big-screen adaptation, one that’s heavy on period gloss but light on engaging characters.
Stories told “honestly and unapologetically” proved a winning strategy at the 6th Amman Intl Film Festival – Awal Film, an intimate, carefully programmed showcase for cinema from the Arab countries and beyond that is asserting itself as a major cultural event in the region.
When documaker Areeb Zuaiter in the U.S. stumbles across the Internet videos of daredevil Ahmad, a teenage parkour athlete in Gaza, they begin a heartfelt long-distance friendship that becomes entwined with the filmmaker’s sense of belonging to her mother’s Palestinian homeland, in the fascinating and revealing meeting of worlds, Yalla Parkour.
From a cash rebate up to 45% for foreign productions shooting in Jordan to educational programs to develop filmmakers and audiences, Jordan’s Royal Film Commission has become a leading force in the MENA region for film culture.
With 150 film submissions, it’s already a win to be among the projects selected at the Amman Film Industry Days.
Amman International Film Festival – Awal Film (AIFF) raises the curtain on Arab and international films for the 6th time, during a pause in Mideast hostilities and the ongoing tragedy in Palestine.
This latest entry roars to life only when humans are directly facing dino-danger – and it takes far too long to get them there.
The cars go vroom but the characters fail to register in this technically proficient and dramatically vacant auto-racing saga.
Some of the best discoveries of Asian cinema at Cannes this year took place in the Classics programme, with overlooked auteurs from marginal countries receiving belated acclaim.
The diversity of art was a running theme at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, where an Iranian filmmaker won the Palme d’Or and Japan emerged strong.
Outspoken Iranian director Jafar Panahi takes the Palme d’Or with his daring ‘It Was Just an Accident’.
Never has the world felt closer to the threats of rising fascism described by George Orwell than now, as filmmaker Raoul Peck (‘I Am Not your Negro’) lucidly shows in his new documentary ‘Orwell: 2+2=5’.
En la competencia por la Palma de Oro, el 3er. largometraje de la cineasta española Carla Simón, Romería, ofrece un apasionante drama familiar que gira en torno a una joven en su búsqueda por la verdad sobre la muerte prematura de su padre.
Jafar Panahi has never been more explicit in denouncing the torture political prisoners are subjected to in Iran, or the furious longing for revenge that haunts the state’s victims, than in ‘It Was Just an Accident’.
Kirill Serebrennikov’s muscular biopic ‘The Disappearance of Josef Mengele’ about the elusive Nazi fugitive is a real-life horror story, sprawling at times but powered by strong performances and great visual swagger.
Stéphane Demoustier directs an elegant film about the dilemma of creators on a real-life project.
El thriller argentino ‘Más allá del olvido,’ dirigido por Hugo del Carril, recibe una merecida actualización en Cannes Classics, 70 años después de su estreno.
The Argentinean thriller directed by Hugo del Carril ‘Beyond Oblivion’ gets a well-deserved brush-up at Cannes Classics, 70 years after its release.
Since 2004, the Cannes Film Festival has actively devoted part of its programming to restored gems, via the Cannes Classics strand.
When it comes to mob stories, Barry Levinson’s altos know the words but not the music.
Writer-director Brady Corbet’s monumental period drama about a tortured genius of modernist architecture, ‘The Brutalist’ is ponderous and bloated, but visually stunning and superbly acted.
This adaptation of the Broadway musical – the first half, anyway – offers a lot of craft but not enough magic.
Director Walter Salles and actress Fernanda Torres relive the terrors of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and one woman’s resistance to silence in ‘I’m Still Here’, a gripping, elevating drama about making truth known and rebuilding a life when all seems lost.
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.
The Berlin International Film Festival’s 75th anniversary had a hard time overlooking the political turbulence in the world.
Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy closer ‘Dreams (Sex, Love)’ grabbed the Golden Bear for its portrait of a 15-year-old girl’s first crush and the intimacy of desire.
Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo returns to Berlin competition for the seventh time with ‘What Does That Nature Say to You’, an amusing boyfriend-meets-girlfriend’s-family tale illustrating the artist’s need to reject materialism.
Norway won the Golden Bear this year in Berlin with the endearingly awkward ‘Dreams’ (‘Drømmer’), the final installment in Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy about contemporary relationships.
‘Monk in Pieces’ is a fragmentary but highly engaging documentary portrait of Meredith Monk, trailblazing icon of New York City’s experimental arts and music scene.
A telepathic schoolgirl unwittingly discovers some disturbing family secrets in German writer-director Frédéric Hambalek’s sharp-witted satirical comedy ‘What Marielle Knows’.
The thrill isn’t exactly gone from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it surfaces all too infrequently in this latest installment, which feels both thin and overstuffed.
Marion Cotillard channels her inner Bette Davis to maximum effect in “The Ice Tower”, French auteur Lucile Hadžihalilovic’s relentlessly dark, glacially paced and emotionally forbidding adaptation of the Snow Queen fairytale.
Burhan Qurbani’s madly original revamping of ‘Richard III’ is a riotous sensory experience of uninterrupted energy that pushes Shakespearian evil to the limit, in the story of two Arab gangster families.
The 54th edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam served up a cosmopolitan banquet of punky Balkan bio-drama and chilly Baltic brooding, arty African essay-films and mind-bending Mexican animation.
In her sprawling but boldly original debut feature ‘Red Stars Upon the Field’, Laura Laabs turns the hidden skeletons of German history into a maximalist magical murder mystery tour.
Portuguese documentary-maker José Filipe Costa swerves towards fictional-feature territory in ‘Our Father – The Last Days of a Dictator’, a stylistically measured yet quietly glorious character study of the ousted tyrant Salazar.
Indonesian filmmaker Harung Bramatyo makes his first foray at a top-ranked international festival with “Gowok: Javanese Kamasutra’, a visually arresting cross-generational melodrama charting an appre’tice sex tutor’s entangled emotions about love and emancipation.
Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal channel the spirit of cult modernist Robert Walser in this strange, caustic “repainting” of his novel about a beleaguered assistant.
Two troubled teenage sisters share a spookily close bond in actor turned director Ariane Labed’s patchy but atmospheric feature debut ‘September Says’.
TFV spoke to IFFR’s directors, Vanja Kaludjercic and Clare Stewart, about the 2025 edition and what they have planned beyond that.
A woman repeatedly fails a Captcha test and starts to wonder whether she is, in fact, a robot in the high concept identity crisis drama, I’m Not a Robot.
Just released in the U.S., ‘Oceans Are the Real Continents’ is an exquisite love poem to Cuba, where three generations struggle to survive 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.
‘Until the Orchid Blooms’ is a fine exploration of the battle between modernism and tradition set in a Cambodian community.
As Saudi Arabia’s film industry continues to grow, Hamzah Jamjoom is playing a part in shaping its future.
Bowing at the Singapore International Film Festival, Chen-hsi Wong’s second feature ‘City of Small Blessings’ is a film of delicate visuals and nuanced performances, but uncertain messaging.
A vengeful labourer’s plan to kill his manipulative foreman gives way to empathy for the rural poor in lawyer-turned-filmmaker Murat Firatoglu’s solid directorial debut.
A troubled, politically entangled premiere in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori has partly overshadowed Rusudan Glurjidze’s wistful Georgian comedy that cleverly targets Georgian-Russian relations.
The director of Georgia’s International Film submission ‘The Antique’ discusses the film’s difficult Venice debut and modern-day censorship from Russia.
TFV spoke with Mohammad Rasoulof about his latest film, the award-winning ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’.
Returning after last year’s dramatic cancellation, the 45th edition of the long-running Cairo festival had a rich international program but a special focus on strong films from Africa, the Middle East, Palestine and Egypt itself.
The Cairo jury gave their main prize to Romanian director Bogdan Muresanu’s tragicomic Cold War period piece ‘The New Year That Never Came’, but local writer-director Noha Adel earned the most awards and warmest reviews with her bittersweet female-driven ensemble drama ‘Spring Came Laughing’.
The Ukrainian director of accidental one-shot war documentary ‘Real’ talks to The Film Verdict about war and peace, boycotting Russian propaganda, and Donald Trump’s prospects for ending the conflict.
‘Shadow Scholars’ introduces a serious issue plaguing academia, but the Eloise King documentary isn’t quite ready to point a finger at the African component of the problem.
Delivered in his typically playful style, John Smith’s latest film, Being John Smith, is a wry reflection on the conventionality of his name dotted with radical flourishes.
The outgoing head of IDFA, the world’s biggest documentary festival, Orwa Nyrabia insists non-fiction cinema must balance pragmatism and radicalism, mainstream and marginal voices.
A stubborn boy searches all over Palestine for a lost pigeon in ‘Passing Dreams’, Rashid Masharawi’s unexpectedly gentle, non-confrontational allegory about the state of the country.
The new man behind the 45th festival wants films to be seen beyond central Cairo.
200 miles from the Egypt-Gaza border, the city on the Nile prepares to open the curtain.
Thomas Riedelsheimer brings land artists and physicists together in a considered, densely packed doc celebrating the elusive nature of light as a medium.
The Maw Naing’s second fiction feature, ‘MA – Cry of Silence’, is a riveting cri du coeur about life under authoritarian rule in Myanmar, seen through the struggle of aggrieved factory workers against their abusive employers.
Several generations of women are stalked by the same creepy family curse in Spanish director Pedro Martín-Calero’s stylish, prize-winning psycho-horror debut ‘The Wailing’.
Mike Leigh returns from a lengthy excursion shooting period films to the kind of chamber piece he excels in, in ‘Hard Truths’, a small story about family dysfunction magnified into high drama by Mariane Jean-Baptiste’s formidable lead performance as a wife and mother going over the edge.
Costa-Gavras, in top form at 91, starts another revolution, this time about death, with ‘Last Breath’.
Cuando la despensa está vacía, una familia de clase media en un país latinoamericano sin nombre, primero pasa hambre y luego se vuelve salvaje en ‘Zafari’. La espeluznante fábula distópica de Mariana Rondón hará que los espectadores no quieran cenar.
Un ensayo imaginativo y fascinante sobre el feminismo y la maternidad, ‘La virgen roja’ de Paula Ortiz presenta a una inolvidable Najwa Nimri como una madre infernal y dominante que ve a su brillante hija de 16 años como una escultura que ha creado para cambiar el mundo en la España de los años 30.
Una historia conmovedora y divertida sobre dos mujeres solitarias que se conectan a través de la división de clases, con la actuación excepcional de Paulina Garcia como una matrona rica y mandona que se desliza hacia la demencia.
Festival favorite Kiyoshi Kurosawa remakes his own 1998 revenge thriller ‘The Serpent’s Path’ as a tasteful psychological horror film set in France, whose top-notch, mixed Franco-Japanese cast makes it worth watching.
One of the most prominent Latin American film industries is under the chainsaw.
Vibrant flamenco music redeems a weak narrative in Antón Alvarez’s directorial debut.
Australian stop-motion master Adam Elliot is back with his touching, humane second feature ‘Memoir of a Snail’, featuring the voice of Sarah Snook.
2024 awards race takes shape as TIFF brings stars and prestige to the red carpet.
The long, hot summer seemed reluctant to end as crowds returned to the Lido to see the stars and the Venice film selection.
The birth of Italian porn films in the 1980’s is told as a sentimental, gently humorous biopic about porn entrepreneur Riccardo Schicchi in ‘Diva Futura’, a well-written romp made to cash in on its airbrushed sketches of adult film stars Moana Pozzi, Cicciolina and Eva Henger.
Taiwan-born and New York-based producer Alex C. Lo seems to be everywhere on the A-list festival circuit.
A kidnap thriller rooted in surveillance, voyeurism and the unkindness of strangers, Yeo Siew Hua’s third feature ‘Stranger Eyes’ is the first ever Singaporean film to compete for the Golden Lion in Venice
Choosing a narrative style as austere and unforgiving as her OB-GYN heroine, rising Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili (‘Beginning’) plumbs the depths of female suffering and self-sacrifice in ‘April’, a festival film which, like its protag, is destined to be admired more than loved.
Starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature ‘The Room Next Door’ is a minor-key but quietly profound meditation on love and death, pain and glory.
A retired military sniper tries to atone for his murderous past in ‘Phantosmia’, Philippine auteur Lav Diaz’s poetic, reflective, modest yet visually captivating study of guilt and redemption.
Ageing bad-boy auteur Harmony Korine’s latest experimental art-punk feature ‘Baby Invasion’ is a visually impressive but ultimately hollow exercise in jaded hipster nihilism.
Three doctors of different political views struggle to treat soldiers returning from the front during WWI and combat a new menace, the Spanish flu, in director Gianni Amelio’s grimly shocking film about war’s after-effects, ‘Battleground’.
French writer-director duo Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma go back to the 1990s with their operatic but flawed coming-of-age saga ‘And Their Children After Them’, adapted from a prize-winning novel.
A horse racing champion embarks on a surreal gender-blurring ride in Luis Ortega’s bumpy but stylish, colourful, enjoyably goofy comedy thriller ‘Kill The Jockey’.
The life, politics, music and relationship of cultural idols and revolutionary artists John Lennon and Yoko Ono are brilliantly blasted onscreen amid exploding shards of 1970’s Americana in Kevin Macdonald’s and Sam Rice-Edwards’ irresistibly original and high-energy documentary, ‘One to One: John & Yoko’.
Brazilian director Petra Costa explores how religious faith can become a dangerous political weapon in ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics’, the gripping sequel to her Oscar-nominated ‘The Edge of Democracy’.
TIFF’s slate of European cinema ranges from provocative documentaries to pulse-pounding genre thrills.
Sarajevo Film Festival’s 30th edition was a starry affair, balancing stories from the Balkan region’s dark past with signposts to a brighter future.
The Romanian ‘Three Kilometers to the End of the World’ by director Emanuel Pârvu took home the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Feature Film.
Fresh from awards in Locarno, Georgian director Tato Kotetishvili spoke about integrating reality and trusting in magic with debut feature Holy Electricity.
Santa Claus is not coming to town in Emir Kapetanovic’s bittersweet comic road movie ‘When Santa Was a Communist’, which is based on an absurd true story in the Balkan region’s ongoing culture wars.
Beloved American actor John Turturro spoke of depicting eccentrics, early typecasting, and the realities of mental health care to a rapt masterclass audience in Sarajevo.
The Oscar-winning director of ‘Sideways’, ‘About Schmidt’, ‘Nebraska’ and ‘The Holdovers’ came to Sarajevo Film Festival for a masterclass talk and gala screening.
The Oscar-winning writer-director of ‘American Fiction’ gave a lively masterclass and hosted a gala screening as part of the Balkan-region film fest’s 30th anniversary edition.
A lively documentary from Greek director Fil Ieropoulos, ‘Avant-Drag!’ salutes the radical roots and ongoing bravery of queer performers who defy gender norms, especially in more conservative societies.
Marco Tullio Giordana deals solidly with family drama and music in Locarno premiere ‘The Life Apart’.
Slovenian writer-director Sonja Prosenc explores the tragicomic extremes of wealth and privilege in her sprawling but impressive social satire ‘Family Therapy’.
A young woman learns some bittersweet life lessons about love and family in Oscar-winning Bosnian director Danis Tanovic’s latest sunny but slight glum-com ‘My Late Summer’.
Finding universal emotion in a singular case study, director Maja Novakovic’s painterly debut feature ‘At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking’ is a hauntingly beautiful meditation on loss and loneliness.
One last memory of a Yugoslavia that no longer exists becomes a site of obsessive return in Iva Radivojevic’s elegantly narrated reconstruction.
In the impressive ‘Listen to the Voices’, Maxime Jean-Baptiste presents a sobering look at trauma, blackness, and violence in a Guianese neighbourhood.
Ramon Zürcher’s utterly distinctive talent for twisting the domestic into the uncanny gains intensity in a cutting psychological horror as thrilling as it is elliptical and dark.
Mar Coll returns to the Locarno Festival to explore the limits of modern motherhood in Mothers Don’t (Salve María), an intimate and empathetic film.
The 58th edition of KVIFF featured Kafka-esque comedy, a strong international program and some controversial prize choices.
A backwoods bachelor party becomes a fight to the death in Canadian writer-director Annick Blanc’s uneven but gripping feminist thriller ‘Hunting Daze’.
The island of Malta adds a Mediterranean-themed film festival in its quest to make the film industry a pillar of its economy.
Turkish auteur Zeki Demirkubuz’s ‘Life’ (‘Hayat’) with its caustic social critique and a quietly angry feminist message won the top prize at the second edition of the Mediterrane Film Festival.
A Hungarian dressmaker does what she can to survive and resist the power abuses of the ‘40s Slovak State fascist militia in Iveta Grofova’s dark, evocative drama.
British-Maltese musician, soundtrack composer and record label boss James Vella talks to The Film Verdict about his deep connections to Maltese music, cinema and culture.
An enthralling doc on Czech photographer Libuse Jarcovjakova, whose candid, diaristic images show a communist Prague on the margins, and life on her own terms.
Expert location manager and line producer Joseph Formosa Randon has worked on the top foreign shoots in Malta.
Currently head of the jury at Mediterrane Film Festival, the UK-based writer-director Jon S. Baird talks to The Film Verdict about his upcoming projects, his Scottish roots and his personal connections to Malta.
On a break from Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival, The Film Verdict takes a rare peek inside the studio complex where Game of Thrones, Troy, Assassin’s Creed, Napoleon and both Gladiator films were shot.
Mediterrane Film Festival’s new artistic director, Teresa Cavina, turns her attention to Malta and the Mediterranean in this interview with TFV.
Produced by Emma Stone, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s uneven but impressively bold passion project ‘I Saw the Tv Glow’ celebrates gender-queer liberation using cult TV homages and hallucinatory horror elements.
An engaging Romeo and Juliet romance between rich and poor Punjabis slowly reveals its darker side in Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s laid-back but ultimately devastating social critique. ‘Dear Jassi’.
The hunters get captured by the game in ‘Hunters on a White Field’, Swedish writer-director Sarah Gyllenstierna’s classy horror-tinged thriller about the dark side of macho bloodsports.
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (‘I Am Not Your Negro’) once again makes masterful use of the documentary form as a vehicle for social and political commentary in ‘Ernest Cole: Lost and Found’, an intense viewing experience that leaves its mark long after the last photo fades.
Sean Baker’s fizzy Cinderella tale about a Brooklyn lap dancer who falls for a Russian playboy won this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Michel Hazanavicius’s (‘The Artist’) long-cherished animation project ‘The Most Precious of Cargoes’, bowing in Cannes competition, nimbly combines a classic, grim fairy tale with the horrors of the Holocaust in a well-made but sentimental tale whose audience is unclear.
Dissident filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof denounces the bloody repression of protests by Iranian authorities and the Revolutionary Guard in ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’, his most angrily outspoken film yet.
Featuring nuanced performances from its leads, Payal Kapadia’s tender relationship drama ‘All We Imagine As Light’, about three women working in a Mumbai hospital, is the first Indian film to compete for the Palme d’Or in more than three decades.
Another genre-bending fantasy from Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, ‘Grand Tour’ takes the viewer on a dreamy ride through colonial Asia in 1918, though the present day often pushes through the whimsical story of two characters chasing each other across Asia.
Mahdi Fleifel’s masterful feature debut ‘To a Land Unknown’ marks a new chapter in Palestinian cinema with its harsh yet empathetic walk in the brutal world of being an Arab refugee in Greece.
Bowing in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, Truong Minh Quy’s third feature ‘Viet and Nam’ leans more on innovative imagery and historical allegory than its underwritten story and characters.
In the lush ‘Parthenope’, which he has called his first “feminine epic”, Paolo Sorrentino captures the passion and decadence, the misery, tragedy and baroque riches of his native Naples.
Veteran cult Canadian director David Cronenberg channels personal feelings of grief, loss and enduring love into his latest underpowered but absorbingly weird techno-gothic thriller, ‘The Shrouds’.
Boris Lojkine’s tale of a Guinean immigrant in France, ‘The Story of Souleymane’, is a vigorously edited piece of cinema with an outstanding performance by first-time actor Abou Sangare.
Ali Abbasi’s portrait of a young monster, ‘The Apprentice’, wisely chooses a humorous key in which to chronicle Donald Trump’s formative years as a businessman and how lawyer Roy Cohn helped his empire get its crooked start, though well-informed viewers will find nothing much new.
Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley co-star in French director Coralie Fargeat’s wild Cannes contender ‘The Substance’, a gloriously tasteless but finely crafted feminist body-horror fairy tale.
The shamanic and environmentalist struggle of the Yanomami tribe is treated with knowledge and respect in this visually attractive documentary.
Despite a few bumpy moments, actor-director Noémie Merlant’s gory feminist horror comedy ‘The Balconettes’ paints a rowdy, richly imagined portrait of three ladies on fire.
Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldaña show off their song-and-dance skills in French director Jacques Audiard’s audacious Mexican musical thriller ‘Emilia Pérez’.
Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe reunite with ‘Poor Things’ director Yorgos Lanthimos for ‘Kinds of Kindness’, a slight but fun triple-decker sandwich of macabre absurdism.
Yuumi Kawai delivers a storm of a performance as a young bipolar woman struggling with Japan’s unspoken social norms in “Desert of Namibia”, Japanese filmmaker Yoko Yamanaka’s stunning sophomore effort.
Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating neo-Roman epic ‘Megalopolis’ is a muddled misfire of overcooked kitsch and undercooked ideas.
In ‘Bird’ Andrea Arnold once again shows she has the magic keys – in this case Franz Rogowski’s piercingly tender bird-man, and Barry Keoghan’s manically affectionate drug-dealer dad — to extract drama, fantasy and authentic emotion from characters living on the lowest rungs of English society.
French writer-director Agathe Riedinger’s coming-of-age Cannes contender ‘Wild Diamond’ is an unpolished gem, but it sparkles with lusty energy and strong performances.
A prestigious award and well-earned recognition goes to a sensitive and communicative film critic.
A Palestinian and an Israeli boy bond over surfing in a vivid if familiar story from the Second Intifada that today feels more than slightly unread.
Nada Alhaidan takes us through the 10th anniversary edition, which is spotlighting Indian cinema and a Science Fiction Hub along with its focus on local production.
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.
Berlin’s transitional year unfolded uncertainly amid a dire world political situation and an imminent leadership change at the festival.
Featuring wordless performances by a heavily disguised Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ is a boldly surreal Bigfoot comedy with surprising emotional depth.
Aliyar Rasti’s contemplative fable searches for a better future in the vast Iranian countryside.
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 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.
The voices of three women give authenticity to ‘Memories of a Burning Body’, premiering in the Panorama section at the Berlinale.
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 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.
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.
German director Andreas Dresen’s biopic of anti-Nazi activist Hilde Coppi, ‘From Hilde, With Love’ is diligent and thoughtful but too tastefully restrained.
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.
Celebrated stage dramatist Annie Baker paints childhood as a midsummer daydream full of tragicomic adult behaviour in her droll, charming film debut ‘Janet Planet’.
Aaron Schimberg’s darkly funny body-horror fairy tale ‘A Different Man’ takes a satirical scalpel to the beastliness of beauty.
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.
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.
Three very different films from Japan, India and Australia won Rotterdam’s Tiger Awards, underlining the festival’s range of new talent.
Kazakh writer-director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s stylish but brutal neo-western thriller ‘Steppenwolf’ takes place once upon a time in the Wild East.
TFV correspondent Max Borg investigates the Manetti-verse and how the Italian duo scored a Focus program at this year’s IFFR.
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.
‘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.
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.
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’.
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.
An absurdist, Gothic twist takes Jonathan Ogilvie’s coming-of-age comedy and New Zealand post-punk subculture origin story into delightfully uncharted territory.
The mainstream and the niche coexist at IFFR this year under artistic director Kaludjercic and managing director Stewart.
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
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.
The Duhok International Film Festival held a successful, vibrant 10th edition in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
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.
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.
Two of El Gouna Film Festival’s leading ladies discussed Yousra’s film career in a special masterclass.
Director Lucy Kerr’s feature debut ‘Family Drama’ is slender and elusive, but highly atmospheric and hauntingly strange.
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
El Gouna is screening eight Sudanese shorts from the ’70s and ’80s to retell a forgotten chapter of African film history.
Marwan Hamed’s work cannot be separated from the industry aspects of his successful film career.
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.
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’.
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.
Luminous hand-painting animates a famed Polish tale of female defiance in a rural world of predatory opportunism and survival.
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.
Festival confirms dates will be December 14 – 21.
Marco Mueller will direct the Asia-Europe Festival with Jerome Paillard handling the industry side.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
Director Marc Isaacs takes a bumpy but engaging journey into post-Brexit England in his eccentric docu-fiction pageant ‘This Blessed Plot’.
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.
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.
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.
Lina Soualem is touring global festivals with her very personal documentary’ Bye Bye Tiberias’, in “a moment of great tragedy and despair”.
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..
Director Katrin Rothe’s animated bio-documentary hybrid ‘Johnny & Me’ brings to life the visually striking photomontage work of pioneering political artist John Heartfield.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Austrian documentary maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s symphonic Covid chronicle ‘The Standstill’ plays like a slow-motion disaster movie with immersive widescreen visuals.
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’.
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.
‘My Lost Country’ is a personal documentary in which the director Ishtar Yasin uses multiple tools in a moving portrait of her Iraqi father.
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’.
Canadian director Henry Bernadet paints a sunny patchwork portrait of multicultural Montreal in his collaborative teen-driven docu-drama ‘Gamma Rays’.
Víctor Erice maestro del cine español recibe el Premio Donostia en el SSIFF.
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.
Australian writer-director Kitty Green takes a hellish holiday in the badlands of toxic masculinity with her punchy feminist Outback thriller ‘The Royal Hotel’.
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.
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 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.
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’.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
Infidelity is followed by murder in glamorous Paris in Woody Allen’s smooth-as-silk 50th film ‘Coup de Chance,’ shot entirely in French.
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’.
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.
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
Aardman’s beloved duo Wallace & Gromit return in a demanding but fun VR experience that is part of the 2023 Venice Immersive competition.
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.
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.)
‘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.
Emotional highs and lows marked a politically charged Sarajevo edition that saw one day cancelled in solidarity against gender-based violence.
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.
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.
Belfast-born documentarian Mark Cousins, returning to Sarajevo after 29 years, gave a masterclass on his career and creative inspirations.
Globally feted Scottish writer-director Lynne Ramsay has carved a slender but unique body of work shaped by uncompromising attitude and aesthetic flair.
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
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.
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.
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.
A man learns of his own imminent death in iNTELLIGENCE, a strikingly graphic meditation on a curtailed life and the allure of immortality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Espectáculo a diario. 36 filmes en la retrospectiva mexicana en el Festival de Locarno
Locarno celebrates the elegant, contemplative work of renowned Asian filmmaker and artist Tsai Ming-liang.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
From heart-breaking performances to queasy satire, from Pedro Costa to Christopher Lee, there was something for everyone in this year’s KVIFF shorts.
German filmmaker Jan Soldat explains his fascination with cinematic death scenes and the iconic actors who star in them.
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.
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’.
Familiar and forgettable, this mediocre animated feature is destined to sink to the bottom of the ocean.
The Geneva-born director is back in Karlovy Vary with his new William Shatner documentary.
CineVerdict: Kudos para José Iñesta, fundador de Pixelatl, un porrista de la animación es galardonado con Premio de la Industria MIFA en 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.
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
Los cortos mexicanos van al Festival de Animación de Annecy, imaginativos y atrevidos, esperan hacer una gran impresión
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
Women filmmakers swept most of the top awards from Competition to Un Certain Regard and Critics’ Week.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
The combined talents of Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and veteran indie auteur Todd Haynes are largely wasted on humdrum Cannes competition contender ‘May December’.
‘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’.
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.
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.
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.
Malaysian writer-director Amanda Nell Eu’s groundbreaking Cannes premiere ‘Tiger Stripes’ is an offbeat body-horror monster movie with sharp feminist claws.
This documentary about astronauts and the doctor that administers to them finds quiet profundity within the mechanics of interplanetary bodies.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Babatunde Apalowo’s masterful international debut examines a real Nigerian life engaged in a denial of love and its pleasures.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’
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.
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.
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’.
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
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.
The Estonian filmmaker talks about the unwittingly timely release of ‘Kalev’.
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.
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.
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
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.
El maestro mexicano Alejandro G. Iñárritu (‘Birdman’, ‘The Revenant’) hace un paréntesis para un proyecto muy personal con matices autobiográficos y cinematográficos.
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.
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.
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.
Documentaries by Lea Glob, Simon Chambers and Angie Vinchito, all major prizewinners, show the diversity and topicality of the post-pandemic Dutch festival.
Writer-director Asimina Proedrou’s grimly compelling debut feature ‘Behind The Haystacks’ is a contemporary Greek tragedy about family conflicts and border tensions.
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.
La más reciente película del director catalán y especialista en horror Jaume Balagueró es una desordenada y casi incoherente historia de surgimiento diabólico.
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 65th edition of East Germany’s longest-running independent film festival offered a lively mix of parties and premieres, critical voices and formal experiments.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Jung Woo-sung’s accomplished directorial debut is a South Korean actioner brimming with inventive flash that marks him as a filmmaker to watch.
Laura Baumeister’s feature debut is a critical and compassionate portrait of lives on the precarious edge of Nicaraguan society.
A caustically funny and sharply perceptive portrait of adolescence and the toxic perils of obsessive cinephilia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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’.
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
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.
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.
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’.
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’.
Actor-director Christos Passalis draws on his Greek Weird Wave roots for ‘Silence 6-9’. a cryptic but mostly impressive debut feature.
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’.
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.
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.
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’.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
Laetitia Wright and Tamara Lawrence play twisted sisters in director Agnieszka Smoczy?ska’s uneven but beguiling true story ‘The Silent Twins’.
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.
Actor turned director Owen Kline’s assured debut feature is a slimy, grimy comedy of failure and awkwardness.
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.
Korean cult director Park Chan-wook takes us on the rollicking ride of a deconstructed murder investigation, complicated by obsessive love and betrayal.
Rebellious Russian filmmaker Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s directorial debut offers dynamic imagery and damning commentary about her stifled generation.
Prolific French absurdist Quentin Dupieux delivers low-tar laughs and comic-book gore in his fun but disjointed tenth feature, ‘Smoking Causes Coughing’.
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.
Director Emmanuel Nicot’s assured debut feature ‘Love According to Dalva’ navigates dark subject matter with compassion, warmth and great performances.
Léa Seydoux stars in feted French auteur Mia Hansen-Løve’s slender autobiographical rumination on love and loss ‘One Fine Morning’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Iranian filmmaker Faeze Azizkhani portrays the hazards of making a movie about yourself in a self-referential drama packed with anxiety and irony.
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.
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.
A emotionally fragile schoolgirl spends a revelatory summer with foster parents in director Colm Bairéad’s haunting, prize-winning, Irish-language debut feature.
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.
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 director Mikhaël Hers falls short of his Rohmer-esque ambitions in ‘Passengers of the Night’, a sprawling family drama set in 1980s Paris.
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.
Indonesian director Kamila Andini’s gently feminist historical drama ‘Nana: Before, Now & Then’ is visually exquisite but tastefully timid.
Australian rock duo Nick Cave and Warren Ellis bring their recent lockdown albums to life in Andrew Dominik’s handsome music documentary.
Cult director Peter Strickland’s culinary art-world satire ‘Flux Gourmet’ is enjoyably weird but ultimately undercooked.
French prankster Quentin Dupieux takes a detour into midlife melancholy with his latest gloriously absurd comic fable ‘Incredible but True’.
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.
French debutante director Morgane Dziurla-Petit returns to her home village for the playful and poignant docu-fiction hybrid Excess Will Save Us.
French auteur Jacques Doillon returns to form in this endearing, small-scale chronicle of abuse and friendship between two kids from different social classes.
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.
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.
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.
This colorful portrait of a golden-aged Florida dance troupe doubles as a statement on friendship and female liberation.
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.
In his diaristic portrait of grief during the isolation of lockdown, Fabrizio Maltese has crafted a personal documentary full of universal poignancy.
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.
A keenly observed if somewhat underwhelming chronicle of divorce, and how it upends the life of a teenage girl.
‘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.
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.
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.
A sly, humorous take on the detective genre, set in a placid Uruguayan town where hidden passions rage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
The big prize-winner at Karlovy Vary film festival, As Far as I Can Walk is a modern migrant story with historic literary echoes.