March 11, 2025
Stephen Dalton
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.
March 11, 2025
Alonso Duralde
This adaptation of the Broadway musical – the first half, anyway – offers a lot of craft but not enough magic.
March 3, 2025
Stephen Dalton
A Brooklyn lapdancer falls for a super-rich Russian playboy in ‘Tangerine’ and ‘Red Rocket’ director Sean Baker’s latest walk on the wild side, ‘Anora’.
March 3, 2025
Deborah Young
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.
March 3, 2025
Jay Weissberg
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.
February 24, 2025
TFV Staff
The Berlin International Film Festival’s 75th anniversary had a hard time overlooking the political turbulence in the world.
February 22, 2025
TFV Staff
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.
February 20, 2025
Deborah Young
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.
February 20, 2025
Stephen Dalton
Filmed in schools all across war-torn Ukraine, Kateryna Gornostai’s panoramic documentary ‘Timestamp’ is a deeply moving ensemble portrait of youthful hope and courage.
February 20, 2025
Max Borg
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.
February 19, 2025
Stephen Dalton
‘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.
February 17, 2025
Stephen Dalton
A telepathic schoolgirl unwittingly discovers some disturbing family secrets in German writer-director Frédéric Hambalek’s sharp-witted satirical comedy ‘What Marielle Knows’.
February 17, 2025
Stephen Dalton
Sam Riley and Stacy Martin share dark secrets and smouldering sexual tension in Jan-Ole Gerster’s slow-moving but stylish psychological thriller ‘Islands’.
February 17, 2025
Alonso Duralde
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.
February 16, 2025
Stephen Dalton
Multiple Robert Pattinsons share a risky deep-space mission in ‘Parasite’ director Bong Joon-ho’s visually dazzling but muddled dystopian sci-fi comedy thriller ‘Mickey 17’.
February 16, 2025
Clarence Tsui
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.
February 15, 2025
Stephen Dalton
Director Ido Fluk’s playful period biopic ‘Köln 75’ celebrates the remarkable true story of the teenage German girl who made a landmark jazz concert happen against impossible odds.
February 14, 2025
Deborah Young
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.
February 13, 2025
Stephen Dalton
German writer-director Tom Tykwer returns to the big screen with ‘The Light’, a stylish and ambitious but ultimately shallow family psychodrama set in contemporary Berlin.
February 8, 2025
Stephen Dalton
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.
February 8, 2025
Stephen Dalton
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.
February 5, 2025
Clarence Tsui
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.
February 3, 2025
Clarence Tsui
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.
January 31, 2025
Carmen Gray
Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal channel the spirit of cult modernist Robert Walser in this strange, caustic “repainting” of his novel about a beleaguered assistant.
January 30, 2025
Stephen Dalton
Two troubled teenage sisters share a spookily close bond in actor turned director Ariane Labed’s patchy but atmospheric feature debut ‘September Says’.
January 29, 2025
Max Borg
TFV spoke to IFFR’s directors, Vanja Kaludjercic and Clare Stewart, about the 2025 edition and what they have planned beyond that.
January 14, 2025
Ben Nicholson
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.
January 13, 2025
Patricia Boero
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.
January 13, 2025
Patricia Boero
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.
December 9, 2024
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
‘Until the Orchid Blooms’ is a fine exploration of the battle between modernism and tradition set in a Cambodian community.
December 9, 2024
Adham Youssef
As Saudi Arabia’s film industry continues to grow, Hamzah Jamjoom is playing a part in shaping its future.
December 9, 2024
Clarence Tsui
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.
December 5, 2024
Clarence Tsui
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.
November 29, 2024
Deborah Young
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.
November 29, 2024
Deborah Young
The director of Georgia’s International Film submission ‘The Antique’ discusses the film’s difficult Venice debut and modern-day censorship from Russia.
November 26, 2024
Max Borg
TFV spoke with Mohammad Rasoulof about his latest film, the award-winning ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’.
November 23, 2024
Adham Youssef
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.
November 22, 2024
Stephen Dalton
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’.
November 17, 2024
Stephen Dalton
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.
November 17, 2024
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
‘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.
November 16, 2024
Ben Nicholson
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.
November 16, 2024
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Director Lidija Zelovic’s main assets in the often powerfully meditative documentary ‘Home Game’ are her novelistic voice and strong writing.
November 16, 2024
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Shakespeare’s words and Cheek By Jowl’s directing are the highlights of Sophie Fiennes documentary.
November 14, 2024
Stephen Dalton
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.
November 14, 2024
Deborah Young
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.
November 13, 2024
Adham Youssef
The new man behind the 45th festival wants films to be seen beyond central Cairo.
November 4, 2024
Deborah Young
200 miles from the Egypt-Gaza border, the city on the Nile prepares to open the curtain.
October 28, 2024
Carmen Gray
Thomas Riedelsheimer brings land artists and physicists together in a considered, densely packed doc celebrating the elusive nature of light as a medium.
October 4, 2024
Clarence Tsui
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.
September 29, 2024
Stephen Dalton
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’.
