September 14, 2022
Kevin Jagernauth
Jung Woo-sung’s accomplished directorial debut is a South Korean actioner brimming with inventive flash that marks him as a filmmaker to watch.
September 11, 2022
Kevin Jagernauth
Laura Baumeister’s feature debut is a critical and compassionate portrait of lives on the precarious edge of Nicaraguan society.
September 10, 2022
Kevin Jagernauth
A caustically funny and sharply perceptive portrait of adolescence and the toxic perils of obsessive cinephilia.
September 9, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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.
September 8, 2022
Jay Weissberg
Pre-release hype will be the biggest friend to this mess of a pseudo-biopic that reduces Marilyn Monroe to a disturbed child-woman with Daddy issues, never offering a glimpse of the screen magic notwithstanding Ana de Armas’ impressive recreation.
September 8, 2022
Deborah Young
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.
September 6, 2022
Deborah Young
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.
September 6, 2022
Jay Weissberg
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.
September 5, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Writer-director Carolina Cavalli paints a charming picture of a charmless heroine in her confidently quirky debut feature ‘Amanda’.
September 4, 2022
Jay Weissberg
Penélope Cruz is a joy as a 1970s mother whose free spirit is frozen by her husband’s stereotyped insensitivity, yet other elements of Emanuele Crialese’s film, which is equally focused on the daughter’s certainty she was born the wrong gender, are less transcendent.
September 3, 2022
Jay Weissberg
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.
August 31, 2022
Jay Weissberg
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.
August 20, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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.
August 18, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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.
August 16, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Two unlikely Balkan bikers and a Slavic Pixie Dream Girl share an eventful road trip in ‘Riders’, director Dominik Mencej’s slight but sweet semi-homage to ‘Easy Rider’.
August 15, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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’.
August 11, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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’.
August 10, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Director Santiago Fillol revisits the brutal political climate of 1970s Argentina through the lens of cinema in his dry but elegant period thriller ‘Matadero’.
August 9, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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’.
August 8, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
There’s much to admire in Valentina Maurel’s dramatic depiction of a dysfunctional father and daughter relationship, chiefly its terrific performances
August 6, 2022
Jay Weissberg
Alexander Sokurov indulges his fascination with the corrosiveness of power in this mesmeric, bewildering and often tedious phantasmagoria combining deep fake technology with the graphic arts.
July 12, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Director Jake Paltrow’s multi-character drama about the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, ‘June Zero’ is a bold but muddled patchwork.
July 11, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
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.
July 10, 2022
Deborah Young
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.
July 9, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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’.
July 8, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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’.
July 7, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Austrian director Magdalena Lauritsch’s sci-fi eco-disaster movie ‘Rubikon’ is an admirably ambitious but dramatically flawed debut.
July 6, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Drugs, rap music and reckless hunger for fame prove to be a potent cocktail in Czech writer-director Adam Sedlák’s enjoyably cartoonish comedy thriller ‘Banger’.
July 6, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Actor-director Christos Passalis draws on his Greek Weird Wave roots for ‘Silence 6-9’. a cryptic but mostly impressive debut feature.
July 5, 2022
Ben Nicholson
Ofir Raul Graizer’s sophomore feature is a novelistic exploration of duty and companionship that is as vibrant and colourful as it is humane.
July 4, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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’.
July 3, 2022
Deborah Young
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.
June 30, 2022
Stephen Dalton
German writer-director Carolin Schmitz takes a journey from here to maternity in her fresh but slight docu-drama hybrid ‘Mother’.
June 29, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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.
June 29, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Claudia Müller’s dense, cerebral exploration of the Austrian Nobel winner’s life and politics confirms her unique and complex place in European letters.
June 29, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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’.
June 27, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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’.
June 24, 2022
Deborah Young
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.
June 12, 2022
Deborah Young
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.
May 29, 2022
Jay Weissberg
CANNES GRAND PRIX, JOINTLY AWARDED – REVIEWED MAY 27 Lukas Dhont’s gut-wrenching second feature is a stunning ode to adolescent same-sex friendship and a powerful critique of the ways society normalizes aggression while demonizing physical tenderness.
May 27, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Winner of the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard, Sadiq’s delicate first feature explores the destructive force of patriarchy in a Pakistani family and the fallout from a long-unemployed man’s work at an erotic dance theatre.
May 27, 2022
Deborah Young
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.
May 26, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Laetitia Wright and Tamara Lawrence play twisted sisters in director Agnieszka Smoczy?ska’s uneven but beguiling true story ‘The Silent Twins’.
May 26, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Baz Luhrmann restores The King to his throne in his subjective but generous, imaginative and visually opulent rock’n’roll biopic ‘Elvis’.
May 26, 2022
Jay Weissberg
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.
May 25, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Actor turned director Owen Kline’s assured debut feature is a slimy, grimy comedy of failure and awkwardness.
May 24, 2022
Stephen Dalton
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.
May 23, 2022
Deborah Young
Korean cult director Park Chan-wook takes us on the rollicking ride of a deconstructed murder investigation, complicated by obsessive love and betrayal.
May 22, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Rebellious Russian filmmaker Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s directorial debut offers dynamic imagery and damning commentary about her stifled generation.
May 22, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Prolific French absurdist Quentin Dupieux delivers low-tar laughs and comic-book gore in his fun but disjointed tenth feature, ‘Smoking Causes Coughing’.
