Prolific documentarian Mark Cousins has dedicated himself to foregrounding underseen films from around the globe, especially those directed by women sidelined from cinematic history. in some of his best-known work, including the fifteen-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011), and fourteen-hour Women Make Film (2018). The Northern Irish filmmaker’s latest feature documentary A Sudden […]
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.
A brutal rape and murder case in rural India shines a light on deeper problems of corruption, misogyny and inequality in Sandhya Suri’s ponderous but impressive police drama ‘Santosh’.
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.
The third edition of Italy’s international Audiovisual Producers Summit (June 10-12, 2024) wrapped at the Altafiumara Resort & Spa last week. The AVP Summit is a three-day conference dedicated to the Italian and international entertainment industry with attendees coming from production and distribution companies, television networks and digital platforms as well as independent studios and […]
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.
John Krasinski’s sledgehammer whimsy kills whatever charm this celebration of childhood imagination might have possessed.
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.
Haunting and multi-layered, this is a stunning debut doc on death, female resistance and knowledge in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Maria Stoianova draws on her figure-skater father’s ‘80s and ‘90s VHS archive in a poignant debut doc on a Ukraine caught between the illusions of two systems.
Berlin’s transitional year unfolded uncertainly amid a dire world political situation and an imminent leadership change at the festival.
Nepal’s first-ever competition title at the Berlinale, Min Bahadur Bham’s Shambhala is a visually breathtaking, emotionally engaging relationship drama about a young Tibetan’s physical and mental journey across the Himalayas in search of her vanished husband.
Featuring wordless performances by a heavily disguised Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ is a boldly surreal Bigfoot comedy with surprising emotional depth.
The gap between African and Chinese culture proves easier to breach than the perspectives that separate a woman and a man in acclaimed director Abderrahmane Sissako’s ‘Black Tea’, a fascinating love story set in China but one that sadly gets lost in the telling.
Aliyar Rasti’s contemplative fable searches for a better future in the vast Iranian countryside.
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.