As the Cairo International Film Festival opens Nov. 11, artistic director Mohamed Tarek reveals programming choices, regional disruptions, international partnerships and the growing popularity of classic cinema.
In addition to the latest discoveries and high-profile titles, the Cairo International Film Festival is also screening a wide array of older gems in the Cairo Classics sidebar.
Pierre Le Gall’s forthright gay trucker romance is an appealing debut as tender as it is politically frank about modern-day labour.
Daniel Blake Schwartz’s impressive Tribeca winner is a stripped-back, stark but compassionate contemplation of intersecting lives in the eye of America’s drug crisis.
Strong acting carries Sophie Heldman’s classically framed, bleak but engrossing dramatisation of a nineteenth-century British scandal and libel case.
Adam Meeks collabs with an Ohio recovery court for a remarkably naturalistic drama with raw doc touches on the US opioid crisis and two brothers at a crossroads.
In his seventh year as IFFMH’s artistic and commercial director, Sascha Keilholz reflects on how the festival is meeting this moment of global turbulence, and facing the future.
Greek director Jacqueline Lentzou finds fresh dimensions in mysteries of art and the afterlife in a playfully meta portrait of adolescence in an era of activism.
Lili Horvat’s eerie sci-fi on marital breakdown, space conquest and the limits of knowing is absorbing as a mood piece, even as it plays its mysteries a little too safe.
The second oldest film festival in Germany, Mannheim-Heidelberg, is celebrating its milestone 75th edition until November 15.
Under new management, the first edition of the revived FIC Luanda Intl. Film Festival screened a variety of Angolan and African cinema and aimed to grow into a major African event.
Awards at the Luanda International Film Festival in Angola culminated in a national competition win for the true-life story ‘Life of a Street Vendor’.
Angolan writer-director Denis Miala concocts an entertaining comic feature that mildly rebukes the concept of the indigent African dandy.
Docs against state terror took the top Golden Dove awards at a successful DOK Leipzig, under the new stewardship of Ola Staszel.
Adding nine official awards and ten Partnership awards to the 14 Dok Industry awards presented earlier at the festival, DOK Leipzig’s 69th prize ceremony forefronted memorable, often outspokenly political works.
TFV speaks to Jorge Cohen, the director of FIC Luanda.
A team of digital nomads dream of creating a shared paradise in an abandoned Bulgarian hotel in ‘Hotel Utopia’, an engaging, amusing, slightly elusive documentary by German director Julia Groteclaes.
Acclaimed Czech documentarian Helena Trestikova spoke in a DOK Leipzig masterclass about the complexities of decades-long shooting relationships, observation and ethics.
Drawing on 30 years of footage, fimmaker Helena Treštíková assembles an intimate, darkly funny portrait of Czech rock star Bára Basiková, using the passage of time to expose the distance between romantic hopes, domestic realities, and public image.
Asmahan Bkerat’s intimate portrait of an Afro-Palestinian Bedouin family explores how displacement and racism shape three generations’s experience of alienation, generational trauma, and conflicting ideas of home.
In her first stint as DOK Leipzig director, Ola Staszel confronts Germany’s growing East–West divide while navigating political sensitivities over Palestine, funding cuts and the challenges facing documentary cinema.
Sun Xun’s feature animation debut is a visually ravishing, steampunk-infused maximalist allegory about authoritarianism and the transformative power of art.
Lukas Marxt’s mesmeric, surreal documentation of the LA wildfires rejects dialogue and analysis for an immersive, visceral experience of collective labour in a world ablaze.
Andrei Kutsila’s haunting doc weaves testimony, video footage and animation into an unflinching, politically urgent portrait of life for Belarusian activists hunted by the regime.
Kamila Serwicka’s subtle, evocative and courageously revealing debut doc ‘Blossoming’, a portrait of her family as it regroups after the devastation of alcoholism, signals a strong new talent.
Emotional vulnerability is granted as much space as reverence in ‘Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing’, Erik Shirai’s absorbing, handsomely packaged doc window onto a declining Japanese tradition.
Korean director Shin Sun crafts a quietly inquisitive meditation on chance and uncertainty in ‘Nothing Has Happened Yet’, although its romantic preoccupations and later pacing narrow its horizons.
In its latest edition, the Busan International Film Festival offered proof of the Korean film industry’s ruddy health, showcasing very diverse films from new Korean filmmakers, with surging audience numbers and a stellar line-up of guests.
Majid Majidi’s masterful story of a schoolteacher from rural Iran, ‘Midday Meal’, took home top honors at the 31st Busan International Film Festival.
The precisely shot family drama Hinotama: Ball of Fire has a hint of the mystical and mysterious as it creates a suffocating milieu of detachment that is strangely compelling.
The first feature by Korean Academy of Film Arts graduate Kim Si-jin is a delicately designed stop-action animation that is at once funny and moving.
Chinese filmmaker Story Chen makes her bow at Busan with ‘There Will Be Snow’, a futuristic, frosty and strangely forbidding first feature about two former lovers reuniting in their dystopian hometown.
Filmmaker Jang Woo-jin delivers a moving, meditative and masterful paean to mortality in his fourth feature, which bows in Busan’s Vision Korea competition.
Iranian auteur Majid Majidi’s first film in six years, ‘Midday Meal’ is illuminated by Mohammad Rahimi’s dazzling performance as a morally conflicted schoolteacher.
From thrillers and horror to actioners and road movies, genre films have long fueled Korean movies; here programmer Jung Jihye weighs their importance in Busan’s official selection.
Returning to Busan after 15 years, Michelle Yeoh talks about her latest film, Korean movies she loves, and the injury that nearly ended her career.
A subtle celebration of the transformative power of the written word, ‘Sakoto Always’ features three women in very different stages in life.
Youm Kyu-bock lights up Busan’s top-tier competition with a crowd-pleasing, tear-jerking, excellently animated road movie about two animals’ search for a better place to live.
On his second round as Busan’s festival director, Jung Hanseok reaffirms the festival’s mission as a showcase for Asian talent and quality filmmaking, while giving audiences a memorable experience.
The 74th SSIFF was a bright year for Spanish films, Nordic pictures and gay-themed stories.
The big winner at San Sebastian 2026, ‘Tender Loving Care’, reads almost like a summing-up of Mike Leigh’s long and fruitful career.
La directora debutante Fernanda Tovar evita la estética sombría pero no la seriedad en el tema del abuso sexual.
Massih Parsaei soulfully deals with life far from home in his feature debut ‘Lovers Sleep Alone’, screened in San Sebastián’s New Directors competition.
In her first feature film, best-selling novelist Maha Harada captures the quiet grace of Japanese traditions from art to poetry, cherry blossoms to the tea ceremony, avoiding cliché with an evocative sensibility and a modern sense of humor.
Two women from the rural Argentinian countryside make playful actresses in a sincere, emotional, yet stylish first feature from photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti.
El dúo de directores y guionistas españoles Javier Calvo y Javier Ambrossi revisitan la vida y el legado del ícono literario queer Federico García Lorca en esta épica deslumbrante, aunque ligeramente torpe; ha sido galardonada y ahora aspira al Óscar, cuenta con el respaldo de Penélope Cruz y Pedro Almodóvar.
A feckless funeral director wrestles with financial, emotional and existential angst in ‘The Last Goodbye’, an erratic but engaging tragicomedy from Basque writer-director Koldo Almandoz.
Small but engrossing, Mike Leigh’s ‘Tender Loving Care’ casts a harsh light on the underfunded British health and welfare system, which divides even death unequally into its haves and have-nots.
The great English director Mike Leigh might be done with filmmaking after his sixteenth feature ‘Tender Loving Care’, currently playing on the festival circuit.
Religion, patriarchy and dictatorship make a dangerous, sometimes fatal formula for young women in a melodramatic contestant for the Golden Shell
Grotesque, trippy psychological horror abounds along with redundancies in the feature film of Pablo Larrain’s ‘My Sad Dead’, a mixed bag of ghost stories set in contemporary Buenos Aires and an angry guide to Argentina’s social ills, laced with funeral humor.
David Pérez Sañudo returns to San Sebastián with ‘The Harvester’, an engrossing fact-based period piece revolving around a serial killer in the Basque Country.
Spanish writer-director duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi revisit the life and legacy of queer literary icon Federico García Lorca in their ravishing if slightly ungainly epic ‘La Bola Negra’, a prize-winning Oscar hopeful backed by Penélope Cruz and Pedro Almodóvar.
From the deeply personal to the searingly political, Oldenburg returned for 2026 with an array of creative, challenging, and arresting independent films.
Zachary Nichols’ ‘Variations on Violence’ took home the top prize at this year’s Oldenburg Film Festival.
María Aparicio mixes sadness, nostalgia, curiosity and rebellion in an empathetic, subtly political film.
An absent father returns to take his two small children to their missing mother in a simple tale that blossoms into complexities about life and death like a piece of origami in Kazuya Murayama’s charming if at times overreaching ‘The Ballet Lesson’.
A troubled couple find themselves trapped inside a time loop in Spanish director Javier Ruiz Caldera’s twist-heavy, cleverly constructed, darkly funny fantasy thriller ‘5 More Minutes’.
The Taste of Your Scales is an ominous and unsettling fantasy is a coming-of-age story, where a boy learns the truth about the fish factory in which his father works.
Victor Hugo’s classic novel gets an appropriately epic treatment in Fred Cavayé’s massively grand ‘Les Misérables’, starring Vincent Lindon and Tahar Rahim.
Naomi Watts plays a prim suburban housewife with a very dark past in Canadian director Ben Shirinian’s good-looking but heavy-handed debut feature, a based-on-reality period thriller set in 1960s New York.
A Canadian woman wakes from a coma speaking in a Bosnian accent in Foreign Tongue, Boris Mojsovski’s meditation on the immigrant experience draped on a rom-com framework.
An inflammatory video of the Prime Minister provides the McGuffin for Srdjan Janicijevic’s absorbing thriller, You Won’t Believe What Happened Before, which lays bare a world of corruption and moral compromise.
Fatih Akin’s ‘Ghost Song’ (‘Geister’) takes supernatural screen romance to its breaking point, but even those who don’t shed a tear over teenagers’ death wishes will admire the high-class scenery and pacing.
Two brothers looking make a quick buck steal a car from the roadside only to find some unexpected cargo in Stop the Car, a slick moral drama.
A young girl must wrangle a drunken father and a new step-mother in Hello Mother, Byambasuren Ganbat’s charmingly comedic and utterly earnest Mongolian melodrama.
Gender identity, freedom and grief all become entwined in Life After a Lifetime and Endless Rebirths, Leart Rama’s propulsive and emotive short about a young woman clinging to the memory of her disappeared boyfriend.
The festival’s neighboring country is strongly present at San Sebastián 2026, be it with the newer titles or via the very interesting Retrospective.
Famous indie director, Neil LaBute, is celebrated with a retrospective in Oldenburg.
‘The Debut,’ ‘I Play Rocky’ and ‘ Wild Horse Nine’ Vie For People’s Choice Award
The meditative wordless documentary, Strange Neighbors, explores the flow of life on a nature-rich island in the River Elbe and the machine of massive industry that otherwise dominates the waterway.
Bob Marley’s friend, lawyer, and fellow Rastafarian is given the spotlight she typically shuns in Miss Jobson, an unhurried and mellow observational documentary.
In Asphalt Guerilla, Edgar Pera tells the tale of a far-left militant group in Portugal as a dense, mile-a-minute essay film that combines fiction, archive, documentary and AI to compelling effect.
Apocalyptic foreboding permeates the gripping short, Living Grounds, told through a series of long takes, as a fatal accident becomes all too personal for someone attending the scene.
Germany’s premiere independent festival, Oldenburg Film Festival, returns for its 33rd edition.
Political cinema was back with a vengeance on Lido screens, hurling an intense reality check at the complacent.
May el-Toukhy’s dark period piece ‘Woman Unknown’, set at the end of WWII in Denmark, took home the Venice Golden Lion, while protagonist Mathilde Arcel carried off the best actress award.
Laughter and religion coalesce in Giovanni Veronesi’s unusually serious-minded ‘God Laughs’, the closing film of the 2026 Venice Film Festival.
Laurent Lafitte shines as the titular jurist in the legal thriller ‘The Good Lawyer’, screened in Venice’s Out of Competition sidebar before heading to Netflix.
Chinese writer-director Michelle Zhou draws on events from her own life in her elegantly filmed, emotionally charged, queer coming-out drama ‘Big Little Things’.
An accomplished and entertaining potboiler about motherly instincts put to the ultimate test.
Fifty years after the events recounted in ‘Garage Olimpo’, Marco Bechis’s blood-curdling exposé of torture and murder in Argentina at the hands of a brutal military dictatorship, ‘Back to Buenos Aires’ picks up the shattered pieces of the survivors in an equally dark and intense work.
A female sniper is at the center of the darkly exhilarating action thriller ‘No Paradise if You Are Killed by a Woman’, set in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Ali Asgari’s delicate exploration of living and suffering provides a viewpoint from today’s Iran looking out, in his spot-on snapshot of life in times of uncertainy, ‘A Bit of Light’.
A sentimental sci-fi comedy whose earnest heart is undercut by crude laughs.
Director Theo Rollason’s found-footage documentary ‘Queer Edward II’ paints an intimate, absorbing, surprisingly timely portrait of radical gay film-maker Derek Jarman during a stormy political period.
A moving document of struggle and revolution spanning generations inside Iran.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine gets a very personal cinematic treatment in Mykyta Gibalenko’s first feature ‘Camouflage’, inspired by his own experiences.
Irina Ignatiew-Lemke steps up as Managing Director of European Film Promotion
Toronto makes a major industry play amongst its star-studded lineup.
The 2026 edition of Venice Immersive keeps pushing the envelope in terms of what is possible with augmented and virtual reality.
Proving their rambunctious, winning formula is a snug fit for dark times, Sophie Fiennes and philosopher comrade Slavoj Zizek plumb how our world got to where it is, through iconic movies.
A dark family secret is at the core of Paolo Strippoli’s horror-tinged drama ‘The Spiral’, which injects some genre flavor into Venice’s main competition.
Veteran German director Wim Wenders explores the work of prize-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in his finely crafted 3D documentary ‘From Inside Out’, a beautiful if slightly opaque love letter from one maestro of deluxe minimalism to another,
A dark secret could upend an upcoming marriage in May el-Thouky’s vibrant and resonant period piece ‘Woman Unknown’, set at the tail end of World War II in Denmark.
A working class family fallen into poverty becomes embroiled with a wealthy married couple who have a creepy agenda in Lee Chang-dong’s heartfelt depiction of the aftermath of a failed strike, ‘Possible Love’, whose understated delicacy is its power.
Nanni Moretti returns to Venice after 37 years to bow ‘It Will Happen Tonight’, an unrepentantly passionate love story starring Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca.
Noted filmmaker Amos Gitai adds another brick to his lifelong critique of Israeli government policies in ‘The Road to Jericho’, whose call for peace between Arabs and Jews has a striking timeliness as the Iran war rages on.
Nicola Lagioia’s true crime novel comes to cinematic life in a surprising way in Edoardo Gabbriellini’s ‘The City of the Living’, screened in Venice’s Orizzonti competition.
Legendary German director Werner Herzog returns to fictional drama with ‘Bucking Fastard’, an audacious based-on-reality fairy tale starring Rooney and Kate Mara as sisters who share a spookily close bond.
John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play CIA hit men sharing a poignant farewell mission in ‘Wild Horse Nine’, the latest knockout black comedy from ‘In Bruges’ and ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ writer-director Martin McDonagh.
Ashgan El-Hamus’s loosely structured first feature ‘Al Baraneya’ uses a mosaic of scenes from rural Egyptian life to champion both a close-knit community and women’s right to choose their own lives.
David Bowie dazzles in new ways in the immersive installation ‘Bowie: Unseen | Unheard’, unveiled as part of the Venice Immersive program.
As Venice 2026 gets underway, accredited professionals wonder if the event on the Lido is still a worthwhile experience, particularly for freelance journalists.
‘Everytime’ in the Narrative Feature Competition and ‘To Hold a Mountain’ in the Documentary Feature Competition were notable winners at the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, which closed with a screening of the restored version of the Academy Award®-winning film ‘No Man’s Land’ by Danis Tanovic.
Sandra Wollner’s Everytime won the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Feature Film at Sarajevo Film Festival’s star-studded and politically engaged 32nd edition.
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi spoke about keeping the gift of everyday observation alive, and resisting media’s manipulation of reality, in a masterclass at the Sarajevo Film Festival.
German reunification forms the backbone of an intriguing character study in Luise Donschen’s feature debut ‘Tomorrow a Long Time Ago’, screened in Locarno.
Social media collides with the vulnerability of grief in Slovenian writer-director Ursa Menart’s ‘Everything That’s Wrong with You’, a raw, uneven portrait of a vacation friendship between two troubled young women.
A school trip to Naples stirs up strong emotions in Marine Atlan’s forceful feature debut ‘La Gradiva’, the big winner of Cannes’ Critics Week in 2026.
Personal ambition, pill dependency and a chaotic family life make for compelling drama in Rabbit Don’t Run, a drama about a provincial footballer clinging onto a dying career.
Croatian film-maker Dragana Jurišic returns to the Wild East of her war-torn childhood in ‘The Balkan Cowboy’, a charmingly quirky and deeply personal love letter to a lost pioneer of low-budget westerns.
Dear Orchid is a poetic and diaristic documentary, using the perspective of a child to ruminate on fleeing the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.
Less is enough in Zvonimir Juric’s portrait of a family tying up an inheritance on a stormy island, a quiet, modest portrait with a profound payoff.
Florin Serban’s Locarno winner ‘You Don’t Belong Here’ deftly dismantles the reign of amoral masculinity over a Romanian town with the controlled, deliberate precision of a surgical cut.
As unflinchingly personal as it is urgently political, Damir Markovina’s documentary debut ‘We Shall Live Together’ reckons with the ongoing tension of his family’s exile from Mostar in the 90s.
Creativity and second chances populate Nicolas Steiner’s oddball fiction feature debut ‘You Believe in Angels, Mr. Drowak?’, screened in Locarno’s Panorama Suisse sidebar.
A callous scam upends an ageing couple’s dream vacation in Kristina and Petar Valchanov’s acerbic, black-humoured social satire with a surprising heart.
The market side of Sarajevo 2026 is focusing on Switzerland, in a year that promises to be major for the country and its films.
Respected cinematographer Ivan Markovic’s feature debut is a resplendent, rain-washed mood portrait of haves and have-nots in an unfinished luxury housing complex in Cambodia.
Two Bedouin tribes on the Lebanon-Syria border fall out in Rakan Mayasi’s ominous, exquisitely mesmeric feature debut ‘Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep’, which reveals a major directorial voice.
Balkan writer-director Dina Duma’s prize-winning second feature ‘Skateboarding is Not for Girls’ wraps a quietly angry teen-girl empowerment message inside sweet but familiar coming-of-age tropes.
Geneva-born actor Jean-Luc Bideau is in amusingly self-effacing mode in the comedy ‘Happiness Is So Close!’, about an aging thespian.
Filmmaker Lana Daher filmically mimics the chaos, confusion and complexity of her native Beirut’s recent history in a whirlwind of archival montage that is at once stunning and indecipherable.
The Iran war menacing the Middle East was a no-show at Amman’s 7th festival.
“I feel deeply optimistic about the cultural potential in the [Middle East] region,” the British-Egyptian actor and creator of the play ‘Nowhere’ told The Film Verdict.
Cyril Aris’s romcom grounded in Lebanon’s harsh reality ‘A Sad and Beautiful World’ won Amman’s Arab Narrative competition, while in the Arab Feature Documentary race Tawfiq Sabouni’s moving recreation of life in a Syrian prison ‘The Other Side of the Sun’ won three awards.
In a boldly impressionistic sketch teetering between dream and reality, Akinola Davies, Jr. makes a dazzling feature debut with ‘My Father’s Shadow’, a gripping exploration of the bonds between a father and his young sons and the societal forces tearing them apart.
The Amman Film Festival director and co-founder faces new challenges but relies on the community of filmmakers: “We want people who have something to share.”
A child’s endeavor to find baking ingredients in ‘The President’s Cake’ becomes a boldly vivid portrait of life in 90s’ Iraq amid war, foreign sanctions, dictatorship, and childhood, with a commendable young cast and unique visual identity.
Amel Guellaty’s ‘Where the Wind Comes From’ is a vibrant road movie combining humor, fantasy, and charismatic performances of two young people determined to imagine their freedom beyond social restraints and economic crisis.
Doc-maker Marlene Edoyan brings a sensitive and poetic, observational eye to Armenian dreams of past and future on the Georgian border.
An Armenian retirement home theatre troupe tackles Shakespearean tragedy in a warm, deeply human doc by Inna Sahakyan and Ruben Ghazaryan.
Strong lead performances power Cypriot director Tonia Mishiali’s patchily plotted but moving drama of exploitation and resilience.
Karen Avetisyan, Artistic Director of the Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, advocates for a regional cinema that safeguards memory and connects the displaced.
Self-avowed no-budget specialist and indie director Baek Seung-kee mixes absurd comedy, kitschily convincing AI-generated sequences and earnest commentary about the state of cinema in ‘Longtake Onetake Mistake’.
Young Korean auteur Jeong Hyo-jung makes a dazzling feature debut that explores the deadly mystery swirling around a smalltown factory owner.
Revolving around an ominous tree able to bring grudges out into the open, J-horror veteran Takashi Shimizu’s soundly structured suspense thriller bows at BIFAN just days after going on wide release in Japan.
As the Bucheon International Fantasy Film Festival turns 30, its new Korean Cinema programmer Kim Hyung-seok explains why “the divide between art films and genre films is ultimately artificial”.
‘Fjord’, Cristian Mungiu’s layered family drama about the cultural clashes and prejudices of a Norwegian community connected with Park Chan-wook’s jury to win the Cannes Palme ‘Or.
A young woman becomes obsessed with watching porn videos in Marjorie Conrad’s ‘The Joyless Economy’, a tough experiment that challenges audiences to make or withhold judgment.
Director Clio Barnard’s engaging, bittersweet Cannes prize-winner ‘I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning’ depicts a lively bunch group of working-class friends as they enter the stormy seas of adulthood.
El icónico veterano español del cine Pedro Almodóvar ofrece más dolor que gloria en Amarga Navidad, un drama semi-autobiográfico y autocrítico -aunque de forma suave y delicada- en la etapa tardía de su carrera.
Launched in the Director’s Fortnight section in Cannes, Venezuelan director Jorge Thielen Armand’s brooding psychological revenge thriller ‘Death Has No Master’ achieves an excellent atmosphere but gets lost exploring its messy mixture of genres.
A young woman deals with existential upheaval in Eivind Landsvik’s cleverly measured feature debut, the Cannes Directors Fortnight premiere ‘Low Expectations’.
The short-lived Vichy government in France, created in partnership with Nazi Germany during WW2, is brilliantly brought to life through the eyes of a civil servant who makes a career out of conforming to the fascist state, in Emmanuel Marre’s impressive second feature ‘A Man of His Time’.
La muerte no tiene dueño, del director venezolano Jorge Thielen Hedderich, en la Quincena de Realizadores, logra una excelente atmósfera pero la película se pierde al buscar una mezcla de géneros.
Veteran Spanish screen icon Pedro Almodóvar delivers more pain than glory in ‘Bitter Christmas’, a semi-autobiographical and gently self-critical but fairly slight late-career drama.
Arthur Harari’s fascinating and weirdly poignant fantasy ‘The Unknown’ takes body horror to metaphysical levels when an introverted photographer and a mysterious Léa Seydoux awaken from orgasm-induced unconsciousness to find they have exchanged bodies.
Veteran French filmmaker and film-diarist Alain Cavalier draws from his vault of video footage to deliver ‘Thanks For Coming’, a personal, funny and poignant documentary spanning Cannes, cats, companions and cinema.
Notions of identity and seasonal entertainment coalesce in quietly affecting fashion in the Swiss autofiction ‘Summer Drift’, playing in the ACID sidebar at Cannes.
La segunda película de la directora chilena Manuela Martelli es muy efectiva como thriller sobre personas desaparecidas pero estira demasiado sus alegorías políticas.
Award-winning filmmaker Koreeda Hirokazu takes the children’s side in ‘Sheep in the Box’, a lean, engrossing SF story about parents who have lost their son and replace him with an android replica.
Well crafted but inevitably low on surprises, director Steven Soderbergh’s controversial AI-enhanced documentary ‘John Lennon: The Last Interview’ is based on a familiar radio interview that the legendary ex-Beatle recorded just hours before his murder.
Gillian Anderson stars as a veteran horror movie scream queen in Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature ‘Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma’, an uneven but boldly ambitious celebration of vintage slasher films and their psychosexual undercurrents.
Chilean director Manuela Martelli’s sophomore feature ‘The Meltdown’ is highly effective as a missing-person thriller, but stretches its political allegories too far.
The lives of two idealistic women — a visionary French caregiver and a Japanese theater director – briefly overlap in ‘All of a Sudden’, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s long and challenging manifesto against the inhumanity of capitalism and the possibility of a better world.
Art and life take turns imitating each other in a long cascade of intricately interwoven stories in Asghar Farhadi’s ‘Parallel Tales’, part engrossing puzzle and part a repetitively revolving door.
Set in newly divided Germany at the start of the Cold War, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s biographical literary drama ‘Fatherland’ is a visually stunning, superbly acted, minimalist masterpiece.
Low-key but spanning a symphony of disturbing themes from personal relations and wildlife conservation to the threat of war, Koji Fukada’s ‘Nagi Notes’ offers a fascinating, multi-faceted perspective on insular Japan today.
Newcomer Talha Akdogan soars alongside Barry Keoghan and Riley Keough in the Directors’ Fortnight opener “Butterfly Jam”, directed by exiled Russian cineaste Kantemir Balagov.
The Quinzaine artistic director also touches on Quentin Dupieux’s film classes, Sarah Arnold subverting male-oriented genre tropes, finding a spot for Bruno Dumont and courting Radu Jude.
Marking 25 years of Thierry Frémaux at the helm of the festival, Cannes 2026 promises a wide array of discoveries alongside the more familiar names.
Korean director Yu Soyoung reflects on filmmaking after winning a special prize at JEONJU IFF with her feature debut, ‘Water Deer’.
Intense cinephilia, fiery social activism and inventive corporate-backed initiatives converged at the 27th JEONJU International Film Festival, concluding with the stirring political documentary ‘The Longest Night: Namtaeryeong’.
An intimate portrait of two dancers from Serbia and the U.S., Marta Popivoda’s ‘Body in Plural’ inventively describes the human body as a vessel for individual expression, collective action and social change.
Korean filmmaker Jang Yun-mi’s first feature-length documentary, ‘Miari Texas’, is an immersive, empathetic experience about Seoul’s oldest red-light district as demolition nears.
Park Soo-ah and Kang Hye-won vividly evoke the confusion and grief of recently orphaned kids in Kim Yong-cheon’s ‘A Little Life’, one of two recent productions funded by the Jeonju Cinema Project.
If Ruben Ostlund directed ‘My Dinner with Andre’ in Asia, you might get the coolly inquiring ‘Cruel Optimism’, an experimental film commenting on the visual arts scene.
French-educated Korean filmmaker Jéro Yun teases raw emotions and rapturous performances out of his cast in ‘Left Behind’.
JEONJU IFF dedicates special programmes to the late actor Ahn Sung-ki and the up-and-coming festival-acclaimed filmmaker Park Syeyoung.
Revolving around an old teacher-turned-farmer’s doomed attempts to make his cow give milk, Ankur Hooda’s ‘The Calf Doll’ is a canny combination of aesthetics, atmosphere and subtle social analysis.
Winner of the Next Wave award at CPH:DOX, ‘Dream of Another Summer’ is filmmaker Irene Bartolomé’s poetic, pensive and powerful ode to the traumatized Lebanese capital of Beirut.
An isolated rural life is at the center of the quietly compelling Swiss-French documentary ‘The Echo of the Herd’, screened at Visions du Réel.
Jonas Meier explores the veil between perception and reality in the image-centric ‘Social Landscapes’, screened at CPH:DOX.
Technology and nature are the opposites who attract to form the thematic core of Ian Purnell’s ‘Arctic Link’, screened at CPH:DOX.
Crime and punishment, guilt and healing are the big themes treated by writer-director Petra Volpe in the thought-provoking ‘Frank & Louis’, a measured, stylistically impeccable study of two Black prison inmates, one losing his memory through dementia.
Ilker Catak’s drama ‘Yellow Letters’ wins the Golden Bear for Best Film amid a firestorm of unrelated political debate.
Two films about Turkey won the Golden Bear for Best Film and Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 76th Berlin Film Festival.
A boozy party at a seaside villa descends into a delirious explosion of suppressed angst for two slackers and their angst-ridden middle-aged fathers in “Cesarean Weekend”, Iranian indie cinema instigator Mohammad Shirvani’s first feature in 13 years.
Home is definitely not where the heart is in young German writer-director Kai Stänicke’s ‘Trial of Hein’, a ponderous but mostly impressive drama about exile, identity and repressed desire.
A droll delight from Austria, whose wry performance by aging blues player Al Cook made it one of the most popular films in Berlin competition, ‘The Loneliest Man in Town’ once again pushes the documentary envelope in unexpected ways devised by filmmakers Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel.
The issues of living with a relative with cognitive decline are at the core of Lance Hammer’s quietly devastating ‘Queen at Sea’.
Director Faraz Shariat’s second feature ‘Prosecution’ is a stylish, fast-paced, politically charged crime thriller about a young German-Korean state prosecutor targeted by neo-Nazi racists.
Austrian documentarian Ruth Beckermann delves into Ethiopian history by looking into a specific building in the engrossing ‘Wax & Gold’.
Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello co-directs ‘The Ballad of Judas Priest’. a polite but warm-hearted rockucumentary about one of heavy metal’s foundational bands, aided by Jack Black, Ozzy Osbourne, Dave Grohl and other famous fans.
An acclaimed Turkish actress and her theater director husband lose their livelihoods over a petty dispute with the authorities in power in ‘Yellow Letters’, a deeply disturbing tale that struggles to stay on topic.
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?
South African and Bangladeshi films won big at a 55th edition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival embracing global chills and genre thrills.
Highlighting a rich splash of African titles, the South African drama about an elderly goat herder, ‘Variations on a Theme’, topped the awards list at the 2026 International Film Festival of Rotterdam.
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’.
Georgian director Ana Urushadze’s Supporting Role is a wildly eccentric take on fleeting windows for creative ambition, in a worldweary, twilight Tbilisi.
A demon feeds on a mother’s grief in ‘Talking to a Stranger’, a powerful and unsettling piece of Mexican horror.
China’s one-child policy provides the inspiration for Dean Wei and Shiyu Liu’s The Apple Doesn’t Fall…, a meticulous and theatrical apartment-bound family drama told through expressive dance.
A parent-child bond is tested in a supernatural manner in the highly entertaining South Korean film ‘My Daughter Is a Zombie’.
Documentary and fiction are interwoven in ‘La belle année’, a contemplative self-portrait that connects contemporary grief and teenage romantic obsession to tantalising effect.
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.
Tiago Melo brings satirical bite to genre thrills in ‘Yellow Cake’, his delirious sci-fi mix of geopolitics and apocalyptic fears in Brazil’s Northeast.
Bloated but compelling, writer-director Ivo M. Ferreira’s stylish fact-based retro-thriller about a real 1980s terrorist group feels like a Portuguese cousin of ‘One Battle After Another’.
Political upheaval is the backdrop for a fact-based dark comedy in the shape of Samuli Valkama’s ‘The Kidnapping of a President’.
A corruption scandal throws a nun into crisis in Australian-Filipino director James J. Robinson’s debut ‘First Light’, an intriguing, introspective slow-burner.
Writer-director Charlotte Glynn balances hard-nosed grit and tenderness in her quietly devastating portrait of an injured teen gymnast in working-class Pittsburgh.
A luxury Venice hotel is a site of strange death dealings and cryptic dream logic in Juja Dobrachkous’s mesmeric, eccentric sophomore feature.
Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s eerie, stylish techno-horror debut draws us through a library wormhole into a ‘70s scandal around a Benedictine monk’s memory-recording machine.
A small-town Scottish tour guide declares war on a blockbuster TV fantasy show in ‘The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford’, writer-director Seán Dunn’s enjoyably off-beat comedy about grief, depression and obsessive fandom.
Like a delicately composed ecosystem, Othmar Schmiderer’s documentary ‘Elements Of(f) Balance’ is a patchwork of finely tuned vignettes that together form a thoughtful meditation on our relationship with the planet.
TFV inaugurates its Rotterdam 2026 coverage with our customary chat with the festival directors, Vanja Kaludjercic and Clare Stewart.
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 docuseries ‘The Oligarch and the Art Dealer’ provides a gripping look into a high-profile battle in the shadowy realm of the luxury art trade.
The charged atmosphere was felt up and down Main Street.
A father and daughter find their way back to each other in the debut drama ‘Hold Onto Me’.
A couple falls apart as Russia invades Ukraine in this timely exploration of the limits of privilege and empathy in ‘How to Divorce During the War.’
The director of ‘All About the Money’ discusses profiling the radical politics of James ‘Fergie’ Chambers.
A shepherdess takes on the military in ‘To Hold a Mountain’, a documentary about bullets versus beauty.
James “Fergie” Chambers lets it all hang out in this unique portrait of a super wealthy revolutionary.
The fragile independence of a nation is refracted through a working couple in the observant drama ‘Shame and Money’.
Sundance bids farewell to Park City while topical Euro films make their debut.
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.
‘Riverstone’ is a great-looking road movie with deep but questionable politics.
Long considered lost and an urban myth of sorts, ‘Dream of the Red Chamber ‘77’, legendary Chinese filmmaker Chiu Kang-chien’s irreverent, Singapore-set reinterpretation of the Chinese literary classic, re-emerges after nearly five decades as a key curio in the restoration programme at the Singapore Intl. Film Festival.
A gay man returns to his ancestral village and rekindles his relationship with his childhood friend-turned-lover in ‘Cactus Pears’, Indian filmmaker Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s sensitive, bittersweet first feature.
Veteran Singapore actor Lim Kay Tong anchors ‘The Old Man and His Car’, Michael Kam’s sensitive and slow-moving feature debut about a retiree preparing to leave his house, his car and his memories for Canada.
A-list Asian stars, international festival hits, local trailblazers and restored classics converge at the latest edition of the Singapore International Film Festival.
Alex Bakri’s power-conscious documentary ‘Habibi Hussein’ dismantles the feel-good façade of “development work,” revealing the power imbalances, condescension and erasure that underpin a German-led attempt to revive Jenin’s cinema.
Literary ambition and the dangers of artificial intelligence coalesce in Yann Gozlan’s entertaining sci-fi thriller ‘The Residence’.
Blending bold Arab selections, strong youth engagement, major Palestinian films, and a confident curatorial vision, the 46th Cairo International Film Festival delivered a focused and forward-looking edition.
Presided by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the jury of the 46th Cairo International Film Festival bestowed the Golden Pyramid Award on ‘Dragonfly’ directed by Paul Andrew Williams.
‘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.
The Film Verdict continues to spotlight emerging voices in the Arab world, recognising promising filmmakers, actors, and critics whose work is reshaping cinema across the Middle East and North Africa.
The Film Verdict-Cairo International Film Festival Next Generation Award Winners for 2025 honor young Arab talent.
The 2024 Paris Olympics serve as the backdrop for a heartwarming tale of sisterhood in Valentine Cadic’s feature debut ‘That Summer in Paris’.
Nordin Lasfar has made a decent, anodyne documentary from flammable material in ‘Mohammed & Paul – Once Upon a Time in Tangier’.
A new chapter begins for CIFF, as Cairo 2025 introduces festivalgoers to the world of immersive experiences and augmented reality.
Matabeleland may be her first feature documentary but Nyasha Kadandara juggles romance and politics across Zimbabwe and Botswana like a pro.
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’
The influence of a conservative new imam on a Moroccan tribal village is an economic, emotional and cultural disaster in ‘Goundafa, the Cursed Song’, which neatly embraces the simplicity of the people and their ancient lifestyle.
Almost 20 years after his death, the legacy of writer Naguib Mahfouz continues to be present on the Egyptian cultural scene.
Revolution takes on a new, animated form in Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s elliptically intriguing film ‘Death Does Not Exist’.
At the 46th Cairo International Film Festival, Palestine is not only present as a topic; it’s foundational to the emotional and artistic narrative.
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.
Like Youssef Chahine’s quadrilogy, which explored his and his family’s defeats, shames, and victories, Namir Abdel Messeeh’s tenderhearted documentary ‘Life After Siham’ turns private mourning into a quiet, searching act of cinema.
After a decade of involvement with the Cairo Intl. Film Festival, Mohamed Tarek steps into the leadership position, prioritizing viewers and revitalizing programming.
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.
Sarra Abidi’s slow-moving existential drama set in a remote Tunisian call center painstakingly illustrates what living a life of quiet desperation really means in ‘Looking for Ayda’.
A journey through love and feelings left unsaid, ‘Triangle of Love’ turns everyday speech into an archive of attachment and grief.
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.
A small domestic malfunction unveils suffocating routine and bureaucratic absurdity in Yasser Shafiey’s Kafkaesque dark comedy ‘Complaint No. 713317’.
In ‘The Silent Run’, Marta Bergman’s reconstruction of a tragic true story about a young migrant family trying to enter England from Belgium carves out its niche in the familiar European genre by shifting viewpoints between the determined, frightened refugees and the police whose job it is to stop them.
Khaled El Nabawy is regarded as one of the most prominent actors of his generation and among the most conscious of art as a cultural and human message that transcends local boundaries.
The obliterated ruins of Gaza and its refugee tents bear witness to a rare act of defiance — laughter and smiles — in Mai Saad’s and Ahmed Eldanf’s hauntingly powerful documentary ‘One More Show’.
Among 120 titles representing more than 50 countries at the 46th Cairo Intl. Film Festival, 14 films are competing for the Golden Pyramid awards, including five Arab features.
Raising the profile of Egyptian cinema, the oldest and most important film industry in the MENA region.
Ivan Ramljak’s much-lauded ‘Peacemaker’ wins DOK Leipzig’s documentary competition while Seth and Peter Scriver’s delightfully bizarre family ruckus ‘Endless Cookie’ takes home the Golden Dove in the animated competition.
Ron Rothschild’s self-interrogating documentary ‘A Jewish Problem’ weaves his Jewish Israeli-German family memory into a fearless meditation on how Jewish trauma, European guilt, and Palestinian erasure continue to mirror one another.
History and colonialism form the basis for Gregor Brändli’s engrossing ‘Elephants & Squirrels’, screened at DOK Leipzig.
Funny and compelling, if slightly glib, Ole Juncker’s fast-paced documentary ‘Take the Money and Run’ chronicles the case of a Danish artist who stole a hefty chunk of gallery money, arguing in court that the theft was a conceptual art statement.
Ugandan poet, political activist and professional troublemaker Stella Nyanzi is the explosively charismatic subject of director Patience Nitumwesiga’s assured debut feature ‘The Woman Who Poked the Leopard’.
Childhood memories and a lost homeland are the backbone of Dea Gjinovci’s powerful documentary ‘The Beauty of the Donkey’.
Mental health receives a very personal approach from Moris Freiburghaus, whose film ‘I Love You, I Leave You’ is rooted in friendship.
Srdan Kovacevic’s inspirational ‘fists in the air’ documentary ‘The Thing to Be Done’ offers a close-up on a small workers’ advisory office in Slovenia where a ‘parallel world’ for labour rights could exist.
Paleontology comes to the screen from a child’s point of view in Marcel Barelli’s family-oriented feature debut ‘Mary Anning’.
A delightfully bizarre ruckus of wild family anecdote, the Scriver brothers’ animation is an astute catalogue of Canadian First Nations dispossession, and a hopeful contribution to resurgent knowledge.
A Russian teacher re-enacts her denunciation by one of her own students in director Yulia Lokshina’s ‘Active Vocabulary’, a flawed but ambitious documentary about free speech, propaganda and state indoctrination of schoolchildren.
This multiple prize-winning documentary is an inspirational close-up portrait of a proudly rebellious woman fighting for gender equality in a deeply traditional region of Iran, making powerful enemies along the way.
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.
The 68th edition of the world’s longest-running documentary festival promises an all-inclusive Oktoberfest of high art and heavyweight issues, critical thinking and serious fun.
French Nobel winner Annie Ernaux’s writing becomes a prism for the minds of a new generation in Claire Simon’s deceptively simple, insightful and expansive doc.
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.
Amid widespread concern over the health of the Korean film industry, the Busan International Film Festival celebrated its 30th edition hosting domestic films – and audiences – marked by their variety and vitality.
In ‘Gloaming in Luomu’, Korean-Chinese filmmaker Zhang Lu offers his most radical reworking of the theme of searching for a long-vanished soulmate, in a film that unfolds like a delirious dream.
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.
Saoirse Ronan and two child actors shine in the implausible but wildly funny UK comedy ‘Bad Apples’, screened in San Sebastián’s New Directors section.
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.
South Korean rom-com royalty Bae Suzy and The Squid Game star Lee Jin-wook descend on Busan with the slick, subdued and fastidiously chaste ‘Seven O’Clock Breakfast Club for the Brokenhearted’.
Scathing social commentary meets brash body horror in the unclassifiable and utterly compelling ‘Kok Kok Kokoook’, Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap’s first feature.
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.
Danish director Emilie Thalund depicts teenage confusion with gentle precision in her feature debut ‘Weightless’.
Zhang Lu conjures an enigmatic, engaging and visually enchanting cinematic experience with ‘Gloaming in Luomu’.
Sri Lankan cineaste Vimukthi Jayasundara re-emerges from his decade-long feature-filmmaking hiatus with ‘Spying Stars’, a moving story about death and mourning packaged as an audacious sci-fi fantasy.
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.
A dying filmmaker struggles to bring one final project to fruition and his wife attempts to realise this last wish in “By Another Name”, Korean indie filmmaker Lee Jea-han’s uneventful entry to Busan’s new competition.
A dying filmmaker struggles to bring one final project to fruition and his wife attempts to realise this last wish in “By Another Name”, Korean indie filmmaker Lee Jea-han’s plain and uneventful entry to Busan International Film Festival’s newly minted main competition.
Music and obsessive love are the center of the compelling new Arnaud Desplechin film premiering in competition at SSIFF.
Indian filmmaker Tribeny Rai makes back-to-back festival bows at Busan and San Sebastian with ‘Shape of Momo’, a thoughtful family drama about an affluent, cosmopolitan woman’s rebellion against the gender- and class-based schisms in her picturesque Himalayan hometown.
A sense of déja vu permeates the Busan competition entry ‘Without Permission’, British-Iranian Hassan Nazer’s awkwardly dated tribute to the subversive spirit of Iran’s filmmakers.
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’.
‘Funky Freaky Freaks’ puts troubled Korean youth on the big screen in a manner that advertises director Han Chang-lok’s eye for fine performances and unusual visuals.
Korean cineaste Shin Su-won’s first feature in three years, ‘The Mutation’ is a lyrical and heartfelt odd-couple road movie about bereavement, bigotry and self-belief.
With his first feature ‘Leave the Cat Alone’ competing in Busan, Japanese filmmaker Daisuke Shigaya offers a sensitive and subdued exploration into the loves and hopes of some artistic millennials.
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’.
Yoo Jaein’s graduation film, ‘En Route To’, is both a clear-eyed drama about teenage pregnancy and a humorous, touching tale of female friendship.
Iranian cineaste Jafar Panahi talks about his 30-year relationship with BIFF and calls for a change in the Academy Awards’ submission rules.
New York-based Tajik-American filmmaker Isabelle Kalandar bows in competition at Busan with ‘Another Birth’, a mesmerising rite-of-passage drama bolstered by poetry, picturesque landscapes and a powerful turn from its child actor.
Koto Nagata’s surprisingly subtle and melancholy suspense thriller ‘Baka’s Identity’ about three Japanese scammers vaunts nuanced performances but gets derailed by flashbacks.
Busan International Film Festival enters a new era with a dedicated competition section and the appointment of a new festival director eager to highlight BIFF’s Asian focus.
Ondrej Provaznik’s ‘Broken Voices’ takes the top prize, while debut directors flourish at Oldenburg 2025.
The indie film event par excellence, Oldenburg Film Festival, returned over an inspiring five days filled with bold and creative filmmaking from brutal dystopian pregnancy dramas to charming mental health love stories.
The gripping, formally inventive jury-room drama ‘Re-Creation’ is part speculative fiction and part true crime exposé built around strong performances.
Most famous for his role in the Critters franchise, Oldenburg celebrates Don Keith Opper’s contributions as a screenwriter.
Mattie Do’s The Sleeping Beauty is a beguiling fairy tale of accursed love that blends fantasy and horror, born of traditional Laotian folklore.
Louise Hemon’s feature fiction debut, The Girl in the Snow, takes real life stories and conjures with them an enthralling period chamber piece with folk horror inflections.
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.’
German Tejada updates Oswaldo Reynoso into contemporary Lima in The Innocents, a grungy coming-of-age drama that explores burgeoning sexuality and youthful alienation.
Labour and mythology come crashing together in The Boy with White Skin, a disquieting short set in the pitch darkness of a Senegalese gold mine.
Incandescent rage sets alight Under the Burning Sun, a road trip through a merciless dystopian desert where women’s bodies are not their own.
Scott Glenn is fantastic in Eugene the Marine, a genre-bender that uses heartwarming comedy and bloody giallo to rage against the dying of the light.
El elegante primer largometraje de la escritora y directora colombiana Gala del Sol es un carnaval queer audaz, ambicioso y caleidoscópico de lo basado libremente en el ‘Infierno’ de Dante.
The insidiousness of abuse is expertly explored in Broken Voices, a restrained but devastating loss-of-innocence drama from Ondrej Provaznik.
The short experimental documentary ‘perfectly a strangeness’ pairs the mundane with the majestic in an equine odyssey to the stars.
Addiction and religion clash in ‘Our Father’, a powerful drama about getting clean under the eye of God.
The city in Lower Saxony comes to life with the return of Germany’s top indie festival, the Oldenburg Film Festival.
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.’
Dissent around the jury’s Golden Lion pick only slightly dimmed one of Venice’s best film festivals in years.
Paolo Strippoli puts his own spin on the intertwining of grief, faith and horror in the solidly intriguing ‘The Holy Boy’.
The tensions of motherhood overflow in the existential, visually expressive drama ‘The Currents’.
Golden Lion goes to Jim Jarmusch; Grand Jury Award to Gaza drama ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’
Valentyn Vasyanovych imagines post-war Ukraine with both hope and fear in the compellingly meta drama, ‘To the Victory!’
Rare is the film able to turn a meditation on time, nature, neuroscience and interspecies connections into a memorable, stirring adventure of ideas like Ildiko Enyedi’s ‘Silent Friend’, a totally original, time-spanning story that closed Venice competition with a bang.
Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja take on edgelord media with an inventively comic touch in ‘Egghead Republic’.
Loaded with previously unseen archive footage, Robert Gordon’s engaging documentary ‘Newport & the Great Folk Dream’ looks beyond star names like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to explore the musical, social and political roots of Newport Folk Festival.
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’.
The independent filmmakers section reaches its 22nd edition.
Nicolas Wadimoff returns to the topic of Gaza with the experimental documentary ‘Who Is Still Alive’, an intellectually intriguing Venice premiere.
A tremendously moving reenactment of a real tragedy that took place in Gaza, Kaouther Ben Hania’s ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ masterfully integrates fiction and reality in a grief-stricken lament for a child in mortal danger.
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.
Filmed in Kenya, Damien Hauser’s wildly inventive retro-futuristic fairy tale ‘Memory of Princess Mumbi’ combines dazzling AI visuals with bittersweet meditations on love and loss, cinematic fantasy and human reality.
Kathryn Bigelow turns her prodigious talent for edge-of-seat action thrillers to the most terrifying horror show of them all: a rogue nuclear missile is headed straight for the USA and officialdom discovers the absurd inadequacy of available responses, in ‘A House of Dynamite’, a dazzling dark fantasy that leaves viewers shaken.
Marie-Elsa Sgualdo explores women’s rights in the 1940s in her handsomely mounted, quietly intriguing feature debut ‘Silent Rebellion’.
Laura Samani deals with high school tribulations in her deceptively breezy sophomore directorial effort ‘A Year of School’.
Acclaimed artists and filmmakers Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani (‘Radiograph of a Family’) pool their talents in ‘Past Present Continuous’, an emotionally-charged yet formally distanced creative documentary that combines experiences of Iranians in exile from their country.
Mortality is on the mind in Charlie Kaufman’s contemplative and illusory short, How to Shoot a Ghost – an enveloping, chimeric memento mori.
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’.
Russian history whips by onscreen in Olivier Assayas’s often fascinating, at times clumsy English-language drama ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin,’ detailing the rise of Putin (Jude Law) and authoritarian power through the eyes of a brilliant, unscrupulous young ideologue.
Anders Thomas Jensen teams up with Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas once again for the hilariously moving dark comedy ‘The Last Viking’.
British writer-director Mark Jenkin’s visually inventive maritime mystery ‘Rose of Nevada’ hits a few choppy waters but ultimately proves to be a haunting meditation on grief, guilt and collective trauma.
Guillermo del Toro’s lifelong obsession with Frankenstein and his Creature comes to thrilling, bombastic life in this new take on Mary Shelley’s novel.
Digging deep into Naples’ past, Italy’s premier documentarian Gianfranco Rosi (‘Sacro GRA’; ‘Notturno’) struggles to turn the city into a metaphor for time, history, and the human condition in ‘Below the Clouds’.
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.
Libyan-American director Jihan K mourns both her lost father and her lost fatherland in her moving, lyrical, densely layered murder-mystery docu-memoir ‘My Father and Qadaffi’.
Mihai Mincan’s compellingly enigmatic sophomore solo effort ‘Milk Teeth’ deals with the end of the Ceausescu regime in Romania in a roundabout way.
Multiple elements of the 2025 edition of Venice Immersive tried to go beyond the conventional image of the virtual reality experience.
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.
The new reconstruction of ‘Queen Kelly’ was an appetizer for things to come at Venice 2025, the 82nd edition of the festival.
Stefan Dordevic’s sensitive doc portrait of grief won top honors at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival.
Wind, Talk to Me was named Best Feature at Sarajevo Film Festival’s political and star-studded 31st edition.
Director Julian Radlmaier’s charming small-town ensemble comedy ‘Phantoms of July’ finds poetry, political unease and romantic yearning at the heart of modern Europe.
A rich array of awards was distributed to film projects at the 23rd CineLink Industry Days in Sarajevo.
Antoine Chapon repurposes eerie architectural animations in ‘The Orchards,’ a paean to a lost Damascus community that attempts to resist its eradication by a vindictive regime.
In Yegor Troyanovsky’s warmly personal, bittersweet doc ‘Cuba & Alaska’, we follow a volunteer combat medic duo of two best friends on and off Ukraine’s wartime roads.
Shocking but sensitively handled, Ketevan Vashagashvili’s debut doc ‘9-Month Contract’ exposes exploitative practices in Georgian surrogacy agencies through one woman’s risky reality.
The documentary vignette ‘I Believe the Portrait Saved Me’ uses a deeply personal story to explore the power of creativity and evoke the teetering knife edge of survival.
The prolific American actor discussed working with unconventional arthouse giants, and the view from atop one of Scorsese’s most controversial scenes.
.A more prolific and eclectic actor is hard to find: Ray Winstone adds another feather to his cap with Sarajevo Film Festival’s highest award.
Sergei Loznitsa’s masterfully controlled, mordantly absurd drama on the fate of a just idealist in Stalin’s USSR is a timely warning on the workings of state terror.
Director Kristina Nikolova’s lively documentary portrait of Bulgarian queer musician and performance artist Ivo Dimchev, ‘In Hell with Ivo’, is compelling but frustratingly light on detail.
Swiss documentarian Jacqueline Zünd makes her fiction debut with the quietly powerful human relationship drama ‘Don’t Let the Sun’..
Anchored by a wonderful performance from newcomer Jara Sofija Ostan, Urska Djukic’s feature debut Little Trouble Girls is a refreshing and enigmatic take on sexual awakening.
The man behind ‘The Consequences of Love’ and ‘The Hand of God’ is among the guests of honor at the Sarajevo Film Festival.
Nikola Lezaic melts the lines between fiction and family memory in a gently unusual but ultimately frustrating drama about a road trip to Dalmatia for a re-burial.
A woman’s strange arrival upends order in a Croatian shepherd clan in Hana Jusic’s powerful, brooding period drama.
Mirjana Balogh’s affirming animation, Wish You Were Ear, finds solace in a dystopian future where ending a relationship requires the physical swapping of a body part.
The 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival promises to be yet another rich and layered showcase of contemporary cinema.
A morgue in Belarus is the unlikely setting for new hope to seed in an unsettling, unusual drama from Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter.
In Ivana Mladenovic’s satirical, chaotic anti-romance, an obsessed fan in a kitsch-crammed Romania goes to extreme lengths to pursue a Balkan music star.
Dane Komljen’s spectral and shape-lifting landscape of bodies and the paranoia of uncertain identity is a mesmerising, unsettling gem.
Past traumas are at the center of Zijad Ibrahimovic’s documentary ‘The Boy from the River Drina’, screened in Locarno’s Panorama Suisse section.
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.
A sensitive and emotionally intimate exploration of cultural identity amidst grief, ‘Têtes Brûlées’ recounts how a 12-year-old girl from a Tunisian family living in Brussels loses her beloved brother, in Maja-Ajmia Yde Zellama’s stereotype-shattering debut feature.
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.
World premiering at the Amman International Film Festival, Gazan director Abdulrahman Sabbah’s ‘The Clown of Gaza’ is an observant and immersive documentary about the anxiety, hope and resilience of displaced Palestinians through the life of a buoyant street performer.
Lotfi Achour’s chilling psychodrama of a young shepherd who witnesses ISIS behead his cousin won the top prize at the 6th Amman Int. FIlm Festival – Awal Film.
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.
In ‘From Ground Zero +’ the project organized by Rashid Masharawi collects new documentary testimony giving voice to Palestinians living in the midst of war, in which four directors vividly describe the atmosphere of fear and suffering in Gaza today.
A prestigious boys’ high school between Amman and the Dead Sea finds itself torn asunder in a growing divide between traditional teaching methods and the digital revolution, added to political tensions as the war intensifies in Gaza, in the Jordanian documentary ‘Mother of Schools’.
With 150 film submissions, it’s already a win to be among the projects selected at the Amman Film Industry Days.
As Amman’s Film Industry Days explode with some 400 participants signed on, Industry head Bassam Alasad assesses, “Arab cinema has gotten bolder and wilder – no rules can hold back its creativity.”
A delightful bouquet of children’s tales, told in stop-motion animation, gently broaches the theme of accepting death and loss in ‘Tales from the Magic Garden’, adapted from the stories of beloved Czech playwright Arnost Goldflam.
A magical film about time and history, told through the eyes of a Peter Pan farm boy who refuses to grow up, Oday Rasheed’s ‘Songs of Adam’ masterfully evokes a timeless Iraqi society of Mesopotamian farmers from post-WW2 to the present.
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.
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland reteam for a sequel to their zombie smash that’s got a lot of heart – and other organs.
Sepideh Farsi’s documentary ‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk’ is a devastating yet profoundly human portrait of photojournalist Fatma Hassona and her life under siege in Gaza.
The Dardenne brothers tell another understated story of slices of female life with “Young Mothers”, winner of the Best Screenplay award in Cannes.
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.
Director Tarik Saleh closes his Cairo trilogy with ‘Eagles of the Republic’, a daring political fantasy thriller set in the Egyptian movie industry, starring a magnetic Fares Fares.
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.
Joachim Trier makes a powerful return to the Cannes Competition with “Sentimental Value”, a meditation on art, family and depression with a distinctly Nordic flair.
In Saeed Roustaee’s ‘Woman and Child’, a young widow loses control when her son dies, in a well-made, well-acted and unrestrained Iranian melodrama gauged primarily to local audience tastes.
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’.
A dazzling if confusing thriller set in 1977 Brazil during the worst years of the dictatorship, ‘The Secret Agent’ finds actor Wagner Moura embroiled in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the corrupt police of Recife.
Humor negro, ironía y desafío de los estereotipos cinematográficos hacen de ‘Un poeta’ una comedia para ser disfrutada.
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.
Lynne Ramsay returns to the big screen with the peculiar Cannes Competition entry ‘Die My Love’, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson.
Stéphane Demoustier directs an elegant film about the dilemma of creators on a real-life project.
A devout young Muslim woman struggles to reconcile faith with being lesbian in Hafsia Herzi’s ‘The Little Sister’, celebrating the LGBTQIA culture in Paris in its many aspects as it explores how religion and sexuality shape self-identity.
Jem Cohen’s epistolary and associative docufiction is an ode to science and streetcorner stargazing that is haunted by the extinction anxieties of an Anthropocene age.
Monica Stromdahl’s raw, intimate doc portrait of a teen living in cramped quarters with his alcoholic parents champions the resilience of youth and the dismantling of shame.
Brothers in North Macedonia’s mountains question the shepherding life in Petra Seliskar’s empathetic and earthy observational doc.
Julien Elie’s stark, moody doc premiering at Visions du Réel ponders an Earth with no memory of the night sky’s stars, and a Texas town irrevocably altered by SpaceX’s promise of a colony on Mars.
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.
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.
Starring Rose Byrne on revelatory form, Mary Bronstein’s high-energy dark comedy ‘If I Had Legs I’d Lick You’ takes a deep dive into the nightmarish pressures and surreal horrors of motherhood.
Director Mohamed Rashad’s working-class drama ‘The Settlement’, a visually impressive folk tale portraying a young man’s desperate attempts at social integration, is a milestone for the Egyptian film industry at the Berlinale.
Punky Romanian auteur Radu Jude softens his usual bitingly satirical approach with his latest Berlinale prize-winner ‘Kontinental ’25’, a serious-minded but minor-key social drama about gentrification and bourgeois liberal guilt.
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.
A Kazakh boy and a Chinese girl grow up together in China’s vast northeast, in Jing Yi’s dreamlike and meditative first film, ‘The Botanist’.
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.
You can’t look away from nurse Floria as she races around an understaffed hospital to check on 25 seriously ill patients in Petra Volpe’s breathless, high-stress salute to the nursing profession.
‘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.
Guillaume Ribot powerfully evokes the Holocaust in an astutely edited collection of outtakes from Claude Lanzmann’s 9½ hour documentary ‘Shoah’ (1985), both playing in the Berlin Film Festival at a crucial point in history.
Ivan Fund’s small, quiet film featuring a young Argentine girl with a special gift is all about atmosphere and nuance.
The worlds of James Bond and Italian comic books crash head-on in the drolly witty, madcap psychedelia of ‘Reflection in a Dead Diamond’ from experimental filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani.
A telepathic schoolgirl unwittingly discovers some disturbing family secrets in German writer-director Frédéric Hambalek’s sharp-witted satirical comedy ‘What Marielle Knows’.
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.
Engrossing actors and an Amazon river setting lighten some heavy-handed social commentary about how the elderly are scandalously mistreated, in Gabriel Mascaro’s likable future dystopia, ‘The Blue Trail’.
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.
Set in 1991, Huo Meng’s sober and respectful ‘Living the Land’ is a bittersweet reflection on Chinese farmers, capturing the shared experiences of multiple generations who are threatened by mechanization and the urban siren song.
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.
Original, sophisticated films that pushed the limits of fiction and documentary were recognized by juries at this year’s Tiger awards.
Jeppe Rønde’s psychologically complex yet tender drama delves into the world of trauma healing and cults without sensationalism, preferring to raise questions rather than supply answers.
Science fact is stranger than science fiction in this tonally flat but fascinating documentary profile of controversial dolphin whisperer, inner-space psychonaut and LSD enthusiast John C. Lilly.
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.
The only African film in this year’s IFFR Tiger Competition, Sammy Baloji’s ‘The Tree of Authenticity’ offers a much-needed disruption to Belgian colonial archives, which dominate historical narratives in Congo.
Tying together disparate locations in Northern England and Jamaica, Hope Strickland’s evocative boat ride, ‘a river holds a perfect memory,’ explores the interrelations between labour, memory and rivers.
Stefan Djordjevic’s sensitive doc portrait of grief and nature’s endless capacity for renewal is a gem of small gestures and surreal moments.
Ostensibly about the preservation of an ancient language, Eva Giolo’s essay film ‘Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths’ combines linguistics with landscape and myth to captivating effect.
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.
A mother unadvisedly leaves her two young sons home alone in Don’t Leave the Kids Alone chaotic but largely entertaining Mexican haunted house horror.
Igor Bezinovic engages citizens of his Croatian hometown in a rigorously researched, irreverently punk re-enactment of its brief occupation by Italian poet and self-styled dictator Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Traditional fruit cultivation becomes a source of archival fascination in Common Pear, a sci-fi documentary hybrid set amidst environmental collapse.
Daniel Hoesl’s latest skewering of the excesses of the mega-rich is a mesmeric and doomy doc hybrid about the Casino di Campione, Europe’s largest casino.
The third work in Lawrence Lek’s trilogy on disobedient driverless cars, Empty Rider explores autonomy and responsibility through a futuristic AI show trial.
Ivan Salatic’s magnificently moody, intelligent and doom-laden vision of Montenegrin freedom fighting and exile questions the formation and undoing of national myth.
Colombian writer-director Gala del Sol’s stylish debut feature ‘Rains Over Babel’ is an audacious, ambitious, kaleidoscopic carnival of queerness loosely based on Dante’s ‘Inferno’.
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 with Marten Rabarts, the newly appointed Head of IFFR Pro, to discuss the industry side of the festival.
Vladimir de Fontenay’s otherwise superb father-son drama is marred by an unsatisfactory ending.
Sakha cinema pioneer Aleksei Romanov reworks an eerie Yakut tale for an intriguing mix of ethnographic detail, anti-imperial defiance and bone-deep chill.
TFV spoke to IFFR’s directors, Vanja Kaludjercic and Clare Stewart, about the 2025 edition and what they have planned beyond that.
A Russian high school teacher becomes an unlikely undercover activist in ‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’, an insider documentary about the poisonous spread of Kremlin pro-war propaganda.
Nordic horror meets classic French fairy tale in ‘The Ugly Stepsister’, a new take on the well-known Cinderella story that is tailor-made for the genre circuit.
More a psychological study than a thriller, ‘The Things You Kill’ explores the corruption and internalized violence of a patriarchal society, spiced with some bold narrative tricks from Alireza Khatami, co-director of the Iranian festival hit ‘Terrestrial Verses’.
Last year was a landmark year for The Film Verdict, and 2025 will be full of changes.
Featuring films from the classic to the experimental, the 20 works presented in the Berlinale Shorts program will introduce a range of new filmmaking talent.
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.
Zeki Demirkubuz, one of Turkey’s best-known filmmakers, discusses the importance of closely observing and deeply understanding people in this interview on his new film ‘Life’ (‘Hayat’).
A strong international introduction to the Hausa-speaking filmmaking of Kannywood, Nigeria’s Oscar submission ‘Mai Martaba’ is an adventure tale drawing on themes of power, gender, and political legacy.
‘Until the Orchid Blooms’ is a fine exploration of the battle between modernism and tradition set in a Cambodian community.
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.
Marissa Anita and Yusuf Mahardika deliver biting performances as a possessive mother and a confused mamma’s boy in Indonesian filmmaker Tumpal Tampubolon’s powerful if predictable suspense thriller, ‘Crocodile Tears’.
Singaporean playwright Keng Sen Ong juxtaposes his queer take on a 17th century opera with a documentary about Dutch curator and academic Adriaan van der Staay’s summer retreat in the beautiful yet bewildering ‘The House of Janus’.
Nine films have been sent to the 2025 Oscars by African countries. Will any one get a nomination?
TFV spoke with Milcah Cherotich and Toby Schmutzler, two of the persons behind ‘Nawi’, Kenya’s official submission for the 97th Academy Awards.
The evocative short animation, Prostrate and Draw Near, explores a strange and unique moment in the Great Mosque of Mecca during a Covid-19 lockdown.
TFV spoke with Miguel Gomes, whose latest film ‘Grand Tour’ is Portugal’s submission for the 97th Academy Awards.
Miroslav Lekic recounts the origins of the Kosovo conflict in ‘Russian Consul’, Serbia’s submission for the 97th Academy Awards.
The director of ‘The Flats’ discusses documenting the untold stories of The Troubles.
TFV speaks to Miroslav Lekic, the director of ‘Russian Consul’, Serbia’s submission for the 97th Academy Awards.
Peruvian filmmaker Tito Catacora finished shooting ‘Yana Wara’ after the sudden death of his nephew, the original director.
La propuesta del Perú al Oscar Internacional es una conmovedora denuncia contra la violencia de género sufrida por una niña indígena aymara, atormentada por espíritus malignos, en una historia ambientada en el hermoso y desolado altiplano andino peruano.
‘Yana Wara’ es la presentación de Perú para los Premio Internacional de la Academia 2025
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.
Tia Kouvo impresses with her feature debut ‘Family Time’, a very personal drama set in her hometown Lahti.
Director Tia Kouvo talks to TFV about the process of making Finland’s Oscar submission ‘Family Time’.
En tono de comedia y apoyada en el encanto de sus jóvenes protagonistas ‘Vuelvealavida’ entra a la pelea de los Óscares por la mejor película internacional por Venezuela
The creator and subject of the Oscar-qualified short, ‘Imprinting’ – Andrea Ciavatta – discusses translating his life to the screen and the role of music in his film.
A man goes on a psychological and emotional journey into his subconscious in this lavishly mounted but somewhat perplexing short from Andrea Ciavatta, Imprinting.
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.
Director Milad Tshangir’s impressive debut feature ‘Anywhere Anytime’ puts a contemporary illegal-immigrant spin on Vittorio De Sica’s beloved Italian neorealist classic ‘Bicycle Thieves’.
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 topic is marriage and the four compulsively watchable stories that make up Noha Adel’s ‘Spring Came Laughing’ nail the shallowness, hypocrisy and suffering of Egyptian middle-class women, caught in a web outdated traditions.
The new Omar Sharif Award recognizes the growth of the Middle East as a premier filmmaking region.
The Cairo Industry Days’ dynamic panel about African cinema underlined how filmmakers must challenge the systems that restrict them.
A mother and her young son’s relationship is pushed to the limit in Teta, an unnerving psychological horror with disquieting, supernatural overtones.
British director Eloise King discusses her documentary ‘The Shadow Scholars’, showing at the 2024 edition of IDFA, and what it says about the intellectual capacities of the Global South.
The Film Verdict chief critic and editor Deborah Young addressed the importance of the awards in celebrating exceptional MENA film talent.
The unpredictable nature of conflict robs ‘Writing Hawa’ of much of its compelling titular character, but Najiba Noori’s pro-feminist and anti-Taliban project emerges unscathed in ideological terms.
Rakeen Saad of Jordan began acting at ten and has steadily grown in her chosen career.
Gerald Igor Hauzenberger and Gabriela Schild have made a quietly spectacular documentary on the migration-related troubles of the Nigerien city Agadez through a trio of knowledgeable and remarkably telegenic mediators.
Screenwriter and director Noha Adel represents Egypt in Cairo Film Festival competition with her first feature, ‘Spring Came Laughing’.
For his extensive experience covering Saudi cinema and the regional film industry, Al-Ayyad has been awarded the Next Generation Award.
Hani Khalifa’s latest film ‘Flight 404’ is Egypt’s official submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 97th Academy Awards.
Made in collaboration with feted dissident director Jafar Panahi, Nader Saeivar’s ‘The Witness’ is a muted but quietly furious protest drama about murder and misogyny in contemporary Iran,
How we consume images and what it means to be a distant onlooker lie at the heart of Miranda Pennell’s sobering, analytical short, Man Number 4.
Drawing on her own troubled family background, Irish visual artist and first-time feature director Myrid Carten paints a slightly muddled but emotionally powerful portrait of addiction and depression, shame and blame with ‘A Want in Her’.
A captivating story, at once simple and profound, describes the relationship between a blind boy and his loving grandfather as they travel through the desert in Daoud Aoulad-Syad’s layered road movie, ‘The Blue Lake’.
Malena Szlam uses in-camera editing to craft Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya, an evocative 16mm exploration of Australia’s vast central eastern ranges and their deep geological time.
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.
Bassam Mortada’s ‘Abo Zaabal 89’ is a personal odyssey about the scars of political activism in contemporary Egypt, and a big win for Arab documentary filmmaking.
‘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.
Iranian director Ali Asgari delivers an elegant response to government censorship with ‘Higher Than Acidic Clouds’, an achingly beautiful essay-film about memory, imagination and Tehran’s toxic skies.
The affable president of the Cairo Film Festival is a clear-sighted leader whose other job is being one of Egypt’s biggest stars.
Shot over a year ago by students in a filmmaking workshop in Gaza, ‘Gazan Tales’ is a disarming snapshot of four men’s everyday lives, as they pass their days unaware of the disaster about to befall them
Yousry Nasrallah’s willingness to address social taboos, his commitment to depicting female protagonists, and his insight into the political and cultural struggles of Egyptian society have earned him popularity and the respect of Arab filmmakers and audiences.
Under the curation of Palestinian producer-director Rashid Masharawi, ‘From Ground Zero’ is an anthology of 22 short films offering a rawly immediate and deeply human response to devastation in the Gaza Strip.
Controversially dropped from the London Film Festival, director Havana Marking’s timely documentary thriller about the work of anti-racist campaign group Hope Not Hate ‘Undercover: Exposing the Far Right’ is making its international debut in IDFA.
Based on an AI screenplay drawn from the works of legendary director Werner Herzog, Polish film-maker Piotr Winiewicz’s docu-fiction debut feature ‘About a Hero’ is a compellingly weird trip into the digital deepfake Twilight Zone.
In his well-executed documentary ‘Holidays In Palestine’, Maxime Lindon dissects what it means to be a Palestinian with a European passport.
Rashid Masharawi discusses his work and his enduring commitment to bringing Palestinian stories to the global stage.
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.
Julie Delpy’s dark refugee comedy ‘Meet the Barbarians’ is a stark reminder of the absurd cruelty of ranking human suffering, and the resilience required to rebuild a life amid indifference and prejudice.
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.
The head of Cairo Industry Days hopes the market-based event will promote inclusivity among all players of Egyptian filmmaking, not just festival and arthouse circles.
The Cairo International Film Festival has put in a big effort to diversify its lineup and make bold choices, like 10 juries judging a historically large selection of films.
A cadre of feral siblings teach a small town the true meaning of Christmas in a rare faith-based film that doesn’t oversell its message.
The long-running East German documentary and animation festival found a fruitful balance this year between heavy political themes and more playful, experimental, mind-bending films.
Visual anthropologists Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble investigate the mysterious rituals of taranatism in this arty, lightly experimental, prize-winning essay-film.
Dominique Cabrera’s feature documentary ‘La jetée: the Fifth Shot’ triumphed in the feature documentary category at Dok Leipzig, while László Csáki’s ‘Pelikan Blue’ swept the animation strand.
A free-spirited urban nature lover becomes a living symbol of Ukrainian resistance in ‘Flowers of Ukraine,’ a slender but immensely charming debut feature by Adelina Borets.
Daphne Matziaraki and Peter Murimi’s essential documentary ‘The Battle for Laikipia’ describes global warming and the brutal impact of colonial land ownership in Kenya, showing the overlap of environmental and social issues without oversimplifying.
Yvann Yagchi’s documentary ‘There Was Nothing Here Before’ is as an angry yet tender letter to a lost friend, amid a brave quest to discover the filmmaker’s family history in the occupied territories.
Director Dominique Cabrera’s investigation of her family connections to Chris Marker’s landmark sci-fi film ‘La Jetée’ takes a messy but sporadically magical mystery tour though history, memory, cinema and politics.
Chris Gude’s vivid doc on the ravages and inequalities of ages-long gold mining in Venezuela is startling in its poetry and meticulous in its contextualisation.
A playful, lighthearted hybrid doc from Peter Kerekes on steering one’s fate, as an Italian astrologer sends her troubled clients off globetrotting.
Thomas Riedelsheimer brings land artists and physicists together in a considered, densely packed doc celebrating the elusive nature of light as a medium.
The 67th edition of DOK Leipzig festival promises a week of pop and politics, critical debate and constructive disagreement in fiercely divided times.
A quietly angry film about suicidal Indian farmers and the women they leave behind, documentary director Kinshuk Surjan’s feature debut ‘Marching in the Dark’ is moving, lyrical and surprisingly uplifting.
Tomasz Wolski’s found-footage documentary ‘A Year in the Life of the Country’ paints a playful, freewheeling collage portrait of Communist Poland during martial law and the birth of Solidarity.
Elene Mikaberidze’s wry, sensitively humane and politically layered debut doc explores precarity on Georgia’s border via one family’s blueberry farm venture.
From Myanmar workers to K-pop and a swashbuckling Netflix blockbuster, the mood straddled politics and celebration at Korea’s (and possibly Asia’s) largest film festival.
Park Ri-woong’s South Korean tale of racism and inequality ‘The Land of Morning Calm’ and The Maw Naing’s stirring tale of exploitation in Myanmar, ‘MA – Cry of Silence’, took top honors in the New Currents section.
Hwang In-won makes a case for the unresolved nature of the trauma of sexual assault in her meditative, elliptical first feature ‘Journey to Face Them’.
Chun Sunyoung’s debut feature ‘A Girl with Closed Eyes’ is a well-made thriller lightly marred by an elaborate third act.
Indonesian filmmaker Loeloe Hendra’s feature debut in Busan, ‘Tale of the Land’, is a melancholic, beautifully mounted Borneo-set story about a young indigenous woman who has lived her life in a floating house in the middle of the sea.
Reflective, heartwarming and funny, ‘Gingerbread for her Dad’ is Kazakh filmmaker Alina Mustafina first feature, in which she embarks on a transcontinental journey to search for her great-grandfather’s remains.
With ‘Village Rockstars 2’, Assamese director Rima Das reunites with the cast of her highly-acclaimed 2017 festival hit in a mesmerizing portrait of a teenage girl guitarist’s struggles with nature and culture in northeast India.
This platitude-heavy infomercial for kindness benefits from strong performances and handsome production design.
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.
Powerful performances from Taiwanese actors Kimi Hsia and Yang Kue-mei anchor Taiwanese filmmaker Tom Lin Shu-yu’s beautifully filmed black-and-white family drama ‘Yen and Ai-lee’.
Bowing in Busan’s New Currents competition, Japanese filmmaker Go Furukawa’s feature-length debut, ‘Kaneko’s Commissary’, offers a delicate, humane and relentlessly life-affirming tale about an ex-con.
The long-running Basque film festival’s latest edition delivered contentious prizes and dubious celebrity vanity projects, but it also showcased a feast of Spanish screen talent alongside strong comebacks from Pamela Anderson, Mike Leigh and more.
All the big prize winners, surprise career comebacks and controversial jury choices at the long-running Basque film festival.
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’.
‘El lugar de la otra’, el debut en ficción de Maite Alberdi, está hecho con elegancia pero carece de profundidad
Small in scale but big in its ambition to show how an ordinary woman reinvents herself by learning to express her desires, the Colombian film ‘Skin in Spring’ is observational fiction at its most delicate and intriguing
A psychiatrist is put to the test when her daughter, the member of a cult, is arrested for killing her baby in the spooky but unconvincing Chilean-Argentine drama ‘Maybe It’s True What They Say About Us’.
Former ‘Baywatch’ star Pamela Anderson tests her indie art-house credentials in Gia Coppola’s ‘The Last Showgirl’, a slight but engaging portrait of an ageing Las Vegas dancer facing the existential terror of midlife redundancy.
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.
Director Michael Tyburski’s charmingly offbeat dystopian sci-fi rom-com ‘Turn Me On’ takes place in a cult-like community where sex and love, joy and anger have been chemically erased.
Costa-Gavras, in top form at 91, starts another revolution, this time about death, with ‘Last Breath’.
Usando los impactantes paisajes del lugar, su compleja historia e intrigante aislamiento, el director José Luis Torres Leiva lentamente desenreda las emociones largamente reprimidas de una citadina angustiada a través de inspiradores encuentros con un grupo de locales en Cuando las nubes cubren las sombras de José Luis Torres Leiva.
Piet Baumgartner excavates the unspoken truths of a dysfunctional family with his first fiction feature film ‘Bagger Drama’, screened in San Sebastián’s New Directors section.
Maite Alberdi’s fiction debut ‘In Her Place’ is a well-crafted feature, but lacks depth.
Actor turned director Johnny Depp pays indulgent tribute to bohemian artist Amedeo Modigliani, and to himself, in the badly misjudged and barely coherent biopic ‘Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness’.
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.
Danish director Sylvia Le Fanu makes a powerful debut in feature filmmaking with the loss-centric drama ‘My Eternal Summer’, screened in San Sebastián’s New Directors section.
24 years after the first trial of a politician for harassment in Spain, Iciar Bollain directs ‘I Am Nevenka’ with great sensitivity.
A moving, enjoyable story about two lonely women connecting across the class divide, with an outstanding performance from Paulina Garcia as a wealthy, bossy matron slipping into dementia.
An imaginatively engrossing essay on feminism and motherhood, Paula Ortiz’s taken-from-history ‘The Red Virgin’ features an unforgettable Najwa Nimri as a stage mother out of hell, who sees her brilliant 16-year-old daughter as a sculpture she has created to change the world in 1930’s Spain.
François Ozon tells another story of quirky human relationships in the comedy-drama ‘When Fall Is Coming’, screening in San Sebastián’s Official Selection.
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.
Georgian-born French director Akaki Popkhadze brings his dual identity to the screen with the formulaic but confident debut feature ‘In the Name of Blood’, premiering in San Sebastián.
Doomed lovers fight for their right to party in the melodramatic but visually impressive romantic thriller ‘Bound in Heaven’, a strong debut feature from Chinese writer-director Huo Xin.
One of the most prominent Latin American film industries is under the chainsaw.
Uno de los cines mas prominentes de América Latina bajo la motosierra.
Vibrant flamenco music redeems a weak narrative in Antón Alvarez’s directorial debut.
La exuberante música flamenca y el talento de Yerai Cortés sobrepasan un argumento débil.
French director Audrey Diwan’s excruciatingly dull remake of Just Jaeckin’s 1970s soft-porn classic ‘Emmanuelle’ delivers fifty shades of joyless, witless, pointless, mostly sexless tedium.
Backed by Ken Loach’s production company, writer-director Laura Carreira’s debut feature ‘On Falling’ is a well crafted but grindingly glum depiction of poverty, alienation and soul-crushing low-wage work.
Australian stop-motion master Adam Elliot is back with his touching, humane second feature ‘Memoir of a Snail’, featuring the voice of Sarah Snook.
Germany’s leading indie film event, Oldenburg Film Festival, returned to Lower Saxony with an almost implausibly consistent line-up that included grotesque Mexican satire, hard-hitting political cinema from Myanmar and an array of interesting genre cinema.
The eccentric Canadian bicycle comedy ‘James’ claimed the Best Film prize at Oldenburg 2024.
A checkpoint stop en route to Tehran leads to a young boy being held for drug possession. A moral quandary ensues in the emotive short, Alone Together.
The director and actress couple Na Gyi and Paing Phyo Thu have been in hiding since having to flee after their arrest was ordered by the military junta in 2021.
The tale of Maximilian of Habsburg and Charlotte of Belgium is reimagined in A History of Love and War, an anarchic, absurdist black comedy about colonisation and corruption in a fantastical Mexico.
A man finds himself confined in a doorless room in Nicolai Schumann’s claustrophobic monochrome character study, The Lonely Musketeer, built on a remarkable performance by Edward Hogg.
2024 awards race takes shape as TIFF brings stars and prestige to the red carpet.
First-time filmmaker Truman Kewley describes his emotions screening ‘Beautiful Friend’ to audiences, in a journey that began at last year’s Oldenburg Film Festival.
Two young children are left to find their own way when their father commits suicide in Diego Gaxiola’s poignant magical realist short, Nostalgia of a (Still) Alive Heart.
Mitzi Peirone’s sophomore feature, Saint Clare, about a college student on a mission from God to rid the world of predatory men is stylish, weird, sometimes overdone – and a blast.
Maurice O’Carroll’s propulsive boxing-cum-crime drama, Swing Bout, bristles with the energy of the ring in this tale of young hopefuls waiting for their chance.
Frida Kempff’s powerful biopic defies conventions as it studies the intersection of patriarchy and sport.
Edgar Pera uses AI-generated imagery to envisage a meandering , hallucinatory conversation between the authors Fernando Pessoa and H.P. Lovecraft in Telepathic Letters.
A doctor goes on a dreamlike odyssey into sexual temptation in Traumnovelle, a new adaption of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella, which has an archness fitting its absurdity.
Oldenburg, Germany’s premiere indie film festival, returns
An empathetic study of a woman trying to hold it together for her kids is powered with a memorable performance by Ophelia Kolb.
Guillaume Senez’s sensitive and low-key melodrama explores the harsh realities of Japan’s child custody laws.
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.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is a fantasy father figure in Egil Pedersen’s charming coming-of-age dramedy.
Blue Road finds the blazing truth in famed author Edna O’Brien’s remarkable career.
Ali Samadi Ahadi’s turgid drama with a script from ‘Sacred Fig’ director Mohammad Rasoulof offers a surface level view of Iranian politics.
Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature ‘The Room Next Door’ was a dignified winner of the Golden Lion: a quietly profound meditation on love and death, pain and glory, buoyed by knockout performances from TIlda Swinton and Julianne Moore.
Taiwan-born and New York-based producer Alex C. Lo seems to be everywhere on the A-list festival circuit.
Frederik Louis Hviid’s nerve-rattling heist flick unfolds with sweat-soaked tension and clockwork precision.
Wang Bing brings his documentary trilogy to a strong close with ‘Youth: Homecoming’, first screened in Venice’s main competition.
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
Director Elizabeth Lo explores China’s novel solutions to infidelity and marital crisis with her intimate love-triangle documentary ‘Mistress Dispeller’.
Anastasiia Bortuali’s debut documentary is a captivating scrapbook of Ukrainians forging a new life in Iceland.
Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza put their own compelling spin on a true Mafia story with ‘Sicilian Letters’, a Venice competition premiere.
Coming of age is tough in Almost Certainly False, a deft exploration of identity and duty in the life of a young Syrian immigrant dreaming of leaving Istanbul for Europe.
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.
In this love/hate letter to Cairo, Khalid Mansour’s sensitive debut feature ‘Seeking Haven for Mr Rambo’ pays tribute to a generation of young Egyptians shackled by economic and societal frustrations.
Joaquin Phoenix and director Todd Phillips return to their billion-dollar killer-clown origin story with the music-stuffed, lavishly staged but dramatically flawed sequel ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’.
Three Keenings is a darkly comic character portrait depicts an actor presenting a facsimile of grief that is a thin veneer over the real thing waiting to erupt.
Delphine and Muriel Coulin deliver a compelling family drama with their third feature ‘The Quiet Son’, screened in Venice’s main competition.
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 closed, patriarchal community begins to transform as the cries of a legendary forest beast foreshadow social revolution in the spirited short, The Poison Cat.
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.
Romanian filmmaker Bogdan Muresanu delivers sharp holiday-themed satire with his feature debut ‘The New Year That Never Came’, screened in Venice’s Orizzonti section.
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.
The surrealism of images created by artificial intelligence evokes the unreliability of memory and elusive nature of a dystopian plague in the sci-fi short, ‘The Eggregores Theory’.
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 trio of French couples exchange partners while they search for love in Emmanuel Mouret’s professionally crafted but unsurprising salute to a great French film genre, ‘Trois amies.’
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’.
Alexandre O. Philippe pays tribute to a classic on its 50th anniversary with the heartfelt documentary ‘Chain Reactions’, screened in Venice’s Classics sidebar.
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’.
The film auteur of Nazi Germany par excellence, Leni Riefenstahl and her controversial legacy are examined in fascinating depth in the new German doc ‘Riefenstahl’ by Andres Veiel.
The 2024 Venice Immersive selection featured some interesting variations on the usual VR experience, involving the body and senses in new ways.
TIFF’s slate of European cinema ranges from provocative documentaries to pulse-pounding genre thrills.
The Japanese franchise celebrates its 45th anniversary with the VR film ‘Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom’, shown in the Venice Immersive lineup.
Valerio Mastandrea makes good use of his gruff persona in his second directorial feature ‘Feeling Better’, screened in Venice’s Orizzonti competition.
Marvel Studios makes it VR debut with ‘What If…? An Immersive Story’, based on the animated series dealing with alternate realities.
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.
Mirjana Karanovic shines as both creator and star of Mother Mara, a nuanced drama about a middle-aged woman navigating loss, adapted from elements of a Tanja Sljivar play.
We spoke to Saule Bliuvaite, fresh off her dual triumph in Locarno with her debut feature ‘Toxic’.
Teens scrutinise each other on a hot summer’s day at the river and drift off into the wilderness in this unique, mysterious German coming-of-ager.
Fresh from awards in Locarno, Georgian director Tato Kotetishvili spoke about integrating reality and trusting in magic with debut feature Holy Electricity.
A father and son heading home from football practice face the realities of bureaucracy and the lure of migration in Samir Karahoda’s finely tuned short, On the Way.
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.
A passenger train witnesses an act of ethnic cleansing in ‘The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent’, a well-drawn portrait of the wary silence of complicity that allows evil to triumph. Winner of the Palme D’Or – Short Film at Cannes.
The Oscar-winning director of ‘Sideways’, ‘About Schmidt’, ‘Nebraska’ and ‘The Holdovers’ came to Sarajevo Film Festival for a masterclass talk and gala screening.
Kamal Aljafari reclaims and re-envisages looted images from Beirut’s Palestine Research Centre in his moving and enigmatic intervention into the territory of memories.
Belgian filmmaker Leonardo van Dijl makes a strong feature debut with sports drama ‘Julie Keeps Quiet’, which premiered in Cannes.
All is disquiet on the eastern home front in Ukrainian director Lesia Diak’s scrappy but emotionally engaging debut documentary ‘Dad’s Lullaby’.
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.
The 2024 Locarno Film Festival spotlighted the future in more ways than one.
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.
‘Toxic’ (‘Akiplesa’), the first feature directed by Lithuania’s Saulé Bliuvaité, swept two top awards at the 77th Locarno Film Festival.
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’.
Like a Sick Yellow is a fragmentary portrait of place that blurs fact with fiction to create an elusive and unnerving meditation on memory and the Kosovan war.
Southwest Europe’s biggest film festival is marking its landmark anniversary with a feast of premieres, new locations across the city, plus starry guests including Meg Ryan and John Turturro.
Alice Lowe returns behind the camera with her second feature ‘Timestalker’, a century-spanning rom-com screened in Locarno’s Piazza Grande.
Radu Jude teases the profound out of the profane with a manic, comical collage of material drawn from TV commercials produced in Romania after the collapse of its Communist regime in 1989.
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.
A young woman acclimatises to the rhythms of a new city while reflecting on those of her lifestyle in looking she said I forget, the heady short from Naomi Pacifique.
A sensitive mind struggles with esoteric encounters in the Istanbul gloom in Gurcan Keltek’s spectacularly atmospheric horror.
Fede Alvarez returns to the well of the original 1979 Ridley Scott hit while adding a few space-screams of his own.
In the impressive ‘Listen to the Voices’, Maxime Jean-Baptiste presents a sobering look at trauma, blackness, and violence in a Guianese neighbourhood.
TFV speaks to Oscar winner Ben Burtt, the 2024 recipient of the Vision Award at the Locarno Film Festival.
México 86 es el sobrio y sincero segundo largometraje del ganador de la Camera D´Or 2019 César Díaz. al que le falta pasión para ser un relato político convincente.
Acts of faith, plunder and resistance deep in the Amazon are the territory of a majestic and hallucinatory but heavy-handed anti-colonial thriller from Pia Marais.
Sara Fgaier’s feature debut is an account of love and loss that retains a poetic fragmentary appeal, while concealing a more powerful tale.
Tato Kotetishvili’s Georgian debut is a scrappily episodic and freewheeling, dry-humoured celebration of down-and-out margins brimming with eccentric personality.
Kevin Jerome Everson’s latest short – Practice, Practice, Practice – is yet another perfectly calibrated examination of the aspects of African-American labour that packs a powerful punch.
A family derailed by a swimming accident struggles to make sense of the trauma in Laurynas Bareisa’s haunting and profoundly disorienting drama.
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.
Ben Rivers revisits hermit Jake Williams in Scottish woodland for a sparse, mysterious and music-oriented doc on life off the grid in gathering crisis.
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.
Christoph Hochhäusler’s Brussels-set neo-noir about a female assassin sets up wild ideas about futuristic crime which a convoluted plot never quite delivers.
La directora catalana Mar Coll explora los límites de la maternidad moderna en Salve María, largometraje íntimo y empático con el que vuelve al Festival de Locarno
Italian author Paolo Cognetti returns to his filmmaking roots with ‘A Flower of Mine’, an ode to nature bowing in Locarno’s Piazza Grande.
The Locarno Film Festival pays tribute to Claude Barras, a major name in contemporary Swiss animation.
The 58th edition of KVIFF featured Kafka-esque comedy, a strong international program and some controversial prize choices.
Karlovy Vary’s two big standouts when awards were handed out Saturday night were ‘A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things’ directed by prolific Irish documentarian Mark Cousins and Lilja Ingolfsdottir’s Norwegian drama ‘Loveable’ (Elskling).
A backwoods bachelor party becomes a fight to the death in Canadian writer-director Annick Blanc’s uneven but gripping feminist thriller ‘Hunting Daze’.
In writer-director Abdellah Taïa’s ode to youthful rebellion ‘Cabo Negro’, two heartbroken queer Moroccans take refuge in a luxury villa to confront old traumas and share solidarity.
Porcelain War is a beautifully crafted documentary on the creative resistance of Ukrainian citizens under Russian invasion, and the paradoxes of patriotism.
Nature takes center stage in Ivana Gloria’s subtly off-kilter coming-of-age debut ‘Chlorophyll’, screening in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima Competition.
The island of Malta adds a Mediterranean-themed film festival in its quest to make the film industry a pillar of its economy.
A group of young men must endure the hardships of a rigorous military training programme in Night Has Come, Paolo Tizon’s intimate and revealing documentary.
Tiny Lights is a keenly observed portrayal of a six-year-old girl’s experience of her parents breaking up, built around a captivating performance from the young Mia Banko.
This tender, often humorous film Second Chance is about a young woman recovering from trauma is a deftly rendered depiction of convalescence and our ability to heal one another.
Anna Cornudella Castro’s mesmeric debut imagines an esoteric woodland world where humans hibernate, their supremacy among animals a delusion of the past.
Full of atmospheric gloom, Bruno Ankovic’s powerful, decades-spanning feature debut shows how wartime violence and desperation seep through a Croatian village like a contagion.
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.
George Sikharulidze’s debut on masculinity and identity in today’s Georgia is an unusual coming-of-age drama alive with ideas and a bold political imagination.
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.
Dutch writer-director Peter Hoogendoorn’s autobiographical second feature ‘Three Days of Fish’ finds both humour and melancholy in a painfully awkward father-son relationship.
Viggo Mortensen’s tender and offbeat drama, The Dead Don’t Hurt, is led by a magnetic Vicky Krieps and cultivates something beautiful amongst the arid plains and rocky outcroppings of the old west.
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.
Confronting the world refugee crisis head-on in highly dramatic scenes that refuse to let go, Brandt Andersen’s etched-with-an-axe ‘The Strangers’ Case’ is a human disaster movie that passionately describes a chain reaction of real-life horror.
The 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival freshens up and renews its commitment to a new generation of viewers.
Italian actor-director Michele Riondino transforms a notorious real-life case of mass workplace bullying into a boisterous social satire in his lively debut feature ‘Palazzina Laf’.
Representing the younger generation of Maltese filmmakers, Fabrizio Fenech hopes for an uptick of local productions in the future.
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.
The historical documentary Pirates of the Mediterranean combines an operation to uncover a 16th century shipwreck with re-enactment and talking heads to explore an overlooked element of Europe’s past.
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.
At the end of the Basque armed conflict, a young woman waits to flee across the border in ‘Negu Hurbilak’, an atmospheric and rigorously shot but mystifying tale that leaves too much to the viewer’s imagination.
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.
The Film Verdict is at Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta for the next week talking to key players in the Maltese film industry.
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’.
Dutch-Bosnian director Ena Sendijarevic’s playful, surreal, stylish second feature ‘Sweet Dreams’ finds a rich seam of darkly absurd comedy in Europe’s murky colonial history.
The second edition of Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival is paying tribute to art-rock icon David Bowie’s cinematic legacy with a dedicated sidebar.
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.
A French classic gets new, ambitious life on screen with the ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, from the same team as 2023’s ‘The Three Musketeers’.
Women’s films and issues held center stage at Cannes 2024, while outright political films and cinema’s elder statesmen fell out of favor.
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.
A newly married Mumbai housewife unleashes her inner monster in writer-director Karan Kandhari’s stylish, punky, compellingly strange comedy thriller ‘Sister Midnight’.
When ‘The Village Next to Paradise’ bowed in Un Certain Regard, Mo Harawe became the first Somali filmmaker to compete at Cannes.
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.
Blending autobiographical elements with heartfelt homages to Iranian cinema, writer-director Matthew Rankin’s charmingly surreal comic fable ‘Universal Language’ reimagines Canada as a Farsi-speaking dreamland.
The Palestinian-Danish director Mahdi Fleifel, in Cannes with a brutally realistic exile story, opens up about the difficulty of exiles making films in exile about other exiles.
Low on laughs and with a thin plot, Christophe Honore’s ‘Marcello Mio’ is a quirky tribute to one of European cinema’s most famous filial relationships.
Mo Harawe’s story of a Somali family attempting to make ends meet in a troubled environment is visually striking and masterfully told.
With unconventional yet captivating storytelling, Nabil Ayoush’s ‘Everybody Loves Touda’ champions female empowerment through a young woman who is passionate about the traditional Moroccan folk music of Aita.
Jonas Trueba creates a warm and winning ode to love and letting go in the sun-kissed dog days of summer.
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.
Selena Gomez y Zoe Saldaña presumen sus habilidades de canto y baile en el audaz thriller musical mexicano de Jacques Audiard, una lujuriosa celebración de lo queer multicultural y la redención del transgénero.
La lucha de los yanomami, chamánica y ambientalista, es retratada con respeto y conocimiento en este visualmente atractivo documental
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.
In ‘Limonov: The Ballad’, director Kirill Serebrennikov turns up the volume on his already explosive style (Petrov’s Flu), which is really the only way to recount the mad, violence-tinged rise of Russian poet and political extremist Eduard Limonov.
Re-shuffling footage from films he has shot over the last 23 years, Jia Zhang-ke places his awe-inspiring cinematic mastery on full display in ‘Caught by the Tides’, though its ravishing poetic beauty tends to obscure the story.
In ‘The Brink of Dreams’, Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir deliver a fierce, against-all-odds documentary about a group of young women artists in southern Egypt out to prove their independence as theater performers and independent women in a male-dominated society.
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.
The backwardness of a Romanian country village catches 17-year-old Adi in a homophobic trap in Emanuel Parvu’s justly indignant but conventionally scripted ‘Three Kilometers to the End of the World’.
Lou Ye’s 2024 Cannes entry, ‘An Unfinished Film’, takes too long but comes across with some genuinely emotional moments.
Sergei Loznitsa follows up his landmark 2014 doc ‘Maidan’ with a more recent portrait showing the impact of Russian aggression on his country in ‘The Invasion’.
Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating neo-Roman epic ‘Megalopolis’ is a muddled misfire of overcooked kitsch and undercooked ideas.
Rithy Panh’s unnerving screen adaptation of U.S. war correspondent Elizabeth Becker’s real-life 1978 visit to Khmer Rouge-ruled Cambodia vaunts intense performances, a diverse visual palette and an ominous sound design.
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.
Swedish writer-director Magnus von Horn’s Cannes competition contender ‘The Girl with the Needle’ is a gripping historical true-crime thriller cloaked in deliciously dark Nordic Noir visuals.
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.
Profilic French prankster Quentin Dupieux finds the funny side of cancel culture, AI and actorly vanity in his meta-comic Cannes film festival curtain-raiser ‘The Second Act’.
Thanks to its solid, diverse line-up of first and second features, Jeonju International Film Festival consolidated its standing as the premier platform for the discovery of new voices in Korean cinema.
Scooping three awards at the Jeonju International Film Festival, Namkoong Sun’s ‘Time To Be Strong’ is a winning drama about three traumatized losers in the brutal K-pop rat race.
One of Jeonju’s annual trio of self-produced titles, ‘When Clouds Hide the Shadows’ is Chilean director José Luis Torres Leiva’s affectionate, contemplative visit to the southernmost outpost of South America.
Nestled on the shores of Lake Geneva, , Visions du Réel has developed into a small gem for documentary cinema, screening 128 films in its main programs.
Atmospheric, compelling and timely, Swiss documentarian Nicole Vögele’s ‘The Landscape and the Fury’, about migrants trying to cross the Bosnia-Croatian border to reach Europe, won Visions du Réel’s top prize.
Guy Ritchie displays his usual skill at stylized violence, cheeky repartee, and bespoke costuming, but the build-up in this WWII action saga outshines the climax.
Lynne Ramsay checks in from Stockfish, where she received the festival’s Honorary Award, with new films starring Julianne Moore and Jennifer Lawrence on the horizon.
A nun weighs up the freedoms and limits of a Belarusian convent after heartbreak and heroin addiction in this sublime and sensorial debut feature doc.
In the slantwise ethnographic documentary ‘Empathfridges’, Rakel Jonsdottir explores the concept of shared fridges in Iceland to create microcosmic portraits of place and community.
The 10th anniversary edition of the Icelandic festival Stockfish brought professionals and casual audiences together in a warm, intimate manner.
The Balkan landscape is a witness to cycles of time and displacement in Nicole Vögele’s atmospheric, compelling and very human doc, winner of the top prize at Visions du Réel.
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.
Scott Cummings explores the Church of Satan through theatrical vignettes in his inventive, irreverent documentary portrait of a maligned American outsider culture.
The experimental short If I die, will I go home? unnervingly explores the psyche of a young man wrestling with how to survive as an adult when bound by the long grip of childhood trauma.
TFV y CineVerdict le da al cine en español una muy merecida atención
International films are emerging from a bleak winter of disregard, thanks to the power of professional reviews.
Al-Takdir, a new bilingual film platform spotlighting the cinema of the Middle East, is about to bow at Cannes.
A new production agreement between the United States and Italy is in the works that could mean significant advantages to projects of Italian origin.
The Arab Cinema Center turns ten this year, continuing to offer networking opportunities to Arab filmmakers and their counterparts around the globe.
When her lover of forty years suddenly dies, Angie discovers she has no rights even to her own apartment in Ray Yeung’s Teddy Award-winning ‘All Shall Be Well’, a heartfelt though unexceptional drama revealing Hong Kong’s unjust inheritance laws for same-sex couples.
Berlin’s transitional year unfolded uncertainly amid a dire world political situation and an imminent leadership change at the festival.
The Berlinale awards celebrated cultural differences, with the Golden Bear going to Mati Diop’s poetic and thoughtful documentary on colonialism ‘Dahomey’, which follows the return of looted cultural artefacts to Benin.
Crypto-currencies and cryogenics become intertwined in Gala Hernandez Lopez’s illusory dual-screen collage which ruminates on humanity’s speculative relationship with the future, for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world.
A filmmaker explores her struggles with motherhood and artistic stimulus through a correspondence and a short film about birdwatching in That’s All from Me, a deft epistolary short.
Three generations of Russified women in Ukraine come to grips with their identities and displacement in Svitlana Lishchynska’s rough-edged, absorbing film-as-therapy documentary.
Bowing in the Berlinale’s independently curated Forum programme, Indian filmmaker Siddartha Jatla’s second feature, ‘In the Belly of a Tiger’, combines social critique with magical realism to depict the struggles of India’s rural poor.
Wang Xiaoshuai, controversially without an official screening permit, returns to Berlin with another superb picture about Chinese politics (and peasantry) featuring outstanding performances and stellar dialogue.
Featuring wordless performances by a heavily disguised Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ is a boldly surreal Bigfoot comedy with surprising emotional depth.
A misguided narrative full of ill-thought-out atmospheric twists spoils the cinematic attractions of Tunisian-American Meryem Joobeur’s debut feature about a family torn apart when two sons join Daesh.
A man has his heart removed in an attempt to lessen his existential anguish in Fanny Sorgo and Eva Pedroza’s expressive, lingering animation, Tako Tsubo.
Aliyar Rasti’s contemplative fable searches for a better future in the vast Iranian countryside.
The outmoded bleach sellers of Tangier offer a window to a simpler time and a resistance against rampant growth in Hicham Gardaf’s tranquil documentary, In Praise of Slowness.
This lumbering lesbian road-trip “comedy” lurches its way toward nowhere in particular.
Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Ngoc Lan’s first feature, ‘Cu Li Never Cries’, is an absorbing, beautiful ode about a pensioner’s nostalgia for her past and a young couple’s uncertainty about their future.
An elderly couple retreats from the outside world in preparation for the launch of three artificial moons in the strange and meditative experimental documentary, The Moon Also Rises.
Nelson Makengo’s beautifully shot and observed documentary ‘Rising Up at Night’ captures the darkness of Kinshasa after severe flooding and electricity cuts, along with the resilience of its people.
Ukrainian director Oksana Karpovych’s quietly powerful documentary ‘Intercepted’ combines bleakly beautiful, defiantly hopeful images of her war-ravaged homeland with recordings of phone calls made by invading Russian soldiers.
Santiago, Chile is both brought into focus and dreamily abstracted in Towards the Sun, Far from the Centre, a languid city symphony featuring a queer couple looking for a space in which they can express themselves.
Martin Scorsese pays personal homage to visionary film-maker duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in David Hinton’s formally traditional but thorough documentary ‘Made in England’.
Real historical murder cases inspired ‘The Devil’s Bath’, a relentlessly grim but atmospheric psychological horror thriller from Austrian writer-director duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.
A wonderfully observed sketch of a family lunch in late-1990s China, Remains of the Hot Day not only captures period mood but is compiled from glimpses of myriad miniature dramas.
A depressed Chinese woman tired of her unaffectionate family and middle class life heads towards a breakdown in ‘Some Rain Must Fall,’ the first feature by Qiu Yang, whose minimalist storytelling is full of atmosphere and foreboding.
A young girl avoiding her home and a woman returning to hers after a long absence form a brief but profound bond in Selin Oksuzoglu sparkling short, Bye Bye Turtle.
Three people in Beirut representing the past, present and future of Lebanon experience the hopes, disappointments and decimated sense of stability in Myriam El Hajj’s sad yet defiant documentary tracing the country’s ups and downs since 2018.
Hong Sang-soo’s third collaboration with Isabelle Huppert is the weakest outing for both the director and actor so far.
Las voces de tres mujeres dan autenticidad a una película a punto de rebasada por propósitos didácticos. Memorias de un cuerpo que arden que se estrena en la sección Panorama en la Berlinale.
The voices of three women give authenticity to ‘Memories of a Burning Body’, premiering in the Panorama section at the Berlinale.
TFV attended a Berlinale networking event for German talents and asked them about their experiences.
In her first solo directing stint ‘Langue étrangère’, Camera d’Or winner Claire Burger cleverly evokes the fears and anxieties of two middle-class 17-year-old European girls about to inherit a world racked with violently diverging political opinions.
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.
Mischievous writer-director Bruno Dumont combines visually dazzling ‘Star Wars’ parody with small-town French farce in his admirably ambitious but muddled space opera ‘The Empire’.
Santiago Lozano Álvarez encontró una manera original -lírica y exuberante- de hablar sobre los asesinatos, desapariciones y ecocidio en Colombia en Yo vi tres luces negras
The true story of Latvian-born German silent film diva Maria Leiko and her fateful journey to Stalin’s USSR in 1937 is retold in Davis Simanis’s ‘Maria’s Silence’ with a tragic depth that is engrossing and emotional.
Santiago Lozano Álvarez finds an original way – lyrical and exuberant – to talk about the murders, disappearances and ecocide in Colombia in ‘I Saw Three Black Lights’.
Jeremy Clapin follows I Lost My Body with Meanwhile on Earth, another high-concept exploration of loss occupied by expressive ethical wrangling and intangible alien lifeforms.
Mati Diop’s thought-provokingly cerebral-poetic documentary follows the return of 26 looted cultural artefacts and their welcome home to Benin, encompassing the celebrations as well as larger debates around colonialization and how to reintegrate such potently spiritual objects into a society 130 years after they were plundered.
Filmmaker Inadelso Cossa uses sensory evocation to delve into the lingering impact of Mozambique’s civil war (1977 to 1992) in ‘The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder’.
Olivier Assayas’s semi-autobiographical reverie ‘Suspended Time’ on his stay in the family home during lockdown, is likely his weakest work, playing like a parody of an intellectualized director’s banal ruminations.
Corporate scientists use memory technology to bring back the dead for a brief reunion with their loved ones (played by Gael Garcia Bernal and Bérénice Bejo), in Piero Messina’s clever but often perplexing ‘Another End’, whose futuristic love story beyond the grave is a mighty challenge to unravel.
German director Andreas Dresen’s biopic of anti-Nazi activist Hilde Coppi, ‘From Hilde, With Love’ is diligent and thoughtful but too tastefully restrained.
A disappointing, maddeningly self-indulgent plunge into the tensions and inequities in the kitchen of a Times Square eatery, designed as an anti-capitalist diatribe messily juggling personal and choral storytelling but saved to some degree by excellent chiaroscuro camerawork and a strong cast.
Michael Fetter Nathansky, with assistance from lead actress Aenne Schwarz, inspects a shaky relationship in the shadow of work pressures in this adequately sensitive, surreal, and discomfiting look at marriage and its dissatisfactions.
A small jewel of an Iranian romantic comedy, ‘My Favourite Cake’ pits an older woman determined to find a measure of happiness against the restrictions of the Islamic regime and the loneliness of aging, while the film’s creators Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha have been banned from traveling to Berlin.
Cillian Murphy follows his huge ‘Oppenheimer’ success with glum but powerful personal project ‘Small Things Like These’, a soulful literary psychodrama about mercy, empathy, complicity and dark misdeeds in 1980s Ireland.
Celebrated stage dramatist Annie Baker paints childhood as a midsummer daydream full of tragicomic adult behaviour in her droll, charming film debut ‘Janet Planet’.
Aaron Schimberg’s darkly funny body-horror fairy tale ‘A Different Man’ takes a satirical scalpel to the beastliness of beauty.
Carlo Chatrian is about to unleash his fifth and final Berlinale.
TFV speaks to Simone Baumann, Managing Director of German Films.
Rotterdam Film Festival’s 53rd edition balanced an uneven competition program full of sombre three-hour dramas with more adventurous sidebars, essay films, experimental video art and pop superstar guests.
Scattered over different sections with few ripples in the media, four films detailing the Palestinian experience stood out at Rotterdam.
Indian director Midhun Murali’s prize-winning animated shadow-puppet epic ‘Kiss Wagon’ is loopy and confusing but still a dazzling, highly original visual feast.
Daniele Luchetti’s ‘Confidenza’ (Trust), from the Domenico Starnone novel about a dangerous confidant, features a noteworthy performance from Elio Germano.
Three very different films from Japan, India and Australia won Rotterdam’s Tiger Awards, underlining the festival’s range of new talent.
Awash in a luxuriant atmosphere of passion and emotional discovery created by exquisite b&w images of seas rivers and jungles, Marcelo Gomes’s three characters struggle to shake off the past and move forward post-WW2 in ‘Portrait of a Certain Orient’.
Ilir Hasanaj’s deeply empathetic documentary ‘Workers’ Wings’, is centred on manual labourers who have suffered workplace injuries, is a tender and intimate marvel.
TFV interviewed outspoken Hong Kong director Scud, who brought his tenth and perhaps final film to Rotterdam.
Fumbling first love stirs up a frenzy in this indie debut that gets further away the closer you get.
Kazakh writer-director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s stylish but brutal neo-western thriller ‘Steppenwolf’ takes place once upon a time in the Wild East.
In the spritely and tactile essayistic ode to a heroine of Greek myth Daphne was a torso ending in leaves, Catriona Gallagher reflects on the legacy of an ancient arboreal transformation.
TFV correspondent Max Borg investigates the Manetti-verse and how the Italian duo scored a Focus program at this year’s IFFR.
Using a blend of stop-motion animation and live-action, Niles Atallah gorgeously crafts a mesmeric, dying world of analogue detritus and vestiges of magical knowledge, in which a half-amphibian being dreams of survival.
A solitary artist rents her Tehran house out to a film crew, in an ingeniously layered, droll reflection on how we construct memory and community.
The cast shines, but this adaptation of the popular Nigerian novel could use a little more life.
Damien Hauser’s enchanting, sun-baked drama ‘After the Long Rains’ has bigger questions beneath its welcoming glow.
The feted Scottish film and video artist Rachel Maclean talks Barbie, James Bond, pink-punk maximalism and the subversive power of bad taste.
A cryptic Deborah Levy novel is stylised for the screen as an elusive and surrealistic dance of the subconscious, as an uninvited guest crashes a poet’s family vacation.
A major piece of Finland-Swedish literature comes to life with epic results in Tiina Lymi’s dramatic adaptation, ‘Stormskerry Maja’,
Veredicto: ‘La historia se escribe de noche’ es un retrato inusual de los apagones que han azotado a Cuba durante los últimos años y un ejercicio exquisito de atmósfera cinematográfica
‘History Is Written at Night’ is an unusual portrait of the blackouts that have plagued Cuba over the past few years and an exquisite exercise in atmosphere.
The iconic Blondie singer narrates and appears in Kramer’s new documentary ‘So Unreal’, a mind-bending deep dive into prophetic cyberpunk cinema.
Set in the Negev Desert where action blockbuster ‘Rambo III’ was shot, ‘Under a Blue Sun’ is an intricately layered doc scrutinising the intersection of war simulation, oppression and entertainment.
From Aay Liparoto’s powerful ‘Small Acts of Violence’ to Rachel Maclean’s darkly surreal ‘I’m Terribly Sorry’, Rotterdam kept Immersive Media viewers up-to-date.
Finnish director-screenwriter-actress Tiina Lymi. whose ‘Stormskerry Maja’ had its international premiere in Rotterdam, reflects on making the spoken word realistic on screen.
A young woman challenges the superstitious fears of her cult-like patriarchal community in Swiss director Sophia Bösch’s ambitious but uneven dystopian fairy-tale debut ‘Milk Teeth’.
A joyous Kiwi midnight-movie oddity that channels ‘80s fantasy and DIY gumption in a cosmic quest for a hyper-dimensional crystal.
Showing films by Chilean directors in exile, IFFR’s Focus on ‘Chile in the Heart’ helps us better understand the country and the 1973 coup d’état that changed it.
Al mostrar filmes de directores exiliados, el Focus Chile en el corazón de IFFR 2024 nos ayuda a entender mejor el país y el día en que cambió de golpe.
An absurdist, Gothic twist takes Jonathan Ogilvie’s coming-of-age comedy and New Zealand post-punk subculture origin story into delightfully uncharted territory.
The Swiss director is bringing his new film ‘Bisons’ to Rotterdam.
The mainstream and the niche coexist at IFFR this year under artistic director Kaludjercic and managing director Stewart.
Johan Grimonprez’s complex, cacophonous ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ is a feat of design, narration, sound, and cinema about an important chapter in Congo’s tragic relationship with the UN, the U.S., and Belgium.
An intimate and profound study of a child’s need for maternal love, with outstanding acting from 6-year old Louise Mauroy-Panzani and her nanny, Ilça Moreno Zego.
Reinas, dirigida por Klaudia Reynecke es una buena película coming of age que confirma la presencia de una voz con sello propio en el cine latinoamericano
The Europeans were in form at Sundance, where they showed their first new films of 2024.
Thea Hvistendahl’s half-Stephen King, half-Kafka first feature, ‘Handling the Undead’, is a confident three-pronged narrative on the irreversibility of death.
In a Norwegian doc world premiering at Sundance, a moving family story is occasionally snagged by unconvincing dramatic contrivances.
Facts come with chills in this cautionary doc overview of an ethically thorny new reality: the sale of immortality via AI simulations of the dead.
Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann’s ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici’ is an incredibly clear-eyed take on the absolute power the rich have in a capitalist society.
Taking place just two months after the onset of the horrendous war in Gaza, the El Gouna Film Festival’s ‘Special Edition’ was a sober but not gloomy affair that paid its respects to the Palestinian people and their cinema.
The El Gouna Film Festival awards this year included ’Goodbye, Julia’, a Sudanese film by Mohamed Kordofani about two women divided by their cultures, which won the Cinema for Humanity Audience Award, while Egyptian director Ibrahim Nash’at’s ‘Hollywoodgate’ won as best documentary and Hong Sang-soo’s latest ‘In Our Day’ got the best narrative nod.
This superhero sequel represents something never-before-seen in cinema: a boring James Wan movie.
Two of El Gouna Film Festival’s leading ladies discussed Yousra’s film career in a special masterclass.
Egyptian filmmakers stand out in El Gouna’s official Short Film Competition.
Director Lucy Kerr’s feature debut ‘Family Drama’ is slender and elusive, but highly atmospheric and hauntingly strange.
A delightful Algerian documentary about cinema and the Casbah makes a superb companion piece to the newly-restored 35mm print of ‘Tahia Ya Didou’ by cult comic and director Mohamed Zinet.
In a time of war, El Gouna’s special 2023 edition presents an insightful collection of recent films from Palestine, curated with the Palestine Cinema Days.
Gaining extra urgency in the light of current events, British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi’s debut feature ‘The Teacher’ is a well-intentioned but flawed drama set in the occupied West Bank
El Gouna is screening eight Sudanese shorts from the ’70s and ’80s to retell a forgotten chapter of African film history.
The cruel and gripping story of Reyhaneh Jabbari, a 19-year-old Iranian woman convicted of murdering a man who attempted to rape her, unfolds like a thriller in Steffi Niederzoll’s documentary recreation, ‘Seven Winters in Tehran’.
French-Iraqi director Leila Albayaty explores her own complex cultural roots, painful family tensions and buried traumatic memories in her emotionally raw docu-musical ‘From Abdul to Leila’.
Marwan Hamed’s work cannot be separated from the industry aspects of his successful film career.
Magical realism and Far East ghost stories inject a thrilling, if not always crystal clear, element into Nelson Yeo’s fishy tale of an overage and not completely human love triangle, ‘Dreaming & Dying’.
FIPRESCI President and head of CineGouna SpringBoard Ahmed Shawky aspires for more diversity in film circles and more freedom for Arab narratives.
“Art should not be sacrificed during wars”: El Gouna’s Intishal Al Timimi and Marianne Khoury tell TFV
A timely coming-of-age drama about young women dealing with the complexities of sexual consent, writer-director Molly Manning Walker’s prize-winning debut feature ‘How to Have Sex’ is impressively nuanced and emotionally rich.
Two African boys who dream of Europe cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean on a heroic journey in ‘Me Captain’. Italy’s Oscar entry from acclaimed filmmaker Matteo Garrone.
Filmmaker and producer Milorad Milinkovic reveals he is also a history buff in his recreation of the assassination of Prince Mihailo Obrenovic III in Serbia’s Oscar entry, ‘The Duke and the Poet’.
Nine cinematographers worked on depicting the landscape of glaciers and fjords that shaped director Margreth Olin’s childhood in Norway.
At age 82, Hayao Miyazaki proves once again that he’s our greatest living animator with this haunting tale of a boy on a mystical adventure in WWII-era Japan.
The director of ‘Bad Living’ talks to TFV about how it feels to be Portugal’s Oscar submission for the third time.
A stunningly shot meditation on man and nature — or more like man in nature — that could have benefited from more substance.
Director Anna Hints discusses all things ‘Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’, Estonia’s Oscar entry.
Exuberant director Radu Jude talks to TFV about Romania’s Oscar hopeful ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the
End of the World’ and what’s coming next.
The filmmaker talks about ‘The Last Ashes’, an intriguing blend of European and American film traditions that is Luxembourg’s selection for the Oscar race.
Ramata-Toulaye Sy, the talented new director shooting in Senegal, gracefully glides from a Cannes premiere to the Oscar race.
Luminous hand-painting animates a famed Polish tale of female defiance in a rural world of predatory opportunism and survival.
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.
IDFA 2023 received a staggering dose of real-life events on its opening night; the quality of its film selection and a few political moves helped it recover.
Shoghakat Vardanyan’s ‘1489’ wins Best Film at IDFA for its humor and humanity in what the jury called “a vivid evocation of 100 years of history in less than 100 minutes of cinema.”
Elvis Sabin Ngaibino’s IDFA 2023 documentary, ‘The Burden’, walks a familiar path of African misery, but his compelling subjects lends this sophomore feature documentary a deserved poignancy.
Just over a dozen artworks are observed in situ in 14 Paintings, a patient but cumulatively fascinating cross-section portrait of contemporary China.
A star guest at the Dutch documentary festival, 81-year-old art-house provocateur Peter Greenaway discusses his two new feature projects, his fears for the future of cinema, and his own feelings of mortality.
Dutch director Walter Stokman digs into recently declassified KGB archives in ‘The Kyiv Files’, an uneven but timely documentary about Ukraine, Russia and Cold War paranoia.
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.
A raw and immediate found-footage assemblage, ‘Limitation’ traces Russia’s hand in the coup that overthrew Georgia’s first post-Soviet president Zviad Gamsakhurdia.
Melissa Thackway and Biljana Tutorov, jury members for the Beeld en Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award at IDFA 2023, join TFV’s Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, the jury’s third member, in a discussion about the evolution of archives and the festival’s controversial opening night.
Director Barbara Visser explores the controversial links between pioneering Dadaist artists Marcel Duchamp and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in her lively, adventurous, unconventional documentary ‘Alreadymade’.
Sirin Bahar Demirel’s stimulating bricolage short, Between Delicate and Violent, combines archival imagery with animation to examine how pictures tell stories and whether they can be mined for truth.
Fear-stoking myths around wolves, back in Germany after a century, are dismantled in Ralf Bücheler’s doc ‘In Wolf Country’, appealing to nature management via science.
A haunting, poetic doc with political undercurrents, ‘Magic Mountain’ examines a once-grand sanitorium in the Georgian mountains lost to the vultures of capitalism.
Director Marc Isaacs takes a bumpy but engaging journey into post-Brexit England in his eccentric docu-fiction pageant ‘This Blessed Plot’.
Chloe Galibert-Laine’s latest video essay, I Would Like to Rage, reflects on the place of rage online and through this lens explores the blurred lines between authenticity and performativity
Olga Chernykh’s poetic, vividly sensorial essay-doc debut ‘A Picture to Remember’ reconstitutes Donetsk as a cinematic site of memories for three family generations of women.
IDFA’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia talks with TFV critic Carmen Gray about the festival’s role in times of tension, and where documentary might be heading.
Peter Mettler’s multi-layered, monumental cine-diary is a meditation on our obsession with the other side that is as playful and surprising as it is frequently sublime.
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.
With its socially and politically engaged agenda, DOK Leipzig’s 66th edition felt especially timely this year during a major period of global turbulence.
Peter Mettler’s personal and poetic reflection ‘While the Green Grass Grows’ wins DOK Leipzig’s Golden Dove as best international documentary.
Lina Soualem is touring global festivals with her very personal documentary’ Bye Bye Tiberias’, in “a moment of great tragedy and despair”.
‘El Shatt’, a commune established by 28,000 Dalmatian Croats in colonial Egypt where they fled Nazi persecution in 1944, is remembered in Ivan Ramljak’s romanticized but well-researched documentary.
Documentary director Matthew Lancit addresses his existential health fears through horror movie tropes in ‘Play Dead!’. a compelling hybrid blend of non-fiction and playful fakery.
Adrien Beau’s ‘La Vourdalak’ is a lo-fi take on the 1839 Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy novella and a super-quirky, semi-scary, and supremely absurd film..
‘One Hundred Four’ is the number of refugees stranded on one of the world’s deadly smuggling routes, the Mediterranean, in Jonathan Schörnig’s real-time documentary.
Mass wig exportation becomes the lens through which the fascinating, spectral doc An Asian Ghost Story explores Hong Kong’s late 20th-century modernisation and position between East and West.
A hard-hitting immersion into life and death under Russian invasion in eastern Ukraine, ‘White Angel – The End of Marinka’ is seen through an evacuation team’s GoPro helmet footage.
Director Katrin Rothe’s animated bio-documentary hybrid ‘Johnny & Me’ brings to life the visually striking photomontage work of pioneering political artist John Heartfield.
One of the traditional fables of Sang Kancil, the wily mouse-deer, is brought exquisitely to life in Zhang Xu Zhan’s electrifying, otherworldly animation, Compound Eyes of Tropical
Delphine Girard examines the possibly violent encounter between a man and a woman in her solidly unadorned debut feature, ‘Through the Night’, winner of the Audience Award at the Giornate degli Autori.
The feted Austrian documentary maker talks about capturing the Coronavirus crisis on camera, filming in perilous places, and his life-changing rejection from film school.
A married LGBTQ+ couple worry if a future Armenia will honour the rights of their non-conventional family, in this intimately observational, activism-based doc.
In the complex and thought-provoking essay film, Lumene: Privatisation, David Shongo reflects on the commodification of cultural memory and the lasting impacts of insidious colonial impositions.
Belarusian Independent Film Academy founders, and the team of doc ‘Who, If Not Us? The Fight for Democracy in Belarus,’ discuss aims and challenges at DOK Leipzig.
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.
Maria Fredriksson plunged into the doc-making deep end for her debut feature ‘The Gullspång Miracle’, screening at DOK Leipzig.
Austrian documentary maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s symphonic Covid chronicle ‘The Standstill’ plays like a slow-motion disaster movie with immersive widescreen visuals.
Asmae El Moudir’s ‘The Mother of All Lies’ embodies both sides of DOK Leipzig’s festival identity.
An ostensibly simplistic documentary about a flat in Kyiv, Three Windows on South West uses incidental memories to paint a fleeting collective portrait of another time.
Spanish animator, author and producer Isabel Herguera bings her first feature to DOK L — a masterfully evocative work on feminism and women’s lives, ‘Sultana’s Dream’.
Masses seduced by past imperialistic might and activists seeking change present clashing public spectacles in Marianna Kaat’s punchy, broad-strokes doc on modern Russia.
The head of the world’s oldest documentary film festival talks controversial programming choices, magical public screenings, and the need to learn from uncomfortable history lessons.
Eerie, gripping and expertly crafted, Maria Fredriksson’s mind-bending doc takes myriad twists through a Nordic family mystery.
A trio of documentarians traverse the forbidding digital landscapes of an online survivalist video game to explore the communities that have emerged there in this verité machinima, Knit’s Island.
‘My Lost Country’ is a personal documentary in which the director Ishtar Yasin uses multiple tools in a moving portrait of her Iraqi father.
This year’s San Sebastian was a sunny festival filled with discoveries.
Jaione Camborda’s delicate drama of a midwife, ‘The Rye Horn’, won the Golden Shell.
Gabriel Byrne plays dual versions of Irish literary legend Samuel Beckett in Oscar-winning director James Marsh’s unrevealing but elegant and engagingly offbeat bio-drama ‘Dance First’.
Mi país perdido es un documental personal en el que la directora usa múltiples herramientas en un conmovedor retrato de su padre irakí
Canadian director Henry Bernadet paints a sunny patchwork portrait of multicultural Montreal in his collaborative teen-driven docu-drama ‘Gamma Rays’.
In equal parts fiercely amusing and roundly desolating, Robin Campillo’s ‘Red Island’, an offbeat look at the end of French colonialism in Madagascar, is a crowd-pleaser in San Sebastian’s Official Selection.
Rati Oneli’s phlegmatic drama, We Are the Hollow Men, depicts the difficult relationship between an estranged father and son when the latter returns home after his mother’s death.
Griffin Dunne, James Norton and Miles Heizer co-star in Noah Pritzker’s underpowered but charming ensemble drama ‘Ex-Husbands’. which pays fond homage to a lost analogue era of bittersweet New York comedies.
Revered Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice receives the Donostia Award at SSIFF.
Australian writer-director Kitty Green takes a hellish holiday in the badlands of toxic masculinity with her punchy feminist Outback thriller ‘The Royal Hotel’.
Celebrating the natural cycles of life in women’s ever-changing bodies, Jaione Camborda’s second feature ‘The Rye Horn’ is a moving period drama that touches on abortion laws in 1971 Spain.
History, folklore, and contemporary realities intertwine in Amma ki Katha, Nehal Vyas’ essayistic meditation on national aspiration and how stories become enmeshed in state oppression.
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.
El deslumbrante e imaginativo cuento animado de la directora española Isabel Herguera ‘El sueño de la sultana’ sobre una artista itinerante está inspirado en la pensadora feminista bengalí Rokeya Hossain y su cuento de 1905 sobre Ladyland, un país gobernado por mujeres.
A young woman must deal with the physical and psychological bruises of a sexual assault in Shaylee Atary’s powerful dramatic short, Single Light.
Spanish director Isabel Herguera’s exhilarating and imaginative animated tale about a roving artist is sparked by real-life Bengali feminist thinker Rokeya Hossain and her 1905 story about Ladyland, a country run by women.
Spanish directing duo Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal recreate a dark chapter in Brazilian musical history in their visually ravishing animated docu-fiction hybrid ‘Shoot the Piano Player’.
The 2012 Tohoku tsunami still holds an anguished Japanese-Singapore family in its clutches in ‘Last Shadow at First Light’, a complex, if at times overwritten, examination of survivors’ guilt in a first feature from Nicole Midori Woodford.
The road to love is paved with darkly surreal humour for Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed in Greek director Christos Nikou’s uneven but generally engaging low-fi sci-fi rom-com satire ‘Fingernails’.
Achingly poetic and daringly original, Raven Jackson’s first feature ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ chooses to tell the story of a Black girl growing up in Mississippi through atmosphere instead of conventional narration.
Orlando, el extravagante manifiesto del director debutante Paul B. Preciado empuja los límites de los géneros masculino/femenino y también de los cinematográficos.
Godard reaches from beyond with one final film, a coarse and compelling act of montage, an expressive audiovisual treatment for a never-to-be-made made feature, Phony Wars.
CINE VERDICT: Después de su inquietante pero bien recibido thriller `Sundown`, el director mexicano Michel Franco , continúa con `Memoria` un drama familiar-romance dibujado con plantilla , actuado por Jessica Chastain en el papel de una trabajadora social emocionalmente afectada, en Brooklyn.
Germany’s premiere festival platform for rule-breaking indie cinema celebrated its 30th edition with audacious acid-punk UFO comedies, bleak kidnap thrillers and a ground-breaking peek into the multiverse.
Turkey’s chilling political thriller ‘In the Blind Spot’ grabs the Best Film prize at Oldenburg.
A sociopathic amateur film-maker kidnaps the woman he wants to play his fantasy girlfriend role in Truman Kewley’s quietly chilling psycho-thriller debut ‘Beautiful Friend’.
Cult director Jérôme Vandewattyne uses a spate of real UFO sightings as the launchpad for ‘The Belgian Wave’, an incoherent but highly entertaining acid-punk sci-fi road movie about close encounters of the surreal kind.
A mother and father are confronted with an agonising dilemma as they attempt to prepare the body of their young transgender child for burial in Ahmad Alyaseer’s ‘Our Males and Females’.
A kidnapping sees the lives and fates of three troubled youths become entwined in Takayuki Hayashi’s serene and solemn feature debut, From Dawn Till Noon on the Sea.
A troubled young Swedish woman finds Copenhagen to be a town without pity in Danish director Adam Benjamin Mikkelsen’s slight, disjointed but emotionally powerful debut ‘Frames of Alicia’.
David Gregory’s entertaining documentary ‘Enter the Clones of Bruce’ chronicles the bizarre explosion in Bruce Lee lookalikes and copycat films that followed the martial arts superstar’s death 50 years ago.
Mladen Djordjevic’s slow-burn Midnight Madness selection has headier things on its mind than blood and guts.
2023 Toronto International Film Festival sparkles with starry debuts and international favorites.
A friendship between a dog and a robot in 80s New York provides the foundation for a beautiful and touching exploration of relationships in Robot Dreams.
A man uses virtual reality to experience and retouch the memory of his deceased daughter in this poignant, thought-provoking Iranian sci-fi, Dream Maker.
Axel Petersén conjures a surreal, pure vibes, sun-baked noir that’s equal parts David Lynch and Dashiel Hammett.
Temperatures rise but drama stays stuck in this hellish, apocalyptic vision of Rome.
‘A Happy Day’ is a stylized asylum seeker story that wraps its message inside a frustrating riddle.
Mona Achache brings invention, curiosity and raw vulnerability to excavate traces of three generations of female writers in her family and power abuses in France’s literary scene.
‘Spirit of Ecstasy’ is a sensitive look at coming-of-age through the unique lens of the ruthless world of finance.
Nina Palcek follows Lydia Tár in managing Mahler’s 5th with a spiralling personal life in slow-burn thriller ‘Not A Word.’
The 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.
La caída del avión uruguayo en 1972 en los Andes es recreada respetuosamente y en gran detalle en “La sociedad de la nieve,” una película infartante sobre el desastre, que cierra el festival de cine de Venecia número 80, y es dirigida por J.A. Bayona, que ganó fama con “Lo imposible.”
An unexpected story of loneliness and yearning from Stéphane Brizé in which two former lovers come face-to-face with the disappointments of life, beautiful in its understatement and cinematic restraint yet still generating tremendous poignancy.
The miniature beings that starred in an 80s television show slowly unravel in Wander to Wonder, a surreal animation that riffs on an enchanting children’s story trope.
Silent film footage is repurposed in We Should All Be Futurists, a deliciously comic reimagining of Marinetti’s man-machine hybrid as a novel – intimate – cure for female hysteria.
A largely deserted port plays host to subtle drama unraveling at a glacially pace in Xandra Popescu’s strangely beguiling study in stasis, Sentimental Stories.
Part survival-revenge drama, part love story, Giorgio Diritti’s ‘Lubo’ addresses the Swiss state’s forcible removal of Jenisch children from their families beginning in the 1930s, and while Franz Rogowski’s magnetism keeps his morally complex character sympathetic, the film feels too much like a miniseries cut down to a very long feature length.
The freewheeling independence of the open road is given a Gen-Z spin in the Ross Brothers’ kinetic and affecting hybrid documentary, Gasoline Rainbow.
Mujeres en prisiones chilenas retratan la maternidad y el crudo dolor de la separación en este empático e impresionista documental, de Tana Gilbert. filmado con teléfonos celulares.
Women in Chilean prisons record motherhood and the raw pain of separation in Tana Gilbert’s empathetic and impressionistic, mobile-shot doc of solidarity.
Lumbrensueño da una lección de creatividad y amor al cine aún con algunas deficiencias.
‘On The Pulse’ is an admirable but out-of-touch portrait of the gritty work of investigative TV journalists.
Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” is a highly ambitious attempt to fictionalize Isabel Wilkerson’s theory on the centrality of caste rather than race in determining discriminatory hierarchies, playing to the director’s strengths in terms of depicting personal relationships but also her weaknesses in several overly didactic sequences that treat characters and audiences like ignoramuses.
Various installations in the Venice Immersive put their own stamp on the 360-degree viewing experience.
Director Matteo Garrone steps back from the edginess of stylized crime dramas and horror fantasies to recount the no less cruel and shocking journey made by two Senegalese teens to Europe in ‘Io Capitano’.
Kyoshi Sugita’s “Following the Sound” ticks all the boxes for nipponophiles seeking some extremely austere storytelling and swathes of slow-moving, soothing imagery set in a small, serene town in Japan.
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.
Directed by Hiam Abbass’s daughter Lina Soualem, this beautifully layered, quietly intelligent documentary explores her female-centric family’s experiences of dispossession and exile following the 1948 Nakba, seeking to break the silence surrounding trauma.
Director General Cinema and Audiovisual Nicola Borrelli at the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and for Tourism takes time to speak with The Film Verdict before Venice.
Unspoken traumas are made manifest in Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi’s beautifully drawn and profoundly moving animated allegory, In the Shadow of the Cypress.
Infidelity is followed by murder in glamorous Paris in Woody Allen’s smooth-as-silk 50th film ‘Coup de Chance,’ shot entirely in French.
Una absorbente historia de codependencia edípica ambientada entre los traficantes de droga de Roma, “El Paraíso” cuenta con brillantes actuaciones que superan el sentimentalismo.
An engrossing tale of Oedipal codependence set among Rome’s drug dealers, ‘El Paraiso’ boasts brilliant acting that overcomes sentimentality.
David Attenborough and Neil Gaiman are two of the star players in this year’s Venice Immersive lineup.
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 Venice Film Festival has made headlines in some quarters for selecting the latest works of Allen, Polanski and Besson
‘The Featherweight’ is an inventive faux doc portrait of boxing great Willie Pep who faces his greatest fight yet: his own legacy.
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.
The late Italian filmmaker Ruggero Deodato was at the center of one of Venice’s most
anticipated screenings.
Sobre todo de noche, el atrevido y excitante debut de Víctor Iriarte, refrescante aún con una historia dolorosa, se estrena en Gionate degli autori en Venecia 2023
‘Foremost by Night’, the exciting and daring feature debut of Víctor Iriarte, is refreshing even with its painful story.
Casi 50 años después de la pérdida de un documental sobre la comunidad kuna de Panamá, el director suizo panameño Andrés Peyrot lo localiza y exhibe ante una comunidad emocionalmente comprometida, en este documental fascinante aùn con sus fallas.
Saverio Costanzo’s use of “La Dolce Vita” for a 1950s loss-of-innocence story set in Rome’s film world feels locked in its period charms, and despite excellent performances fails to resonate beyond the surface.
Aardman’s beloved duo Wallace & Gromit return in a demanding but fun VR experience that is part of the 2023 Venice Immersive competition.
Dazzling camerawork and an exceptional trio of teenage actors dangle from a weak narrative thread in Alain Parroni’s intense first feature about underprivileged kids growing up without a future.
The General Delegate of the International Critics Week Beatrice Fiorentino discusses her philosophy for the Venice sidebar.
‘Upon Open Sky’, a Mexican road movie full of restraint and some surprises, premieres in Venice’s Orizzonti section.
God is a Woman, nearly fifty years after a film documenting Panama’s Kuna community was lost, Swiss-Panamanian director Andrés Peyrot tracks it down and screens it before an emotionally engaged crowd in this fascinating though flawed documentary.
A sobering observational documentary shot at an air force base in Afghanistan, where director Ibrahim Nash’at embedded himself in order to bear witness to the Taliban mindset.
A cielo abierto, road movie mexicana con una controlada dirección y varias sorpresas se estrena en Horizontes in Venecia 2023
The true story of an Italian submarine commander in World War II who sank enemy ships yet saved defenseless men is told with old-fashioned gusto and retro sentimentality in ‘Comandante’, with star Pierfrancesco Favino injecting life into the film.
TFV talks to the Artistic Director of the Giornate degli Autori, as the Venice sidebar celebrates its 20th edition.
Debut director Janis Pugh’s off-beat musical rom-com ‘Chuck Chuck Baby’ is a rough-edged but warm-hearted celebration of working-class dreamers and queer liberation.
Europeans are coming. EFP and eurimages are coming to Toronto
Publisher and film historian Peter Cowie brings insight and humor to his compact history of the Mostra del Cinema.
Alberto Barbera, director of the 80th Venice International Film Festival, reflects on the future of cinema.
How The Film Verdict has grown since its first public bow in Venice.
European cinema and international films load the Toronto slate.
Teona Strugar Mitevska’s surrealistic vision of a Sarajevo dating event turned lab for reconciliation is refreshing and offbeat in grappling with the Siege’s legacy.
‘El conde’, la oscura sátira de horror cómico revela que convertir a un monstruo de la vida real en el protagonista de su propia película de monstruos es una efectiva manera de lidiar con la tragedia histórica.
Elene Naveriani’s wry celebration of feminist non-conformity from Georgia took topped the awards at Sarajevo.
Gergo Somogyvari’s humanistic doc portrait of life in the woods on Budapest’s margins spotlights the criminalisation of LGBTQ+ people and the homeless by Orban’s government.
Emotional highs and lows marked a politically charged Sarajevo edition that saw one day cancelled in solidarity against gender-based violence.
The quietude of a bucolic life, and the deep wordless bonds between a mother and son, lie at the heart of Giorgi Parkosadze’s serene doc, ‘Requiem to the Hot Days of Summer.’
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.
Sarajevo Film Festival shut down its Wednesday schedule to honour a National Day of Mourning after a femicide in Gradacac and protests.
The prize-winning Romanian director discusses his found-footage docu-fiction hybrid film ‘Between Revolutions’, clandestine screenings in Iran, and the political power of cinema.
The long fingers of the Kosovo War reach into the present in Sovran Nrecaj’s patient and stark documentary about Fran and Verka’s isolated life in an abandoned village.
Kumjana Novakova masterfully contextualises archival testimony in her sensitive, formally inventive reckoning with violence against women as a weapon of the Bosnian War.
Belfast-born documentarian Mark Cousins, returning to Sarajevo after 29 years, gave a masterclass on his career and creative inspirations.
Domonkos Erhardt’s student short ‘From the Corner of My Eyes’ uses the malleability of the animated image to great effect to capture a miniature moment of connection.
With ‘Lost Children’ Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier have created an aching, poignant and keenly observed depiction of a dislocated father-daughter relationship, premiered in Sarajevo International Film Festival,
An elegant, playful exploration of the consolatory but deceptive nature of image-making across generations, from Catalan director-to-watch Laura Ferres is showing in Sarajevo International Film Festival,
Globally feted Scottish writer-director Lynne Ramsay has carved a slender but unique body of work shaped by uncompromising attitude and aesthetic flair.
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
The personal and the political entangle in Self-Portrait Along the Borderline, Anna Dziapshipa’s excellent essay doc about Georgian-Abkhazian relations through the lens of her own family history. It is competing in Sarajevo International Film Festival
Critics’ faves by Ali Ahmadzadeh and Radu Jude took home top prizes at a strong Locarno Film Festival.
Critics and public alike applauded the top 76th Locarno Film Festival Awards to Iran and Romania.
Estonian director Rainer Sarnet’s ‘The Invisible Fight’ is an idiosyncratic tale featuring monks, metal rock, and a manically superb performance from Ursel Tilk.
Once again, the Avant Premiere Series lineup aims to explore the best of regional TV production in Sarajevo International Film Festival
Mátalos a todos de Sebastian Molina Ruiz combina la estética grunge en video con elementos epistolares para explorar el sentimiento adolescente de aislamiento .
A tentative friendship blossoms through video correspondence in ‘Kill ‘Em All’, a deftly observed docudrama filled with youthful uncertainty and poignant loneliness.
A teen comes of age as a troubled Serbia reckons with its direction in ‘Lost Country’, Vladimir Perisic’s sombre yet astute, politically-charged drama.
Lynne Ramsay, Charlie Kaufman and Mark Cousins Are Honoured at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival.
Director Nenad Cicin-Sain’s engaging but slightly fawning documentary ‘Kiss The Future’ chronicles Irish rock supergroup U2’s love affair with war-torn Sarajevo during the Balkan wars.
Ali Ahmadzadeh’s third feature ‘Critical Zone’ is an outspoken reflection of the rage in Iranian society today. It is under attack.
In another angry bulletin from Iran in revolt, Ali Ahmadzadeh’s ‘Critical Zone’ hits censorship out of the ballpark.
American indie darling Bob Byington will please his fans with this minor amusing look at an underachieving English lit professor whose greatest disappointment is himself.
Feted Hungarian Oscar-winner István Szabó has spent his epic career probing Central Europe’s painful, morally complex history of post-imperial trauma and totalitarian tragedy.
A man learns of his own imminent death in iNTELLIGENCE, a strikingly graphic meditation on a curtailed life and the allure of immortality.
Renzo Rossellini has lived an adventurous life on the cutting edge of movies and politics.
Maryna Vroda’s richly lensed feature debut is a melancholic look at a dying part of north-eastern Ukraine that’s seemingly untouched by the present war, and while the narrative holds interest thanks especially to the protagonist, it’s the documentary-like scenes that are the film’s heart.
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.
With ‘All the Fires’, first-time director Mauricio Calderón Rico rises to the challenge of a sensitive coming-of-ager with LGBTQ+ interest and a personal style.
Lav Diaz returns to Locarno with A-list collaborators John Lloyd Cruz and Shaina Magdayao in ‘Essential Truths of the Lake’, a fiery noir-inflected takedown of the culture of criminal impunity shaping contemporary Philippine society.
The beguiling Night Shift follows two individuals as they meander around venerated institutions after dark, crafting an entrancing portrait of liminal existences.
The President of the Locarno Film Festival for 23 years, Marco Solari makes a graceful bow as he steps offstage.
A factory worker wrestles with a dispiriting future in this short about a fortune-telling tortoise and a desire for self-determination.
Laura Luchetti’s freely inspired adaptation of Cesare Pavese’s novel ‘The Beautiful Summer’ features an impeccable cast in a perennially relevant tale about the consequences of sexual awakening.
Potent pacing and a charismatic lead propel this absorbing Israeli film in which a young soldier deserts his post during a Gaza incursion and escapes to Tel Aviv where he keeps running.
Locarno’s 2023 Raimondo Rezzonico Award goes to producer Marianne Slot, who has brought the best of auteur cinema to discerning audiences around the world.
Prize-winning Romanian provocateur Radu Jude shares his thoughts on Jean-Luc Godard and Andrew Tate, the Barbie movie and the thrilling power of bad taste.
If the end of the world really is approaching, Jude may be our most trenchant Cassandra.
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
Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema is a retrospective that comes to the Locarno Film Festival full of diversity, history and joy.
Locarno celebrates the elegant, contemplative work of renowned Asian filmmaker and artist Tsai Ming-liang.
Artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro show TFV how bold programming makes Locarno a memorable festival.
Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra and Eagle Pictures president Tarak Ben Ammar swapped ideas at a lively encounter at the second Audio-Visual Producers (AVP) Summit in Trieste, Italy.
Punk rockers, kick-ass senior citizens and fresh new cinematic voices from Iran to India made for a strong edition of the long-running Czech fest.
Juries at the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival showered awards on the caustic Bulgarian tragifarce ‘Blaga’s Lessons’ and Sweden’s off-beat relationship satire ‘The Hypnosis’.
In his latest forensic documentary ‘Facing Darkness’, French director Jean-Gabriel Périot digs into the rich archive of amateur film footage shot in war-torn Sarajevo.
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 behind-the-scenes look at the making of a film becomes a moving portrait of place and the healing power of artistic endeavour in Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano.
Swiss filmmaker Thomas Imbach talks about his new documentary ‘Say God Bye’, which screens in the Proxima competition at Locarno.
A flesh-and-blood saint causes chaos for a superstitious mountain community in Georgian director Tinatin Kajrishvili’s darkly satirical, bleakly beautiful fable, ‘Citizen Saint’.
Amid political turmoil in Europe and a push to overhaul Karlovy Vary’s identity for tourists, Russia plays a lesser festival role.
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.
La brutalidad colonial de enfrenta a la resistencia indígena en la historia sobrenatural con hechizos y brujería en esta película chilena situada en Chiloé.
An apparently well-put-together couple begin to come loose at the seams after a hypnotherapy session in Ernst De Geer’s awkward and offbeat satire, The Hypnosis.
From heart-breaking performances to queasy satire, from Pedro Costa to Christopher Lee, there was something for everyone in this year’s KVIFF shorts.
Death is not the end in Czech director Robert Hloz’s stylish and ambitious future-noir Euro-thriller debut ‘Restore Point’.
Behrooz Karamizade’s handsomely mounted drama Empty Nets is a compelling allegorical tale about the tragic loss of innocence at the hands of the powerful.
A forensic anthropologist works to return names to the unidentified dead that EU states have forsaken in this sensitive yet urgent and persuasive observational documentary.
Alexandru Solomon leads an offbeat, high-stakes pilgrimage that connects dark history past and present, interrogating the idolisation of Romanian mystic Arsenie Boca through re-enactment and activist exploits.
The Finnish director is the creative force behind ‘Sisu’, one of the action cinema highlights of the year.
A fresh, humanistic period drama that satirises the modernist project of a Czechoslovak factory town, and its sinister demands of conformity on the eve of World War Two.
The reverie of an adult-free summer quickly becomes a monstrous nightmare in Michèle Jacob’s disconcerting portrait of childhood trauma, The Lost Children.
Moroccan documentary maker Asmae El Moudir blends the personal with the political in her formally impressive, puppet-driven, prize-winning family memoir ‘The Mother of All Lies’.
Harrison Ford’s fond farewell to the long-running tomb raider franchise, ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ balances formulaic blockbuster elements with soulful nostalgia and an audacious time-jumping plot.
The festival’s Midnight Screenings confirm its commitment to versatile global genre cinema.
The Geneva-born director is back in Karlovy Vary with his new William Shatner documentary.
The deliciously wry, gently unfurling tale of a middle-aged Georgian woman who rejects small-town conformity won the Swiss Film Prize for best film and best director.
The world’s foremost animation film festival is back with another ambitious edition.
IMCINE takes a bow: The Mexican Institute of Cinematography comes to Annecy with a full hand.
Miguel Ángel Anaya Borja es un animador mexicano participante con k8 en el Festival de Annecy
Aria Covamonas, artista mexicana de la animaciòn, sus cortos animados participaron en el Festival de Annecy 2023
Diego Huacuja T. es un animador e ilustrador mexicano, sus cortos animados participan en el Festival de Annecy 2023
Marcos Almada en un ilustrador, autor de libros infantiles y cortos animados. Participò en el Festival de Annecy 2023
Patricio Plaza autor de cortos animados, participò en competencia en el Festival de Annecy con Carne de DIos
Rita Basulto, creadora de cortos animados participa en competencia en el Festival de Annecy
Cineverdict: IMCINE el Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografìa llega a Annecy con las manos llenas de sorpresas y animaciones mexicanas
Una mirada retrospectiva a la animación mexicana, exitosa hasta fechas recientes.
CineVerdict: El creador mexicano de animación Jorge Gutiérrez habla con TFV sobre su parte favorita del proceso creativo, lo sorprendente de ganarse la vida con lo que le gusta y tiene además consejos para todo el mundo
The renowned Mexican creator of animation talks with TFV about his favorite part of the filmmaking process and the awesomeness of being paid for something you love to do.
Los cortos mexicanos van al Festival de Animación de Annecy, imaginativos y atrevidos, esperan hacer una gran impresión
With their daring appeal, five Mexican shorts are ready to bowl over the animation festival’s audiences.
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
Breathtaking maximalism, for fans of ‘RRR’ and ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (not to mention the previous animated Spider-Man movie).
Women filmmakers swept most of the top awards from Competition to Un Certain Regard and Critics’ Week.
Anointed auteurs padded the competition while the scramble for tickets became exhausting.
After angry, affecting portraits of northern England’s working class families in his previous two films, in ‘The Old Oak’ director Ken Loach travels to a former mining village where Syrian refugees are being resettled, to tell a moving but more generic, less engaging story than its predecessors.
Sahra Mani’s raw documentary about the dire situation for women in Afghanistan, as well as those all but abandoned in so-called safe houses across the border, forces Western audiences to pay attention and stop averting their gaze from the Taliban’s reign of terror.
In his minor-key but charming Cannes contender ‘Perfect Days’, German art-house veteran Wim Wenders delivers a poetic paean to Zen and the art of toilet maintenance.
Pham Tien An’s first feature follows a young man’s slow spiritual journey with long takes, magical imagery and rarely seen glimpses into Vietnamese society.
The pièce de résistance of unabashed culinary cinema, Tran Anh Hung’s ‘The Pot au Feu’ serves up a French country idyll in romantic 19th century sauce for audiences whose tastes run to the fine wines and 12-course meals.
Brazilian newcomer Lillah Halla makes a film full of zest and empathy about a talented volleyball player that resonates in today´s pro-choice panorama.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s poetic docu-essay Pictures of Ghost is a passkey to his previous films as well as a personal reflection on his relationship with Recife and cinephilia, but this terrifically edited meditation is also a more universal ode to the way memories become ghosts that inhabit the physical spaces of our lives.
A sardonic angry look at Iran today, ‘Terrestrial Verses’ approaches the country’s malaise in a series of black comedy skits.
Erwan Le Duc conjures a stylish and swoony look at the quick flame of first love and the lingering, unresolved pain of heartbreak.
“Cerrar los ojos” es una apasionada y atractiva reflexión sobre el arte, la memoria, la identidad y la recuperación del tiempo pasado. Una película del venerado maestro vasco-español Víctor Erice, contada atípicamente, pero que típicamente aborda grandes temas.
Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzmann and a cast of thousands reach for the stars in director Wes Anderson’s visually ravishing retro rom-com ‘Asteroid City’.
A passionate, big-issue film from revered Spanish maestro Victor Erice, ‘Close Your Eyes” engagingly reflects on art, memory, identity and recapturing time past.
Portuguese-Brazilian directors João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora return to Cannes with a complex, highly-charged chronicle of how different generations of a Brazilian indigenous community fight back against intruders on their ancestral lands.
Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing’s second entry at Cannes 2023 is an intensely physical portrait of the life and tribulations of Chinese composer Wang Xilin.
In his feature-length debut, Claude Schmitz aims to simultaneously pay homage to, and blow up, film noir tropes, and while that’s not exactly the result, his film is a handsome, largely enjoyable play on the genre that becomes a bit too shaggy by the end.
Back after a long hiatus with his most personal film to date, French writer-director Michel Gondry’s ‘The Book of Solutions’ is a scrappy, self-indulgent but entertaining love letter to asshole artists.
Japan-educated Mongolian filmmaker Zoljargal Purevdash’s first feature provides a sensitive yet sobering account of a teenager’s struggle for his family’s survival, even if it means sacrificing his own future.
Alicia Vikander steps into the robes of Henry VIII’s last queen in a drama more concerned with turning Katherine Parr into feminist icon than is historically believable, yet bold visuals and a fine cast raise the appeal of Brazilian auteur Karim Aïnouz’s first time in Cannes competition.
The combined talents of Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and veteran indie auteur Todd Haynes are largely wasted on humdrum Cannes competition contender ‘May December’.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro compete to out-grimace each other in Martin Scorsese’s latest monumental but lumbering period true-crime thriller ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’.
French-Senegalese director Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s strikingly shot, solid debut set in the Senegalese Sahel features a compelling central figure whose monomaniacal love for her husband sets nature itself against their village.
The director of ‘If Only I Could Hibernate’ on script labs, working with children and bringing Mongolian cinema to Cannes.
‘Sexy Beast’ and ‘Under The Skin’ director Jonathan Glazer makes his Cannes debut with his coldly compelling, boldly experimental Holocaust drama ‘The Zone of Interest’.
The French-Senegalese director of ‘Banel & Adama’, Ramata-Toulaye Sy, talks to TFV about shooting on location, writing, and having a first film in the main competition in Cannes.
An enthralling “fictional documentary” by Kaouther Ben Hania exploring the psychological states of a strong-headed Tunisian mother and her four daughters, two of whom joined Islamic State, through staged recreations and interactions with actors playing their roles.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s melancholy, dialogue-heavy rumination on personal responsibility, politics and the weight of provincial isolation is intellectually rigorous and always engrossing but largely lacks the well-earned emotional gifts of his more recent masterworks.
A punishing, loud plunge into the brutality of EMT work in Brooklyn’s grittiest hoods that banks on Sean Penn’s stardom but is tone-deaf to its problematic treatment of immigrant communities and women.
Una deliciosa ensoñación sobre cómo escapar de la adormecedora esclavitud diaria del capitalismo y encontrar el verdadero significado de la libertad. Los delincuentes es increíble hechizo de tres horas que seguramente será captado por múltiples territorios.
A delicious reverie on escaping capitalism’s numbing daily drudge and finding the true meaning of freedom, “The Delinquents” is a rare three-hour charmer sure to be scooped up in multiple territories.
Wang Bing’s intimate portrait of the Chinese youth who sew the world’s clothing for a pittance, ‘Youth (Spring)’ speaks truth to the global economy.
Nicolas Peduzzi’s doc following a devoted Paris psychiatrist on hospital rounds is as warmly human as it is indignant at the capitalist gutting of public services.
Malaysian writer-director Amanda Nell Eu’s groundbreaking Cannes premiere ‘Tiger Stripes’ is an offbeat body-horror monster movie with sharp feminist claws.
This riveting courtroom drama distils Pierre Goldman’s complex life into one of its defining moments while crafting a ranging reflection on past and present injustice.
’12 Years a Slave’ director Steve McQueen exhaustively chronicles the Nazi occupation of his adopted hometown Amsterdam in his formally adventurous but lumbering. disjointed documentary ‘Occupied City’.
Tatsunari Ota’s second feature, the winner of Jeonju IFF’s international competition, teases ravishing visuals and taut emotions out of two strangers’ uneventful walkabout in a small town in Japan.
El premiado documental de Pavel Giroud desentierra imágenes ocultas durante cincuenta años en una crónica lacerante y definitiva del suicidio político del poeta cubano Heberto Padilla.
Lee Chang-jae’s documentary about former South Korean president Moon Jae-in mixes footage of his current incarnation as a gardening retiree with glowing testimonials from his aides, but lacks context for non-domestic audiences.
Pavel Giroud’s award-winning documentary unearths footage hidden for fifty years in a searing, definitive chronicle of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla’s political suicide.
Kim Hee-jung’s modestly scaled but emotionally potent South Korean-Polish co-production assesses the emotional fallout from a high-school drowning accident, with nods aplenty to late Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Nanni Moretti returns to his forte, sardonic Italian socio-political commentary, in the meandering collage film ‘A Brighter Tomorrow’ (‘Il Sol dell’avvenire’).
Upending the online practice of blurring sensitive content, Narges Kalhor’s short documentary celebrates those bravely sharing uncensored images of Iran’s recent protests.
This documentary about astronauts and the doctor that administers to them finds quiet profundity within the mechanics of interplanetary bodies.
Alice Brygo’s arresting film is an experiential recreation of the crowds massing around the burning Notre-Dame in 2019 and myriad responses to the catastrophic events.
Young miner-turned-filmmaker Jian Haodong delivers an authentic glimpse of life in China’s rural hinterlands in a semi-autobiographical road movie about a man’s lonely return to his village during the pandemic.
Taiwanese arthouse A-lister Leon Dai and new actor Edward Tan front Singaporean filmmaker Jow Zhi Wei’s visually enchanting, structurally disciplined first feature.
Inspired by the sentiments of Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Seagull’ and mirroring the aesthetics of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’, Macau filmmaker Hong Heng-fai’s first feature offers sensual and sultry drama about love, art and human existence.
Noted Bulgarian director Tonislav Hristov turns his camera on an aging beachside charmer whose years as a gigolo for women tourists are nearing their end just as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine make him rethink his future.
The border between documentary and fiction is troublingly blurred in this exquisitely composed immersive story of a young girl living in the flooded plains of the Brahmaputra River who goes to Dhaka in search of her father.
Love is only slightly warmer than death in German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s genre-blending, gender-bending, hit-and-miss crime thriller ‘Till the End of the Night’.
A superficial, ethically problematic documentary about gender-based violence in Syria whose “topic-of-the-moment” theme can’t paper over glaring flaws in structure, scope, and treatment of its subjects.
A riveting cine-memoir that breaks through all the pitfalls of film-as-therapy, accompanying artist Lisa Selby as she tries to come to terms with her largely absent heroin-addicted mother as well as her own struggles with addiction, that of her partner, and her fears of continuing the cycle of maternal dysfunction.
Edward Berger’s deeply disturbing anti-war film is an unforgettable adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s literary classic, affording a visceral sense of life and death in the trenches of WWI. It won 4 Oscars, including Best International Feature.
Sachiko and Ming share an apartment and predilection for role-play in Cheng Yu’s enigmatic and intriguing exploration of one relationship through the prism of many.
Two Levantine immigrants working in a Lyon café bond in this meditation on friendship and the long fingers of history which claimed the Berlinale Shorts top prize.
Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Mexican visionary Guillermo Del Toro’s first animated feature is a visually ravishing but dramatically wooden update of much-filmed Italian fairy tale ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’.
Despite dark times on the world stage, audiences poured back to Berlin’s first post-COVID festival.
Kristen Stewart’s jury awarded the Golden Bear to the French documentary ‘On the Adamant’, about a floating psychiatric hospital on the Seine.
French documentarian Nicolas Philibert’s latest feature, competing in Berlin, gives voice to the patients in a psychiatric day care centre floating on the Seine.
An outstanding, deeply moving documentary that finally addresses the pandemic not simply as a record of a tragedy but a collective trauma needing to be processed as a community.
From early days in Boston to the height of her stardom and sudden crash, this affectionate documentary made with major family involvement doesn’t probe deep enough or contextualize her career, but it reminds us that Donna Summer was a terrific performer whose talents were minimized by the moniker “Queen of Disco.”
Todd Field’s Tár supplement provides compelling extra notes to his masterfully composed film.
Mostly filmed in the Ukraine war zone by brave battlefield paramedics, ‘Eastern Front’ is a raw and immersive reportage documentary that feels like an urgent first draft of history.
Painter-filmmaker Liu Jian’s third animated feature (his second in Berlin competition) lacks the bite to capture the painful realities faced by Chinese art school students as their country opened up to the West and capitalist ideals.
Indian director Sreemoyee Singh’s moving documentary And, Towards Happy Alleys transcends its overly relaxed editing and sometimes dispersive focus.
Festival directors of San Sebastian, the Viennale, Locarno and Berlin talk to TFV.
This companion to Bad Living is a repetitive exploration of deceitful mothers and toxic families that offers no new insights.
James Benning’s latest, bowing in the Berlin Forum, offers a powerful comment on racial politics in the U.S. in a static-shot portrait of the first settlement to be founded and governed by African-Americans.
The feel bad movie of Berlinale is a bleak and punishing look at familial decay that’s both manipulative and dishonest.
This deeply personal documentary follows an Australian Aboriginal man as he escapes the chokehold of the big city to reconnect with Country.
La historia de sobre un niño de 8 años que siente una creciente desesperación de ser percibido como masculino es extraordinaria por su sensibilidad y percepción. Será un parámetro en la discusión fílmica sobre género, sexualidad e identidad.
This strange and engrossing short blends a surreal and slippery story about a bizarre online relationship with Stephen Vuillemin’s glorious animation.
Portuguese auteur João Canijo is making his Berlinale debut with a Competition/Encounters diptych set in a hotel.
Extraordinary for its sensitivity and perception, Estibollz Urresolo Sologuren’s story of an 8-year-old girl’s growing discomfort with being perceived as a boy is a landmark in the filmic discussion of gender, sexuality and identity.
A Berlin regular, French documentarian Claire Simon is back in the Forum section with her film ‘Our Body’, chronicling the everyday routines in a gynecological hospital.
French director Philippe Garrel in The Plough is faithful to his intimist style, working with his three children in a classic tale.
Set amidst a landscape of mountainous detritus, Kantarama Gahigiri’s short is an abstract but strikingly powerful rejoinder against the exploitation of Africa.
Japanese director Yui Kiyohara’s second feature combines delicate human drama, mesmerising imagery and a reflection on personal and social history.
Canadian writer-director Brandon Cronenberg’s darkly satirical sci-fi horror thriller about sun-seeking tourists on a clone-killing crime spree, ‘Infinity Pool’ is a deliriously debauched joyride into Hell.
A bold and chilling political thriller of shifting perspectives in which the weight of state-sanctioned terror begins to crush a security agent in eastern Turkey, where trauma and paranoia rip apart the social fabric.
Zhang Lu’s ‘The Shadowless Tower’ is gentle, impressionistic story set in historic old Beijing is a rambling account of complicated family ties and individual loneliness.
This tenderly moving documentary observes a group of Ukrainian children adapting to their new lives, after having been re-homed in former military barracks in Germany.
Bologna-based film curator and director Antonio Bigini is in Berlin with his fiction debut ‘The Properties of Metals’, premiering in the Generation sidebar.
Tòtem, la segunda pelìcula de la mexicana Lila Avilés se estrena en competencia en el Festival de Berlín.
A hard-pressed couple in Yemen’s port city of Aden search for a doctor to perform an abortion in Amr Gamal’s excellent, understated yet hard-hitting portrait of a family and their city in desperation.
Korean-born Danish filmmaker Malene Choi talks to The Film Verdict about her fiction debut ‘The Quiet Migration’, premiering in the Panorama section.
In Orlando, My Political Biography director and LGTB+ activist Paul B. Preciado extravagant manifesto pushes the boundaries of feminine-masculine genres as well as cinematographic ones.
Vlad Petri’s visually captivating yet structurally slippery found-footage film reflects on the suppression faced by young, idealistic Romanian and Iranian women under self-avowed “revolutionary” regimes.
Margarethe von Trotta’s deeply perceptive study of Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, played by a dazzling Vicky Krieps, portrays the great writer’s struggle to combine freedom and commitment.
A remarkably delicate, moving romance destined to be a major indie hit, boasting superb dialogue, terrific performances and an insightful understanding of how the what-ifs of life so often dangle around the perimeters of our lives.
This thoughtful compilation film draws our gaze to something unregistered across decades of British cinema and television – the face of a particular extra, Jill Goldston.
A slick but hollow Netflix actioner about an aging professional assassin balancing work and motherhood, inspired in parts by “Killing Eve” but without the bite.
Babatunde Apalowo’s masterful international debut examines a real Nigerian life engaged in a denial of love and its pleasures.
‘The Cemetery of Cinema’ conveys an important point about Guinea’s deplorable relationship with film archives, despite its director’s theatricality.
Cult director Jennifer Reeder’s hallucinatory high-school horror thriller ‘Perpetrator’ puts a queer feminist spin on teen slasher conventions.
The backstory to the creation of the world’s once-most-popular smartphone is much wackier than can be imagined, as evidenced in Matt Johnson’s good-humored rise-and-fall business chronicle.
The acclaimed Italian animator is unveiling his first English-language film at the Berlinale in the Generation section.
Director Emily Atef’s Berlin world premiere about a teenage girl’s forbidden love for an abusive older man, ‘Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything’ is beautifully filmed but fifty shades of boring.
The nature and potential of non-human evolution are explored to disquieting effect in Deborah Stratman’s essayistic blend of science fact and science fiction.
Prize-winning Hungarian director duo Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó foresee a bleak future for humankind in their visually striking debut feature ‘White Plastic Sky’, an animated eco-disaster movie with a lyrical fairy-tale edge.
Rolf de Heer’s stripped-down story of a black woman who escapes from a cage and walks through a landscape heavy with racism and pandemic fear aligns with much of his intensely humane films, yet it feels weighed down by the uncertainty of its ultimate message.
Opening the Berlin film festival, Rebecca Miller’s quirky New York rom-com ‘She Came to Me’ feels creaky and clumsy in places, but is saved by its fine cast and off-beat charm.
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.
As it finally returned from Covid-19 limbo under new artistic director Vanja Kaludjercic, the Dutch film festival reaffirmed its core mission to promote fresh, socially conscious, culturally rich cinema.
Mixing the personal with the political, the Dutch festival made a strong post-pandemic comeback with prize-winning films on Islamist terror, border tensions, jailed teenagers and tender pregnancy dilemmas.
Prize-winning French novelist Alice Zeniter makes a confident directing debut with ‘Before the Collapse’, a lively mystery drama about bed-hopping bohemians in emotional crisis.
Acclaimed Iranian director Masoud Kimiai pours cinematic rage into his recreation of a 1952 politically-motivated bank robbery that resonates with the protests of today.
A murder investigation in Namibia is haunted by echoes of colonial genocide in Perivi John Katjavivi’s flawed but intriguing supernatural crime thriller ‘Under The Hanging Tree’
A sensitive, intricately layered and hand-crafted portrait of mountain life in northern Albania, women’s labour and ancient laws.
This entertaining rom-com offers a freshly subversive, anti-bourgeois twist on the genre, as a pastor and politician in Helsinki open up their marriage to non-monogamy.
A couple reflect on a failed pregnancy in the midst of the pandemic in Monica Lima’s tactile and delicate drama about the desire to nurture and propagate.
An outlandish, radical trip inside Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s mind, gorgeously realised as a mysterious office of alter-egos and clacking typewriters.
A young Danish woman mysteriously vanishes in director Martin Skovbjerg’s smart, stylish blend of sensual romantic drama and moody suspense thriller ‘Copenhagen Does Not Exist’.
A cynical private detective becomes enthralled by a woman he is been paid to surveil in this unconventional and tender tale based on Juan Saenz Valiente’s graphic novel.
An oblique, inventive anatomy of an investigation and execution in ‘90s Ukraine, and a legacy of Soviet violence passed down to today’s generation.
An ageing footballer reflects on his career in this layered rumination on the nature of the beautiful game adapted from the filmmaker’s own short story.
The Oscar-winning director and Turner prize-winning artist draws parallels between Hollywood’s historic racism and his own father’s lived experience in his latest cinematically huge art-work ‘Sunshine State’.
Actor-director duo Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan make inventive use of vintage lo-fi video technology for ‘New Strains’, a slight but hugely charming pandemic rom-com.
Banishments cannot stave off knowledge in this visually bold fable about a colony of children insulated from death and memory.
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.
Jolinde den Haas is the innovative project manager of IFFR Pro immersive, a festival showcasing the most unique and interesting new immersive narrative experiences.
A couple’s farewell dinner in Hanover descends into chaos in this pandemic-era portrait, with a political sting in its tail, of an anxious, divided generation.
Sound and images captured during several years of documentary making form the basis for this haunting essayistic meditation on fear and its effects.
A runaway tiger means extra trouble for a strife-torn married couple in Romanian director Andrei Tanase’s engaging but slight feline chase drama ‘Day of the Tiger’.
Rotterdam’s artistic director savors her first in-person festival with films from Japan, India, Indonesia and even a superhero movie.
Using photos, footage, and fragmented clips, the mononymous director Lina presents an account of the Syrian Crisis as both a national and interpersonal tragedy.
The 52nd IFFR kicks off its first full-scale, physical edition since the pandemic, amid heightened industry scrutiny after a controversial restructure.
The filmmaker touches on the challenges of making a film about revered Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and his iconic painting, ‘The Scream’.
La directora venezolana Patricia Ortega habla de su viaje de autodescubrimiento y los placeres del sexo en ´Mamacruz´en la competencia de Sundance.
Danish director Lin Alluna talks about her seminal encounter with Aaju Peter, the Inuit activist who inspired ‘Twice Colonized’.
The director of ‘Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’ explains the origin of her film to Max Borg.
Venezuelan director Patricia Ortega talks about her journey of self-discovery and the pleasures of sex in ´Mamacruz´, competing at Sundance.
Jakub Piatek’s classical music documentary covers the prestigious Chopin Competition, presenting a group of talented kids in a story that starts slow but becomes truly buoyant in its final third.
Danish documentary filmmaker Lin Alluna’s feature-length debut veers away from the political to reveal the internal conflicts tearing at the Greenland-born, Denmark-educated and Canada-based Inuit civil rights activist Aaju Peter.
A timely and compassionate Sundance documentary premiere, ‘The Stroll’ puts a highly personal spin on New York City’s hidden history of black transgender sex workers
An intimate, visceral immersion into the rituals of the Estonian smoke sauna, a healing space where women confide in one another.
Kiti Manver interpreta a una abuela religiosa que accidentalmente descubre el porno en Internet, dando lugar a una comedia que empodera a las mujeres mayores al tiempo que ironiza sobre la disminución de fieles católicos en España.
Low-key but engrossing, this study of Jewish and Palestinian women who take a beginners’ filmmaking class together sidesteps the threatened stereotypes, as Orit Fouks Rotem creates an atmosphere of quiet realism in her first feature film.
Palestine’s Oscar submission is an uneven story of a depressed man hoping to get his neighbor to bump him off, told in a vaguely black comedy manner.
Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s conventional but compelling documentary ‘Shot in the Arm’ examines the anti-vaccine movement before, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Colombian writer-director Laura Mora’s prize-winning road movie ‘Kings of the World’ is a messy but big-hearted love letter to the loveless.
Sweden’s shortlisted International Oscar hopeful, formerly known as ‘Boy from Heaven’, is a solid though cautious, slow-burn loss-of innocence tale wrapped around the struggle between State versus Religion, designed for Western consumption.
“I can believe in cinema again!” The Indian director of ‘Last Film Show’ talks about making an ode to celluloid in the digital age.
The Estonian filmmaker talks about the unwittingly timely release of ‘Kalev’.
The celebrated Belgian director is once again representing his country in the Oscar race.
The Czech director discusses the challenges of making the multilingual biopic ‘Il Boemo’.
La difícil situación de los indígenas ayoreo, la última tribu en evitar el contacto y reclamar sus territorios en la selva del Chaco paraguayo, se plasma de forma minuciosa y poética en este drama que se estrenó en Rotterdam y es candidata al Oscar Internacional 2023 por Paraguay.
A subtle character study successfully explores guilt, filial duty and labor relations between a young farmhand and his boss, set among the vast soybean plantations along the Uruguay Brazil border.
Un sutil estudio de personajes que explora con éxito el sentimiento de culpa, el deber filial, y las relaciones laborales entre un joven peón y su patrón, ambientado en las vastas plantaciones de soja a lo largo de la frontera entre Uruguay y Brasil.
The Polish filmmaker discusses his bond with the animal star(s) of ‘EO’.
French director and documentarian Alice Diop makes a bright debut in fiction filmmaking with her complexly layered, multi-prize-winning ‘Saint Omer’, exploring the dark side of motherhood.
A beautifully shot, rigidly ice-cold story of love, disease and crushed dreams that will play best with festival crowds and highly selective art houses.
Ali Abbasi’s Iranian-set noir, based on a real serial killer of prostitutes, explores the social and religious culture that is often used as an excuse for violence against women.
Talented filmmaker Houman Seyyedi takes a ride on the dark side in Iran’s Oscar entry, ‘World War III’.
The Norwegian director talks about his very personal epic ‘War Sailor’.
Laura Mora entrega con Los reyes del mundo –primera colombiana en ganar la Concha de oro– una épica caótica y onírica que es ahora la candidata colombiana a los Oscares.
Laura Mora became the first Colombian director to win the Golden Shell at San Sebastian for her chaotic, dreamlike epic, ‘The Kings of the World.’ It is now Colombia’s Oscar hopeful.
A manual day laborer is selected to play Hitler in a film, but this stroke of “luck” leads to terrible tragedies on the film set in Houman Seyedi’s expertly crafted, realistic/metaphoric tale about authoritarian society.
The busy Italian filmmaker, who is concurrently a veteran stage and opera director, describes the genesis of Italy’s international Oscar submission.
The Singaporean director recounts his full immersion in the Oscar promotion process and looks ahead to remakes.
In Costa Rica’s Oscar entry, magic realism meets environmental degradation in the austere tale of a widower’s resistance against ruthless developers.
An intriguing and seldom-told WWII story gets the standardized treatment in this epic-scale Norwegian drama.
Alejandro González Iñárritu, the celebrated director returns to his homeland with a brilliant, excessive, quasi-autobiography that will represent Mexico in the International Oscar race.
Mexican master Alejandro G. Iñárritu (‘Birdman’, ‘The Revenant’) takes time off for a very personal project with autobiographical and cinematic undertones.
Venice Golden Lion winner Lorenzo Vigas talks to TFV about his latest film ‘The Box’ (‘La caja’), which has been submitted by Venezuela for the International Oscars 2023.
Un complejo thriller basado en un escándalo verdadero de abusos sexuales que involucra a políticos chilenos, sacerdotes, empresarios y niños desamparados, donde nadie es totalmente inocente o culpable.
The Moroccan director and screenwriter of ‘The Blue Caftan’ talks about the personal origins of her films.
Firas Khoury’s notable feature debut ‘Alam’ about Palestinian teens living in Israel fought off the competition to win Cairo’s main prize.
Jealousy, betrayal and revenge weave through Sergio Machado’s sultry, fatalistic melodrama set in the Amazon, where a woman becomes the object of desire of three passionate brothers.
The toxic privilege of Algeria’s ministerial elite is the target of Merzak Allouache’s fitfully successful mix of class satire and political thriller.
Documentaries by Lea Glob, Simon Chambers and Angie Vinchito, all major prizewinners, show the diversity and topicality of the post-pandemic Dutch festival.
Cairo awarded its best documentary prize to this broadly appealing fly-on-the-wall documentary about a group of musicians from countries bordering the Nile who go on a demanding hundred-day-tour of the U.S.
As we stand on the edge of increasing digital frontiers, Katharina Pethke’s thought-provoking film explores the mechanics and implications of creating a virtual doppelganger.
A past tragedy haunts the Slovak woodlands in this eerie mystery-horror in which a woman labelled a witch by villagers reclaims her power.
Ana Bravo-Perez searches for the demons released by the extraction of fossil fuels from her native Colombia in this disquieting hybrid documentary.
Danish director and anthropologist Christian Suhr’s feature documentary offers a respectful yet compelling peek into the surprisingly diverse communities of Sufi worshippers within the Islamic tradition of Egypt.
Lea Glob’s ‘Apolonia, Apolonia’, an exploration of what’s at stake in an artist’s life, wins the International Competition at IDFA 2022.
Luis De Filippis’ laid-back tale about an embattled but loving family on vacation pops with a riveting Carmen Madonia as the trans sister.
Alain Kassanda connects Congolese history to family history in this revealing debut documentary.
Lena Ndiaye’s documentary may be the most important contemporary document on Francophone Africa’s malignant economic relations with France.
After a muted few years of Covid caution, the 63rd edition of My Big Fat Greek Film Festival was back in full Dionysian mode.
Greek-British director Spiros Jacovides transforms an eccentric Athens family’s secrets and lies into warm-hearted comedy in his prize-winning debut feature ‘Black Stone’.
Lauren DeFilippo and Sam Soko examine a newfangled Western method of aid to Africa and return with predictable answers in this largely agreeable fare.
Simon Chambers’ family-filming-family masterpiece is a tender and often funny chronicle of a dying man who secretes his brilliant charisma every moment the camera finds him awake.
Valentina Maurel’s dysfunctional father-daughter drama is the big winner at Thessaloniki.
A fascinating and troubling behind-the-scenes look into the work of female stuntwomen, who must frequently portray victims at the hands of violent men.
A multi-layered, intensely personal exploration of what’s at stake in an artistic life, through a sprawling portrait of French painter Apolonia Sokol.
Writer-director Asimina Proedrou’s grimly compelling debut feature ‘Behind The Haystacks’ is a contemporary Greek tragedy about family conflicts and border tensions.
A Ukrainian paramedic wrestles with personal tragedy and public injustice in Christina Tynkevych’s powerful, prize-winning fiction-feature debut ‘How is Katia?’
Director Ehab Tarabieh’s debut fiction feature ‘The Taste of Apples is Red’ is a brooding slow-burn thriller about long-buried family secrets returning to haunt a close-knit Druze village in the Golan Heights.
A highly stylised, thought-provoking meditation on being stared at without being truly seen, as female immigrants to the Netherlands reflect on their experiences across generations.
Simon Liu utilises his familiar febrile aesthetic as a way to explore and represent Hong Kong’s tumultuous recent history, to deeply disquieting effect.
The artistic director of IDFA speaks his mind to TFV critics Oris Aigbokhaevbolo and Carmen Gray in an interview that reveals profound thinking about what a film festival is and its importance in times of war and political despair.
A powerful, accessible blend of animation and archive that bears witness to the Armenian genocide through the eyes of survivor and Hollywood silent star Aurora Mardiganian.
The head of the Mexican Film Institute on how IMCINE has fostered the growing number of women filmmakers in Mexico and on the launch of TFV’s Spanish language reviews in Cine Verdict.
La directora del Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía habla sobre cómo el IMCINE ha fomentado el creciente número de mujeres cineastas en México y sobre el lanzamiento de las reseñas en español de TFV en Cine Verdict.
En Endangered las documentalistas Heidi Ewing y Rachel Grady hablan con urgencia pero sin sensacionalismo al reportar los peligros que enfrenta la prensa en lugares sin conflicto armado declarado.
In Endangered documentarists Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are urgent but never sensationalistic in reporting on the dangers faced by the press in places where there is no official armed conflict.
La más reciente película del director catalán y especialista en horror Jaume Balagueró es una desordenada y casi incoherente historia de surgimiento diabólico.
My home is somewhere else, is a bilingual “animentary” uses the voices of Mexican immigrants, both legal and undocumented, to reveal their fears and dreams through imaginative drawings that allow for greater intimacy and understanding.
Mi casa está en otra parte es un documental bilingüe que utiliza las voces de los inmigrantes mexicanos, legales e indocumentados, para revelar sus miedos y sus sueños a través de imaginativos dibujos de animacion que permiten una mayor intimidad y comprensión.
Theo Montoya’s debut feature ‘Anhell69’ featuring the queer young generation in Colombia wins the International Competition at DOK Leipzig.
The 65th edition of East Germany’s longest-running independent film festival offered a lively mix of parties and premieres, critical voices and formal experiments.
An offbeat, multi-layered “documentary fairytale” in which a film crew help a bi-gender ornithologist enact Twin Peaks-inspired fantasies in the woods outside Moscow.
Polish director Lukasz Kowalski celebrates a different kind of pawn star in his prize-winning docu-comedy debut ‘The Pawnshop’.
This observational documentary follows the travails of a female driver who is part a grass-roots public transit system connecting the villages of northern Colombia.
French director Mickaël Bandela reassembles his broken family history into a multi-media memory mixtape in his messy but stylish bio-documentary ‘One Mother’.
Prize-winning Serbian director Mila Turajlic unearths a fascinating lost chapter in Cold War history in her latest archive-heavy documentary ‘Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels.’
Two of Iran’s biggest actors, Taraneh Alidoosti and Navid Mohammadzadeh, play double roles in Mani Haghighi’s chilling, fast-paced thriller with allegorical overtones about life in contemporary Iran.
A searching and honest recalibration of one family’s narrative, as the director reinterprets her father’s obsessive home movies from her mother’s perspective of domestic unfulfillment.
Gala Hernandez Lopez’s essay film addresses the incel phenomena from a position of fascination and empathy, seeking to understand the pain of isolation in a connected world.International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film
Canadian diplomat’s daughter Sofia Brockenshire assembles a rich mosaic of memories from her family’s globe-trotting history in her visually impressive essay-film debut ‘The Dependents’.
Afro-German documentary director Brenda Akele Jorde’s debut feature ‘The Homes We Carry’ is a touching family saga of love and loss, historic betrayal and mixed cultural identity.
This atmospheric animated documentary uses collage and fleeting rotoscoped drawings to convey the brutality and dislocating effect of state care in the GDR.
The life and work of German palaeontologist Johannes Weigelt is itself placed under the microscope in this inventive and unexpectedly charged miniature portrait.
In her prize-winning documentary ‘A Bunch of Amateurs’, director Kim Hopkins finds hope, humour and heart-warming humanity in an ailing amateur film-making club in northern England.
This warm and inquisitive documentary is both a portrait of activist and self-taught scientist and the spit of land she’s called home for forty years.
Mike Day’s gently ambling documentary offers a fragmentary look at the unique tradition of cowboy poetry.
Featuring a strong ensemble cast including Tom Burke and Jenna Coleman, Neil Maskell’s directing debut ‘Klokkenluider’ is a chilling comedy conspiracy thriller about whistleblowers on the run from mortal danger.
Martin Boulocq’s timely drama exposes a complex web of family, class, and economic codependency in modern Bolivia, where evangelical churches recruit and exploit indigenous communities.
In ‘Pretty Red Dress’, the vibrant debut feature from British writer-director Dionne Edwards, a troubled family of black Londoners learn to express their true selves with a little help from Tina Turner and a fabulous frock.
Three women struggle for independence in an increasingly conservative society in Belmin Söylemez’s award-winning drama set in an Istanbul acting workshop.
A man’s search for redemption after participating in a group murder neatly exposes a community’s moral rot in Ozcan Alper’s rugged mountain thriller, winner of the best Turkish film award at Antalya.
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.
San Sebastian celebrated its 70th anniversary with grace and good programing.
Director Manuel Abramovich’s controversial docu-fiction portrait of Mexican porn star Lalo Santos, ‘Pornomelancolía’ is empathetic and absorbing, despite being disowned by its leading man.
San Sebastian’s top prize went to a Colombian coproduction for the first time in its history, and to a woman director for the third year running.
Oscar-winning director Sebastien Lelio’s handsome literary mystery thriller ‘The Wonder’ stars Florence Pugh as a kick-ass nurse fighting fake news and dubious miracles in 19th century Ireland.
Set in the barrios of Buenos Aires, Diego Lerman’s classroom drama movingly praises a dissatisfied young lit teacher who can’t help but interfere in his students’ lives.
Brexit Britain offers only hellish horrors to exploited migrant workers in ‘Great Yarmouth – Provisional Figures’, a bleakly compelling social-realist thriller from Portuguese director Marco Martins.
The 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.
Katrin Brocks’ feature debut takes full advantage of its exotic setting in a highly dramatized if not always convincing story about a devout young woman who’s about to become a nun when her violent brother turns up at the convent.
Actor turned director John Connors makes a powerful statement with his debut dramatic feature ‘The Black Guelph’, a gritty Irish crime thriller about secrets, lies and trauma passed down the generations.
Years of guilt and shame are exorcised in Davit Pirtskhalava’s stagy drama tracking the aftershocks of bullying.
Debutant director Juri Padel’s low-budget cyberpunk thriller ‘Junk Space Berlin’ elevates its scrambled plot and fuzzy intentions with dazzling digital glitch-art visuals.
Revenge is not so sweet in ‘Our Father, The Devil,’ director Ellie Foumbi’s gripping, horror-tinged thriller about African immigrants with a shared history of violence.
Social tensions and strange cosmic disturbances collide in French director Cédric Ido’s imperfect but admirably ambitious genre-blurring thriller ‘The Gravity’.
Jung Woo-sung’s accomplished directorial debut is a South Korean actioner brimming with inventive flash that marks him as a filmmaker to watch.
A vague, dreamlike lyricism is prioritised over socio-political critique in Rob Rice’s collaboratively-minded doc-fiction portrait of a family facing uncertain futures in the Californian desert.
A young Filipina migrant worker in Hong Kong dreams of dancing her way to freedom in Stefanos Tai’s imaginative photo-montage musical ‘We Don’t Dance for Nothing’.
Steven Spielberg solidifies his legendary origin story playing with truth, fiction, and the magic of moviemaking.
Strongly worded films with clear social and political attitudes took the prizes at the 79th Venice Film Festival, led by Laura Poitras’s Golden Lion winner ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.’
Laura Baumeister’s feature debut is a critical and compassionate portrait of lives on the precarious edge of Nicaraguan society.
A crowded, often frustrating reset of the first post-Covid festival partly obscured the high-quality programming.
A caustically funny and sharply perceptive portrait of adolescence and the toxic perils of obsessive cinephilia.
Director Carlos Lechuga sends a powerful farewell letter to a country adrift in depression and despair in this heartbreaking chronicle of the post-Cuban revolution.
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.
Alice Diop’s superb fiction debut is a marvel of control and depth, using the trial of a Senegalese woman guilty of killing her infant to honestly explore the complexities of motherhood while foregrounding it all within France’s racist currents.
Director Gianni Amelio recreates a dismaying but true story from 1960’s Italy, when a brilliant writer who does little to hide his love for young men is persecuted and put on trial by a laughably outmoded justice system.
A young woman’s first love turns out to be a bad dream in the final film of South Korean master Kim Ki-duk, a visually striking if (for Kim) restrained relationship film that was posthumously completed by Estonian producer and director Artur Veeber.
Joanna Hogg’s latest exploration of mother-daughter relations sees Tilda Swinton playing both roles in an etiolated ghost story whose artificiality kills its characters despite Swinton’s admirable performances.
Philippine auteur Lav Diaz offers a damning and doomed critique of the violent state of his country through the on-screen physical and psychological disintegration of a policeman weighed down by the guilt of his officially-sanctioned murderous past in ‘When the Waves Are Gone’.
Italy’s premier documaker Gianfranco Rosi turns his attention to Pope Francis and his non-stop foreign travels, stressing the ecumenical core of his messaging as he comments on the world’s horrors.
An old-fashioned historical epic on steroids in which a bloodthirsty corsair makes an alliance with the King of Algiers but then determines to conquer the ruler’s headstrong wife.
A timely occasion to foreground the growing role of American extremists like the Proud Boys is largely manqué in Paul Schrader’s unconvincing story about a marked man trying to redeem himself, starring Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver.
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.
Whatever its structural defects, Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp’s documentary is an important document of political tyranny in this decade.
Luca Guadagnino again proves his understanding of the yearning for a fellow soul that defines all feelings of difference in this beautifully played road trip movie which uses cannibalism as metaphor.
Midlife crisis meets coming-of-ager in this sensitive, elegant first film set in Rome and directed by Italian actress Monica Dugo.
Noah Baumbach and an inspired cast headlining Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig enjoyably bring Don DeLillo’s “unfilmable” novel about America in the Eighties to life with retro gusto, while straining to make it relevant.
Paris-based Lebanese filmmaker Wissam Charaf’s second feature takes a delicately droll and deadpan approach in depicting social malaise in Beirut, as seen by a migrant Ethiopian maid and a bomb-surviving Syrian refugee.
Mark Cousins’ thought-provoking examination of the rise of Fascism through a detailed analysis of a 1922 propaganda film that signaled the start of a far-right ideology whose insidious roots continue to find fertile ground.
The Balkan region’s prime cinematic gathering bounced back from pandemic shutdown with a strong film program, starry guests and plenty of party attitude.
Director Kilian Riedhof’s deluxe weepie ‘You Will Not Have My Hate’ is based on a best-selling memoir about a Parisian family dealing with the aftermath of terrorist violence.
Croatian director and actor Juraj Lerotic was the big winner at Sarajevo, taking home both the Best Film and Best Actor prizes for his sensitive and devastating feature ‘Safe Place’.
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.
Atmosphere is everything in this ambiguous, slightly absurd short that leaves a great deal left unsaid, but perfects a lingering sense of melancholy.
This engrossed fly-on-the-wall style documentary follows a group of Bulgarian football hooligans, detailing their highs and lows in a changing world.
This portrait of a musical prodigy brims with the same energy as its subject’s piano playing while depicting the boy as well as the talent.
Serbian director Mladen Kovacevic finds echoes of the current Covid pandemic in Europe’s last smallpox outbreak in his artful, atmospheric found-footage documentary ‘Another Spring’.
Raw, authentic emotion and inventive lyricism combine in Juraj Lerotic’s sensitive, devastating reckoning with an acute mental health crisis in the family.
A murder cover-up in a corrupt town is the catalyst for an inept police chief’s crisis of conscience in Paul Negoescu’s downbeat portrait of masculinity in meltdown ‘Men of Deeds’.
Brazilian director Julia Murat’s bold, brave and important feature ‘Rule 34’ (‘Regra 34’) walked off with the Pardo d’oro for best film at Locarno in a surprise win.
A twisted sister at an all-girl Catholic school pushes her fanatical faith to dangerous extremes in Ruth Mader’s gripping psycho-horror thriller ‘Serviam – I Will Serve’.
Complex and a bit obscure, Ery Claver’s directing debut is a clever contemplation of religion, power, and politics in Angola.
Swiss director Eva Vitija gets up close and personal with much-filmed thriller author and queer icon Patricia Highsmith in her well-crafted documentary ‘Loving Highsmith’.
Award-winning documentary director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest exquisitely composed opus looks at the global garbage crisis, from Maldive palm groves strewn with plastic to festering landfills, encompassing community rubbish collections and recycling plants in a cinema-essay style whose noninterventionist approach caters to audiences already committed to the cause.
A troubled teenage girl finds love and liberation in the nightclubs of 1980s Paris in director Sylvie Verheyde’s slight but charming autobiographical retro-drama ‘Stella in Love’.
There’s much to admire in Valentina Maurel’s dramatic depiction of a dysfunctional father and daughter relationship, chiefly its terrific performances
Debuting director Julie Lerat-Gersant imbues tremendous sympathy for her 16-year-old pregnant protagonist in this unpretentious, heartfelt drama whose overall predictability doesn’t detract from its modest strengths.
Jeff Rutherford’s debut feature film is enlivened by a screenplay packed with truths about the damage parents and partners can cause.
Debut director Thomas Hardiman’s off-beat single-shot murder mystery ‘Medusa Deluxe’ is a dazzling catwalk show of spiky comedy, fluid camerawork and fabulous hair.
Backed by Vasco Viana’s superb cinematography, Carlos Conceição’s film about a squadron of soldiers in pre-independence Angola rises above its narrative gaps.
An intriguing though not always well-integrated attempt to engage with different forms of storytelling, including traditional Malaysian folklore, at the service of a feminist revenge tale.
A misfire of perplexing obliviousness, in which we’re meant to believe that Udo Kier’s character once bore a striking resemblance to Hitler. The best that can be said about this limp comedy is that it could have been far more offensive.
Class inequality, corruption and power dynamics between the sexes is the background to this working-class Malayalam drama anchored by the nuanced female lead, played by Divya Prabha, and mesmeric images in a latex glove factory.
Brad Pitt plays a laconic hit man in director David Leitch’s ‘Bullet Train’, a laborious action comedy about mayhem and murder on an Oriental express.
Japanese director Masaaki Kudo turns a compassionate eye on a 17-year-old nightclub hostess with a toddler, sent skidding toward prostitution in a heart-felt story set on Okinawa.
Signe Baumane’s animated feature is so brilliant in presenting a female perspective on love and marriage that you forgive its need to tell us the science behind romance.
Ambiguity abounds in Emmanuel Tardif’s elusive Québécois drama about a family’s self-imposed isolation after an unexpected event and the spreading fractures in their fragile status quo.
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.
Cruel and delicate, this Icelandic drama shows troubled kids as the product of the actions and inactions of adults.
Two cultural titans, Jean-Luc Godard and Ebrahim Golestan, exchange online messages in director Mitra Farahani’s scrappy but sporadically charming documentary ‘See You Friday, Robinson’.
Andreas Horvath’s observational documentary offers a different, meditative view of animals in captivity, whose uneventful lives without a human audience inevitably recall our own experience with the pandemic.
Director Nina Menkes attacks cinema’s long history of sexism, including some canonical male directors, in her timely and enjoyably polemical filmed lecture ‘Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power’.
Canadian-based filmmaker Sadaf Foroughi (‘Ava’, 2017) revisits the theme of teenage rebellion in middle-class Iran in a drama full of danger and nervous energy.
The Covid ward of a hospital in a town in western Bulgaria is the subject of this clear-eyed observational documentary about the perseverance of both its staff and patients.
Iranian director Dornaz Hajiha pushes maternal and paternal sentiment to anguishing extremes in an intriguing and intensely acted debut feature, but the ending is missing.
The women’s toilet in a nightclub becomes the site of miniature disasters and minor catastrophes in Angelika Abramovitch’s multi-stranded and surprisingly affecting short.
Actor-director Christos Passalis draws on his Greek Weird Wave roots for ‘Silence 6-9’. a cryptic but mostly impressive debut feature.
A wild documentary ride through the selection process at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where the teaching staff brainstorms to test the hidden talent of young applicants, and future artists do their best to make the undefined grade.
Jonathan Glazer’s lockdown short embraces the urge to dance, re-framing a 16th century madness into an infectious ode to perseverance in the pandemic era.
A couple decide to broaden their sexual horizons with increasingly complicated results in Tomasz Winski’s knotty and intimate examination of honesty within relationship dynamics.
A young Georgian woman struggles to overcome stifling sexism and emotional trauma in director Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze’s worthy but muted chamber drama ‘A Room of My Own’.
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 woman seeks a fortune teller’s guidance about her ailing love life in this discursive but affecting portrait of generational trauma and self-love.
Polish director Anna Kazejak chronicles scenes from a collapsing marriage in her darkly comic holiday-from-hell psychodrama ‘Fucking Bornholm’.
Felix Herrmann’s hybrid film is an occasionally dry but frank examination of faith, feminism, and ambition in the modern world.
Maksym Nakonechnyi’s carefully calibrated drama about a young Ukrainian woman soldier who returns home in a prisoner exchange, tortured and pregnant, projects a more human, less heroic view of the Ukraine-Russia war while it affirms a woman’s right to choice vis-à-vis maternity.
Katharina Woll handles her delightful debut feature film with the grace and sensitivity of a much more experienced filmmaker, with a hand from lead actress Anne Ratte-Polle.
A random tragedy exposes the dark heart of a rural Irish community in ‘It’s In Us All’, the absorbing debut feature from actor-director Antonia Campbell-Hughes.
Claudia Müller’s dense, cerebral exploration of the Austrian Nobel winner’s life and politics confirms her unique and complex place in European letters.
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’.
A richly satirical sci-fi allegory with an edge of biting social commentary, writer-director Sophie Linnenbaum’s impressive feature debut ‘The Ordinaries’ is anything but ordinary.
Teenage rebels confront the sexually abusive leader of a cult-like commune in German director Christopher Roth’s timely, engrossing, based-on-reality drama ‘So Long Daddy, See You in Hell’.
In writer-director Anna Jadowska’s sensitive whydunit, veteran Polish actress and Tribeca winner Dorota Pomykala plunges the viewer into psychological depths in her deftly nuanced portrait of a 60-year-old who tries to rob a bank with a kitchen knife.
Director Alexandre Philippe’s latest essay-film ‘The Taking’ is a thoughtful, visually ravishing, politically charged rumination on American cinema’s oldest rock stars.
With a deft hand for black comedy, Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli takes his examination of modern narcissism to its body-horror extreme.
Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret’s film is a solid debut indebted to the impressive performances of its child actors.
WINNER OF THE CAMERA D’OR IN CANNES FOR BEST FIRST FILM. ‘War Pony’, from first-time directing duo Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, deeply immerses the viewer in the roughshod coming-of-age drama of two teenage boys who live on the fringes of the law on a Native American reservation in South Dakota.
Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravi?ius was killed by Russian soldiers after shooting footage for this gritty and unnerving documentary about life in the besieged, bombed-out Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
Sergei Loznitsa’s latest archival cinema essay, inspired by W.G. Sebald’s book and organized within a quasi-symphonic structure, lays out the brutality of fire bombings in World War II and the ways the war machine refused to acknowledge the human costs.
Thomas Salvador’s beguiling second feature innovatively combines a realistic first half with fantasy elements in the second without losing its earlier spirit, achieved through unpretentious storytelling, a superb visual eye and excellent special effects.
CANNES GRAND PRIX – JOINTLY AWARDED, REVIEWED MAY 26 Set in Central America, Claire Denis’ second English-language film is more straightforward than most of her works but is unmistakably hers in the way she suspends her complex characters in the sweaty grasp of a tropical setting.
PALME D’OR IN CANNES, REVIEWED MAY 22 Swedish social satirist Ruben Östlund returns to Cannes with ‘Triangle of Sadness’, another sprawling but roaringly funny attack on wealth, beauty and privilege.
A father and son make daily parachute jumps from their cliffside home to sell ice in João Gonzalez’s gripping and poignant animation.
Prize-winning French writer-director Léonor Serraille plots a multi-decade family saga in her ambitious but uneven second feature ‘Mother and Son’.
A teenager cares for her younger siblings in this delicate portrait of familial love and the desire to hold on to a semblance of childhood.
After her award-winning ‘Adam’, writer-director Maryam Touzani affirms her strong storytelling skills in a hugely touching love story set in an old Moroccan medina, where Lubna Azabal battles illness to be with her homosexual husband Saleh Bakri.
Michelle Williams reunites with feted indie writer-director Kelly Reichardt for ‘Showing Up’, a modest but moving portrait of frustrated artists and dysfunctional families.
It’s the end of Europe as we know it, but stars Vincent Lacoste and Sandrine Kiberlain feel just fine in this breezy, rather trite French caper flick.
María Silvia Esteve’s new short is a bombastic and overwhelming voyage of colour and sound that conveys the psychological sensation of spiraling hypochondria.
Laetitia Wright and Tamara Lawrence play twisted sisters in director Agnieszka Smoczy?ska’s uneven but beguiling true story ‘The Silent Twins’.
An offbeat comedy about family dysfunction ultimately becomes a touching examination of how we deal with scars left on us by our histories.
Spanish director Albert Serra’s slow-burning, suspenseful Tahiti-set tale pitches Benoît Magimel’s quasi-colonial official against nuclear conspiracies.
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.
The outlawing of physical contact creates a cauldron of unexpressed sensuality for the burnished and browbeaten shipyard workers of Evi Kalogiropoulou’s eerie dystopian short.
Director Saeed Roustaee (‘Just 6.5’) takes a hard turn into social drama with his epic saga about an Iranian family trying to claw its way out of poverty, beautifully shot, directed and acted.
Actor turned director Owen Kline’s assured debut feature is a slimy, grimy comedy of failure and awkwardness.
Shuli Huang’s intensely personal and moving diary film is like a heart-wrenching exploration of – and possibly coda to – his relationship with his mother.
A gently appealing choral work from Tunisia with a strong understanding of rhythm and balance that marks a strong first feature for documentary-trained Erige Sehiri.
Director Brett Morgen’s overstuffed hot mess of a documentary ‘Moonage Daydream’ celebrates David Bowie’s legacy as a live performer, spiritual thinker and living work of art.
Ethan Coen’s first solo directing project without brother Joel. ‘Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind’ is a retro-rock documentary with a whole lotta shaking going on, but not much else.
Legendary cult director David Cronenberg’s first film in eight years, ‘Crimes of the Future’ is an ambitious but unconvincing return to familiar body-horror themes.
Korean cult director Park Chan-wook takes us on the rollicking ride of a deconstructed murder investigation, complicated by obsessive love and betrayal.
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’.
Though nothing like Patrizio Guzmán’s fabled ‘The Battle of Chile’ or ‘Nostalgia for the Light’, this energizing doc is still a master class on Chile’s recent nation-wide uprising for democracy and social justice.
Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton star in ‘Mad Max’ creator George Miller’s ambitious but misfiring fairy-tale romance ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’.
Mikko Myllylahti’s impressive debut feature is a poetic and perplexing look at a man facing the diminishing of his life’s work with otherworldly stoicism.
Hinging on two compelling performances, this is an absorbing drama that blends the cat-and-mouse tension of a thriller with police procedural to gripping and haunting effect.
A solid though cautious, slow-burn loss-of innocence tale wrapped around the struggle between State versus Religion set (but not shot) in Cairo and designed for Western consumption.
Director Emmanuel Nicot’s assured debut feature ‘Love According to Dalva’ navigates dark subject matter with compassion, warmth and great performances.
An immersive portrait of writer-director James Gray’s family in 1980s Queens, N.Y. is woven around the young protag’s dawning social consciousness.
Léa Seydoux stars in feted French auteur Mia Hansen-Løve’s slender autobiographical rumination on love and loss ‘One Fine Morning’.
Mathieu Vadepied’s affecting portrait of paternal love hinges on intensely involving performances by Omar Sy and Alassane Diong, as an African father who goes to war to protect his conscript son.
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.
A disappointingly anemic take on the great composer’s unfortunate marriage, gloriously shot by Vladislav Opelyants yet hampered by Kirill Serebrennikov’s less than penetrating narrative.
Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton look back on their ground-breaking feminist comedy hit ‘9 to 5’ in this timely documentary from directors Camille Hardman and Gary Lane.
Tom Cruise returns to his career-making role as a hotshot U.S. Navy pilot in director Joseph Kosinski’s shallow but action-packed sequel ‘Top Gun: Maverick’
Toronto photographer Louie Palu’s unstructured yet immersive trip into the Donbas war zones in 2016 makes a skin-crawling intro to the current invasion of Ukraine.
Hossein Tehrani’s gently melancholy first feature about poor farm laborers, which won Tokyo’s Asian Future competition, reveals a strong new Iranian voice.
The age-old Faroe Islands tradition of slaughtering pilot whales for their tasty meat gets pushback from animal rights activists in a documentary that raises more complex questions.
Scottish director Jono McLeod’s debut documentary ‘My Old School’ is a highly entertaining account of an outlandish fraud and its lingering aftershocks.
In a West Bank documentary that begins like a thriller and ends like a drama, Daniel Carsenty and Mohammed Abugeth introduce a new path into a conflict that never leaves the news.
Éric Baudelaire riffs on the music and musical sensibility of Alvin Curran in this absorbing archival documentary about the revolutionary fervour of mid-century Rome.
In this collaborative rumination on the nature and limits of political protest, Bassem Saad weaves together performance, found footage, and on-screen text with playful results.
A phenomenal archive of cataclysmic imagery is the main attraction in Sara Dosa’s doc about star-crossed volcanologists, but it’s also imbued with their zeal.
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED OCT. 9, 2021 Stephen Graham gives a raw, red-meat performance as a troubled chef in this sizzling single-shot ensemble drama now on Netflix.
A simple premise yields increasingly complex results in Marie Suul Brobakke’s dissection of a romantic relationship between two actors rehearsing a scene.
Fabrizio Maltese’s new documentary is both an artfully captured portrait of Mauritania and a road trip guided by an elusive filmmaker and a watching spirit.
Following a man from Somaliland who journeys from Finland back to the country of his birth, Inka Achte’s documentary is engaging and often entertaining—with an unexplored darkness lodged within its heart.
Irish writer-director Kate Dolan’s prize-winning debut feature ‘You Are Not My Mother’ is a rich witches’ brew of psychological horror, social realism and creepy Celtic folklore.
Vera Krichevskaya’s lively documentary ‘F@ck This Job’ chronicles how a rebellious gang of champagne-loving Moscow socialites ended up running the last independent TV news channel in Putin’s increasingly repressive Russia.
A career-spanning documentary on Norway’s most successful pop band, ‘A-ha: The Movie’ is an earnest but mostly absorbing study of fame, friendship and midlife angst.
A emotionally fragile schoolgirl spends a revelatory summer with foster parents in director Colm Bairéad’s haunting, prize-winning, Irish-language debut feature.
A young woman learns her family is linked to the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate and other horrors in an authentically harrowing drama shot in Calabria.
Millie foolishly lies low but the film should stand tall given how well it captures the excruciatingly relatable tribulations of a young New Zealand woman who digs herself into a very deep hole while attempting to preserve other peoples’ expectations.
Apocalypse anxiety, discomfort in the childhood home, and the effects of enforced isolation make for a heady brew in Maria Estela Paiso’s multimedia fever dream.
Akuol de Mabior’s first feature-length documentary isn’t quite cohesive, but it offers a partial portrait of a troubled country and one of its female leaders.
The rapidly changing social mores in Iran are highlighted in the dilemma of a single mother and her baby, directed by Ali Asgari with thriller-like tension.
A new documentary from Lucrecia Martel explores communal creativity and expressive performance by bringing together marginalised artists in the north of Argentina.
Taylor Taormina’s experimental second feature captivates without telling a traditional story — or any story at all.
Hong Sang-soo’s 27th feature, and his third in competition in Berlin in as many years, offers his trademark acerbic humor, anchored by veteran Korean actress Lee Hye-young’s caustic turn as an embittered writer.
This grainy, tender, and contemplative film by Sofia Georgovassili approaches a potentially traumatic coming-of-age drama through a fable-like, quotidian lens.
On his first completely solo flight directing without his late brother, Paolo Taviani pays a stirring salute to Sicily’s great novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello.
Through a triptych of stories, Kivu Ruhorahoza offers a critique of masculinity and patriarchy in his most accessible film to date.
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
Spanish director Isaki Lacuesta’s powerful eyewitness drama ‘One Year, One Night’ chronicles the shattering aftershocks of the 2015 Bataclan theatre attack on one young Parisian couple.
An experimental, hybrid film that in its disjointed way expresses nostalgia for nicotine, Kaffeehaus culture and family bonds, set in present-day Vienna.
A gang of tough queer women controls an illicit oil refinery in this grim neorealist documentary drama, set in Brazil’s largest shanty town.
The truth lies in the spaces between recorded history in Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflânc?’s austere and through-provoking silent documentary.
Magnum photographer Micha Bar-Am’s life and work is powerfully, sometimes painfully recounted through still images and offscreen voiceover in Ran Tal’s multilayered documentary that questions the psychological effects of shooting atrocities.
Li Ruijun’s deeply felt portrait of mature love between two socially unvalued Chinese peasants is beautiful to look at, but labors to catch the emotional wave it promises.
French director Mikhaël Hers falls short of his Rohmer-esque ambitions in ‘Passengers of the Night’, a sprawling family drama set in 1980s Paris.
Japanese filmmaker Emma Kawawada takes the humanist cue from her mentor, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and adapt it to her warm and engaging directorial debut, in which a Kurdish-born Japanese teenager struggles to keep her life and dreams afloat when the authorities threaten to deport her family from the country.
Through colourful, chemically contaminated found footage, Rafael Castanheira Parrode evocatively excavates the trauma of the 1987 radioactivity disaster in Goiânia, Brazil.
A joyful, transgressively liberating ode to cinema and the way an unexpected passion can make societal barriers disappear, Nicolette Krebitz’s intelligently written and expertly crafted love story about an older woman and a much younger man is a delight.
An anonymous collective of Burmese filmmakers delivers a powerful statement of defiance against the murderous military dictatorship that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government on February 1, 2021.
There’s not much new in this lovingly made impressionistic documentary about New York’s very well-chronicled Chelsea Hotel, but the place and its tenacious residents still have a pull.
An indomitable Turkish woman living in Germany battles to free her son from imprisonment in Guantanamo in Andreas Dresen’s no-surprise recreation of a true story.
French screen heavyweights Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon trade bruising blows in ‘Both Sides of the Blade’, a conventional but gripping love-triangle drama from veteran Gallic auteur Claire Denis.
Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack form a winning pair of performers in Sophie Hyde’s watchable story of sex positivity across age categories.
Indonesian director Kamila Andini’s gently feminist historical drama ‘Nana: Before, Now & Then’ is visually exquisite but tastefully timid.
A punishing film of unrelenting cruelty which seeks to draw attention to the plight of enslaved Central Asian workers in Russia, but its overstuffed plot and taunting hopelessness is more alienating than galvanizing.
Australian rock duo Nick Cave and Warren Ellis bring their recent lockdown albums to life in Andrew Dominik’s handsome music documentary.
Super 8 footage of an idyllic holiday destination provides the serene surface for Wilbirg Brainin-Donnenberg’s probe into the darker elements of history both political and personal.
Elliot Page’s attachment as executive producer will spur interest, but “Into My Name” stands on its own as a sensitive, humanist portrait of four young F to M trans Italians coming into their own.
Cult director Peter Strickland’s culinary art-world satire ‘Flux Gourmet’ is enjoyably weird but ultimately undercooked.
Less gore and more psychology should broaden the audience for Dario Argento’s kinky but strangely staid horror film about a slasher out to kill a blind prostitute.
Egyptian queer experimental cinema comes into its own with this playful, visually inventive sex-positive short feature that repurposes “One Thousand and One Nights” using gay Arab cultural signifiers.
French prankster Quentin Dupieux takes a detour into midlife melancholy with his latest gloriously absurd comic fable ‘Incredible but True’.
Rafiki Fariala’s history-making film shifts to a more intimate story towards its end, which one wishes he had pursued from the start.
Gerard Ortín Castellví’s film about the mechanised standardisation of plant products in an industrial greenhouse is both hypnotic and unsettling; meticulous documentary and dreamlike fantasy.
French director François Ozon pays artfully twisted homage to Fassbinder’s torrid queer classic ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant’ in this stylish glam-rock remake.
A young woman struggles to process personal trauma and wider social injustice in Norwegian director Anders Emblem’s slender but quietly haunting drama A Human Position,
Ágata de Pinho impresses both in front of and behind the camera in this visceral drama about a woman who believes she will disappear on her 28th birthday.
Canadian filmmakers Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk pay tribute to Stan Brakhage, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard and Pedro Costa in an intriguing experimental exercise looking at the history of cinema and old-school political activism.
Our prehistoric relationship to the forest is atmospherically invoked in this documentary about a small Indian village and the tales its inhabitants tell of the whispering trees.
French director Mabrouk El Mechri’s screwball action comedy about domestic violence, Kung Fu Zohra is admirably audacious but misses the target.
Yan Wai Yin’s diaristic documentary uses the interplay of posters and graffiti on a local footbridge to explore and evoke intense social unrest in Hong Kong.
Alberto De Michele artfully deglamorises the gangster film, constructing instead two interlaced stories around a man’s complex relationship with his father and the latter’s plans for one last heist.
The vestiges of politically-instigated past trauma come back to trouble an older couple in their second marriage as they begin ruminating on their demise in Gao Linyang’s subtly crafted, detail and performance driven feature debut.
A captivating, shapeshifting excavation of the vampirism of Christopher Columbus and the colonial project filtered through the weed-fuelled mythology of artist and singer, Oba.
The history of Hong Kong and its seething democratic movements is interwoven with a cryptic ghost story in Clara Law’s challenging film about memory and political struggle.
French debutante director Morgane Dziurla-Petit returns to her home village for the playful and poignant docu-fiction hybrid Excess Will Save Us.
Korakrit Arunanondchai’s deeply moving film combines elements of mysticism, ecology, and politics to form some kind of understanding in the face of painful personal loss.
French auteur Jacques Doillon returns to form in this endearing, small-scale chronicle of abuse and friendship between two kids from different social classes.
A bittersweet chronicle of Miao farmers who form a Christian choir in the remote mountains in China, and who are recruited to perform nationally while gradually losing their lands, autonomy, and identity.
Hsu Che-yu’s examination of a political assassination combines digital and physical reconstruction techniques to understand the life of a mobster, assassin, and film producer.
Retired pop star and former anarchist Dunstan Bruce tries to rekindle his youthful punk rage in the charmingly offbeat music documentary I Get Knocked Down.
Pedro Neves Marques follows 2019’s The Bite with another sci-fi-infused relationship story in this thought-provoking meditation on traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.
Eugenio and Mara Polgovsky gently comment on the cycle of life in an observational documentary shot through a window in Mexico City.
Amanda Kramer recreates a 1970s-style variety TV special to comment on a certain kind of diva celebrity, but the results are tediously self-indulgent, clueless about camp affect, and open to claims of disingenuousness.
This fictionalized portrait of a trans woman’s emotional journey towards selfhood tries to cover too many bases in the psychological process, but Raphaëlle Perez’s sympathetic performance and the film’s overall sensitivity make up for some of its flaws.
Brett Michael Innes’ third film, set mostly at a gym in Johannesburg, goes down easy and would be fun for the family—as long as you keep the kids away.
A pleasant though minor queer-skewed indie slice-of-life look at Millenials in Chile, using a ghost device as a way of concretizing the niggling concerns within a struggling actor’s subconscious.
Andrea Riseborough, Harry Melling and Demi Moore celebrate the hidden queerness of vintage Hollywood in Amanda Kramer’s WTF retro-musical Please Baby Please.
This frequently perplexing sci-fi musical has a lot to say about the politics of race, but its true triumph is its music and gorgeous visuals.
This involving documentary captures the plight of the Uru-eu-wau-wau community fighting for its land in the Amazon.
Robinson Crusoe goes musical in a deliciously disorienting brain-teaser from feted Romanian animation director Anca Damian.
Olive Nwosu’s delicate drama explores the difficulty of confronting complex notions of identity while also traversing a tender story of first love lost.
Siblings Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste mine the archive to visualise the transformation of 1960s French Guiana by a new space centre in this poetic documentary.
‘Babysitter’ steers clear of preachiness in its half-scolding and often amusing examination of sexual and sexist attitudes in the wake of #MeToo.
Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing’s first feature-length documentary offers a mellow and intimate portrait of two midwives – one a Buddhist, the other Muslim – who defy the deadly inter-communal conflict around them to become friends and health care providers for their poverty-stricken communities.
Three high school girls in Finland pursue love and orgasm in Alli Haapasalo’s frank and often warmly emotional tale aimed at teen audiences.
Young American missionaries from the Church of the Latter-Day Saints set off to convert the dubious inhabitants of Finland in Tania Anderson’s paradoxical but respectful documentary.
A powerful documentary chronicle of children left abandoned by the conflict in Ukraine won the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.
This colorful portrait of a golden-aged Florida dance troupe doubles as a statement on friendship and female liberation.
Adapted from Lizzy Gordon’s feted book Meet Me in the Bathroom, this archive-heavy rock documentary is a bohemian rhapsody for a lost New York.
Animal rights activists will applaud this Sundance premiere set in Chile’s rainforest, a lyrical fable that mixes ecological apocalypse, gender transition and phantasmagorical rebirth.
Sundance premieres a spellbinding portrait of life in the Bolivian Andes, where a drought threatens the livelihood of an elderly Quechua couple and their herd of llamas.
A young woman navigates the Cordilleran highlands to seek fame in the big city in Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan’s mysterious, Western-tinged drama.
When a Danish couple visits a Dutch couple they barely know, polite discomfort dissolves into horror as Christian Tafdrup’s social comedy of manners goes Gothic dark.
Ilinca H?rnu? gives a captivating performance in Carina Gabriela Da?oveanu’s restrained but perceptive drama about a taxi driver longing for romance amidst a faltering marriage.
Director Kathryn Ferguson’s engaging music documentary Nothing Compares explores Sinéad O’Connor’s legacy as both icon and iconoclast, with input from the scandalous singer herself.
A female bodybuilder tries her hand as an escort in order to pay for her steroids and supplements in this beautifully calibrated, exceptionally well-played feature that digs deep inside its characters, forcing audiences to upend initial conceptions while weaving a memorable, lingering spell.
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.
An insightful exploration of youth, ambition, romance, and meaning through the lens of a young woman you both identify with and love to hate.
In his diaristic portrait of grief during the isolation of lockdown, Fabrizio Maltese has crafted a personal documentary full of universal poignancy.
Originally reviewed Oct. 12, 2021 – NOW ON APPLE TV Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand and a solo Joel Coen turn Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty classic Macbeth into a ravishingly beautiful game of thrones.
Winner of the Academy Award for best international feature, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’ is the story of how love survives death in a long, measured, ultimately mesmerizing examination of the human soul.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a pathological liar whose romance with an Australian girl unveils a horrifying backstory of racism in Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s genre-bending pleaser.
Boasting stunning imagery and a great back story, Bhutan’s first film to make the Oscar shortlist works a well-trodden premise into a beautiful, humanist and accessible picture.
George Clooney directs Ben Affleck in The Tender Bar, a warm-hearted but flat coming-of-age drama.
Family life in rural Myanmar is intimately explored in this earnest if somewhat obtuse chronicle.
The winner of Morelia’s best documentary award is a raw, honest chronicle of the violence afflicting Mexico, seen through the lives of the filmmaker’s own family.
The most fascinating aspect of Marco Bellocchio’s guilt-streaked revisitation of the suicide of his twin brother in 1968 is the insight it offers into the Italian master’s creative font–his own family.
The unsettled protagonists of Hamzah Jamjoom’s “Rupture” seem to be literally pulled through past, present and future in this Italian-inspired thriller in which a woman’s sanity is disturbed by her pregnancy and a malevolent concierge (played by Billy Zane) with his own unsavory baggage.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel ‘The Lost Daughter’ strays too far from Italy to be convincing, but a stunningly good Olivia Colman saves the day.
A keenly observed if somewhat underwhelming chronicle of divorce, and how it upends the life of a teenage girl.
Panama’s Oscar-shortlisted drama eloquently portrays class divides, as a bereaved upper-class architect seeks redemption in her friendship with a homeless, street-smart boy.
Saudi Arabia takes a big step forward with an international culture event in Jeddah that, for all the glitches, showcased the modern and rapidly changing face of its society.
Hany Abu-Assad’s best work toys with questions of moral absolutes, yet his dissatisfying “Huda’s Salon” is hamstrung by a weak script and ill-advised editing choices that fail to build characters or tension, despite an interesting premise.
Director Firouzeh Khosrovani’s own parents embody the lacerating split of Iran into modern liberals and Islamic fundamentalists after the 1978 revolution, in a personal doc of startling clarity and impact.
Voted best film at the London BFI festival and Mar del Plata, an offbeat Iranian roadie launches the filmmaking career of Jafar Panahi’s son Panah in style.
Turkish director Emre Erdo?du’s compelling social drama The List of Those Who Love Me highlights hidden tensions among Istanbul’s arty celebrity set.
The fears and longings of four Lebanese boys on their way to lose their virginity is conveyed in interior monologues in George Peter Barbari’s poignant and deeply original first film.
Palestine’s 2022 Oscar submission is a brooding story of lives in limbo in the Golan Heights, stunningly shot and wrenching in its moving evocation of a man mired in self-loathing and paralyzed by the physical and existential no-man’s land resulting in the Israeli occupation and the disaster in Syria.
One of the best-selling instrumentalists of all time is both unaware and charming in Penny Lane’s engaging documentary.
Director Adam Donen’s messy but ambitious debut feature Alice, Through the Looking brings together Lewis Carroll, Jean-Luc Godard and Monty Python in a hellish post-Brexit London.
Rashid Masharawi’s upbeat lockdown documentary set in Montmartre is a one man show full of charm and humanity.
A well-calibrated debut with a fine central performance, weaving together notions of class and familial betrayal when an impoverished mother sells her son’s kidney to a well-off family in exchange for a better life.
Jane Campion’s bold cinematic interpretation of Thomas Savage’s novel about cattle ranchers in 1920’s Montana is a sensuous, aestheticized Netflix release, whose meticulous detail and gay subplot are admirable but a little tiring.
Predictably stereotyped characterizations still deliver some enjoyable moments in this female empowerment story that unfortunately also plays to the region’s homophobia but will be a crowd-pleaser in the Arab world.
Director Andreas Kleinert’s prize-winning Cold War bio-drama Dear Thomas pays compelling but indulgent tribute to East German literary outlaw Thomas Brasch.
Abbas Kiarostami’s trailblazing ‘Homework’ (1989) gets a brilliant update in a documentary that is equal parts hilarious and saddening in its portrayal of Iranian schoolkids.
Tea Tupajic’s documentary will find its audience among those for whom Srebrenica and other European brutalities have never really ended.
With sensitivity and devastating last-scene irony, filmmaker and poet Granaz Moussavi cinematically embeds the viewer in children’s lives in the heart of war-torn Kabul, in Australia’s Oscar hopeful.
The second film in Kamar Ahmad Simon’s ‘Water Trilogy’ is redeemed by its selection of characters.
Russian director Kyrill Sokolov’s high-octane action comedy No Looking Back involves three generations of women from the same dysfunctional family.
Debut feature director Francesco Sossai’s deadpan cannibalism comedy is charming, original and surprisingly humane.
A melancholic, intimate exploration of the personal cost of migration, told by the filmmaker’s father, who left the island of Réunion in his youth.
Chinese director Liao Zihao’s debut feature Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey is a dramatically muddled but exquisitely shot monochrome fairy tale.
The hypocrisy of high school slut-shaming is the core theme of this strong feature debut boasting two exceptional performances and a layered script that’s distinctly Macedonian but with international resonance.
Kosovo’s Kaltrina Krasniqi makes an impressive feature debut with this beautifully measured drama about a once-compliant 60-something widow who attempts to deflect the malevolent traditional patriarchy in a nation on the edge of change.
Bahman Ghobadi’s latest Kurdish story, shot in Istanbul, hovers between tragedy and humor without hitting the emotional high note it aims for.
Moumouni Sanou’s award-winning documentary about the reality of working girls in Burkina Faso is marred by its lack of discretion.
Jide Tom Akinleminu brings a light touch to a personal but political project that could easily feel overwrought in other hands.
A Ghanaian woman makes an anti-migration decision her friends and family disagree with.
Cambodia’s Oscar submission is a semi-autobiographical critique of how the country’s rampant capitalism frays the traditional social fabric, told with sympathy yet short on dynamism.
Juan Carlos Rulfo has composed his own “Love in the Time of Covid”, a deeply moving chronicle of Mexico’s pandemic response.
Rahul Jain follows up his festival mega-hit ‘Machines’ with an apocalyptic vision of Delhi’s life-threatening pollution that floods the screen with present-day disasters.
Costa Rica dancer Wendy Chinchilla Araya gives an eerie, riveting perf but it only goes so far in this unstructured tale of magic realism and female power from debuting director Nathalie Alvarez Mesen.
You can’t say no to a relationship this mismatched in Juho Kuosmanen’s warm-hearted but melancholy voyage to nowhere, starring Russian actor of the moment Yuriy Borisov and Seidi Haarla as the Finnish tourist who stumbles across him.
Documaker Renato Borrayo Serrano offers eye-opening glimpses into the harrowing and chaotic life of a modern Nenets woman that overturn stereotypes about Arctic life.
Tawfik Baba almost ruins a good story about two Africans in a desert with a confusing ending and on-the-nose politics.
Jeremiah Lemohang Mosese has made a masterpiece that showcases the great talent of the late Mary Twala and announces his own genius.
James Bond star Lashana Lynch joins a large ensemble cast in debbie tucker green’s powerful stage-to-screen drama for the Black Lives Matter era.
In the 19th century, a 14-year-old Danish girl struggles between her will and God’s in Tea Lindeburg’s impressionistic period drama, winner of the best director nod in San Sebastian.
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.
Idris Elba, Regina King, Jonathan Majors and LaKeith Stanfield strap on their six-shooters for Jeymes Samuel’s boorishly enjoyable African-American western.
The conservative new social order sidelines an old-school zookeeper in Emre Kayis’s closely observed, metaphoric first feature about Turkish society, winner of the Fipresci award in Toronto.
A complex, cryptic, compelling film in which Miguel Coyula’s surreal images portray a sci fi Cuba that attempts to mold young minds through genetic engineering.
The 25th James Bond film is bloated and plodding in places, but it ultimately delivers the goods and sends Daniel Craig out in a blaze of glory.
Three little girls grow up in a village terrorized by the drug cartels in Tatiana Huezo’s dreamy and terrifying first feature, which won San Sebastian’s Latin Horizons crown.
Javier Bardem is the main attraction as a smooth-talking factory owner in Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s drawing room social satire about modern labor.
Quentin Tarantino explains his love for Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Westerns and reveals a lot about his own work in the process in Luca Rea’s irresistible, eye-opening documentary.
A small-town misfit takes a new job breaking bad news to bereaved families in Bent Hamer’s droll, elegantly filmed tragicomedy The Middle Man.
The life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon movingly expresses the traumas of war and love in one of writer-director Terence Davies’ finest creations.
A wealthy young Polish couple are forced to confront their own moral bankruptcy during a luxury Italian vacation in Silent Land, Aga Woszczy?ska’s elegantly bleak exploration of First World Problems.
Elio Germano plays a mild-mannered dentist who discovers a girl is tied up in his basement in Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo’s (‘Favolacce’) absurdist psychological thriller.
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.
Stefano Mordini’s unconvincing ensemble drama searches for the origins of evil that provoked the Circeo massacre of two girls in 1975 and rattled upper class Rome.
Finnish filmmaker Teemu Nikki’s story about disability moves you for a long list of complicated reasons.
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED SEPT. 7, 2021 Ukrainian filmmaker Valentyn Vasyanovych follows up his Venice Horizons-winning ‘Atlantis’ with ‘Reflection’ (‘Vidblysk’), a perturbing true horror tale of his country’s war with Russia.
A psychotic girl with lethal powers walks anywhere she pleases at night in Ana Lily Amirpour’s occasionally amusing but mostly treadless fantasy, ‘Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon.’
Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke deliver an emotionally raw but refreshingly nuanced take on female desire.
Produced by Steve McQueen, Bianca Stigter’s experimental essay film is a rigorous exercise in forensic historical excavation commemorating Polish Holocaust victims.
Paolo Sorrentino reflects on his Neapolitan youth in an autobiographical film whose first half is replete with signature baroque touches but then loses its way.
One of Paul Schrader’s most complex and profound reflections on personal traumatic memory bleeds into the American tragedy of Abu Ghraib in an anguishing drama starring Oscar Isaac, Tye Sheridan and Tiffany Haddish.
Young Hungarian writer-director Hajni Kis delivers a highly assured debut feature with non-professional actors in the lead roles.
This superior pulp-noir thriller has a reality-bending look that draws heavily on vintage German Expressionist art.
Olmo Omerzu’s Czech boardroom farce is an absurdist comic parable about lives ruined and families divided by too much focus on money.
Director Qiu Jiongjiong uses a traditional theater troupe to spin out three long hours of dreamy reflections on Chinese history in the 20th century.