Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Bruce Springsteen has always known how to tell a story, but writer-director Scott Cooper falls short when it comes to capturing the Boss at a personal and artistic crossroads.
Spotlight
Black Phone 2
Horror sequel feels fresh and exciting before giving way to tired tropes, turning Ethan Hawke’s chilling villain into a copy of a copy of Freddy Krueger.
Oldenburg pays tribute to Don Keith Opper
Most famous for his role in the Critters franchise, Oldenburg celebrates Don Keith Opper’s contributions as a screenwriter.
Eugene the Marine
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.
Venice 2025: The Awards
Golden Lion goes to Jim Jarmusch; Grand Jury Award to Gaza drama ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’
A House of Dynamite
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.
Frankenstein
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.
KPop Demon Hunters
Wit, style, and some inescapably catchy songs has earned this Sony-Netflix animated feature a well-deserved global fandom.
Cuba & Alaska
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.
9-Month Contract
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.
F1: The Movie
The cars go vroom but the characters fail to register in this technically proficient and dramatically vacant auto-racing saga.
28 Years Later
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland reteam for a sequel to their zombie smash that’s got a lot of heart – and other organs.
How to Train Your Dragon
Fans of the original have no reason to seek out the live-action remake, which competently rehashes the beloved animated classic while adding almost nothing new.
The Phoenician Scheme
A Wes Anderson with all of the typefaces and upholsteries you’d expect, but none of the heart or soul of his best films.
Karate Kid: Legends
This reboot-remake-sequel never strays far from what’s expected but succeeds thanks to cornball charm and some stirring fight sequences.
Lilo & Stitch
This pleasant-enough remake of the animated film never quite justifies why that animated film needed to be remade in the first place.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Taking itself seriously while defying audiences to do likewise, this eighth entry features enough globe-trotting, jaw-dropping action to make the nearly three-hour running time fly right by.
Final Destination: Bloodlines
More snappy, shocking deaths in a satisfying sequel crafted to bring the mayhem to a conclusion. Maybe.
Juliet & Romeo
Something is rotten in the state of Verona — namely, this insipid Kidz Bop take on one of the greatest romantic tragedies of all time.
Thunderbolts*
Entertaining Marvel team-up tale proves you can make a banquet out of odds and ends that were stuck in the back of the fridge.
Shifting Baselines
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.
Snow White
Disney’s umpteenth live-action remake of an animated classic turns out to be another bad apple.
Last Breath
Director Alex Parkinson remakes his own deep-sea doc as a narrative feature but gets lost in the shallows.
Dreams (Sex, Love)
Norway won the Golden Bear this year in Berlin with the endearingly awkward ‘Dreams’ (‘Drømmer’), the final installment in Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy about contemporary relationships.
Paddington in Peru
Might not reach the heights of its predecessor, but this latest adventure of the globe-trotting naif has all the heart, wit, musicality, and meaning that the Paddington franchise brings to bear.
Love Hurts
This mediocre and thoroughly forgettable action-comedy will, one hopes, be but a bump on the road of Ke Huy Quan’s big-screen resurgence.
Wondrous is the Silence of My Master
Ivan Salatic’s magnificently moody, intelligent and doom-laden vision of Montenegrin freedom fighting and exile questions the formation and undoing of national myth.
The Illusion
Filmmaker Roberto Andò combines a wary humanism with expert storytelling to expose the anti-heroic truth about Garibaldi’s 1860 invasion of Sicily to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy and unite Italy, though the comic subplots running through the film tend to be distracting and hard to digest.
Alonso Duralde’s Top 11 Films of 2024
Our chief US film critic’s annual compilation of the year’s finest, including war, death, tennis, queer takes on pop culture, and hundreds of beavers.
Mufasa: The Lion King
Better than a CG-animated prequel to a remake has any right to be, but director Barry Jenkins’ time and effort could surely be better applied elsewhere.
Kraven the Hunter
This absurd (and violent) Spider-Man spinoff plays it so straight that it’s quite frequently hilarious, whether or not that was the intent.
Can Africa Hope for an Oscar?
Nine films have been sent to the 2025 Oscars by African countries. Will any one get a nomination?
Gladiator II
Ridley Scott displays his prodigious gifts for violence and camp in this Roman sequel, but there’s a lot of filler.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
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.
Venom: The Last Dance
Nothing means anything in the conclusion of Tom Hardy’s comic-book trilogy, which makes it either a complete waste of time or a superhero movie in its purest form.
Exhibiting Forgiveness
In his feature-film debut, painter Titus Kaphar exhibits his talents as a visual artist, if not as a screenwriter.
Saturday Night
Jason Reitman’s print-the-legend look behind the scenes of the birth of a legendary comedy TV fixture succeeds on its breathless “let’s put on a show” energy.
White Bird
This platitude-heavy infomercial for kindness benefits from strong performances and handsome production design.
The Last Showgirl
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.
Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness
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’.
The Red Virgin
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.
Bound in Heaven
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.
The Killer’s Game
An action-comedy that contains neither, this generic exercise will remain forgotten as Dave Bautista’s star continues to rise.
Transformers One
Lore-crazed fans will devour this animated prequel that is, at the very least, slightly more intentionally funny than the Michael Bay live-action franchise.
The Wild Robot
Animator Chris Sanders concocts a sweet fable about love, parenting, and finding your own path.
Joker: Folie à Deux
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’.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Tim Burton’s energetically grotesque sequel proves you can go home again, even when that home is haunted.
Blink Twice
Zoë Kravitz makes an impressive directorial debut with a twisty, topical thriller in the Jordan Peele/Ira Levin vein.
TFV is On Point with Audio Film Reviews
The Film Verdict (TFV) launches the industry’s first trade audio film reviews with THE FILM VERDICT ON POINT (TFV On Point), a new podcast series that will turn TFV film reviews into audio broadcasts, hosted by Sarah Vianney.
Alien: Romulus
Fede Alvarez returns to the well of the original 1979 Ridley Scott hit while adding a few space-screams of his own.
Deadpool & Wolverine
Ryan Reynolds fires off quips and bullets with equal precision, but both the meta-comedy and the exaggerated violence wear thin before the film’s denouement.
Fly Me to the Moon
The space race is back in the peppy, bouncy ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, but a sparky face-off between NASA launch director Channing Tatum and marketing wizard Scarlett Johansson can’t disguise an outdated feeling.
Despicable Me 4
Even die-hard Minions fans may come away disappointed from this half-hearted fourquel.
A Quiet Place: Day One
Not much here that the earlier two films didn’t already establish more effectively; its only depth comes from Lupita Nyong’o’s intuitive lead performance.
The Bikeriders
Writer-director Jeff Nichols relies more on mood than narrative to capture the rebellious spirit of 1960s biker gangs.
Inside Out 2
This Pixar sequel brings its protagonist into puberty and examines, with humor and poignancy, the complicated process of building an identity.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence radiate real “I’d rather be playing golf” energy in this fourth entry of a played-out franchise.
Young Woman and the Sea
This biopic of the first woman to swim the English Channel is total Disney corn, but it goes down easy.
Cannes 2024: The Verdict
Women’s films and issues held center stage at Cannes 2024, while outright political films and cinema’s elder statesmen fell out of favor.
Beating Hearts
In ‘Beating Hearts’, Gilles Lellouche has produced a gorgeous film that is an epic rumination on love, revenge, class, and the inescapable pull of a certain kind of romance.
TFV Announces Launch of Al-Takdir
AL-TAKDIR is the first bilingual global source of Arab film and entertainment news and film reviews for both the region and international industry.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
If there’s a valid reason to return to this simian franchise, this latest entry never finds it, despite the craftsmanship on display.
The Fall Guy
This valentine to action-packed moviemaking works best when it ignores the plot and focuses on stunt craft and the explosive rom-com banter between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.
Challengers
Luca Guadagnino’s twisty, sexy, adult tennis saga entwines three players who understand each other (and themselves) on the court but have a harder time working outside the lines.
Monkey Man
Dev Patel makes a dazzling directorial debut that mixes stylish ultra-violence with a provocative political point of view.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
One of the better American Godzilla movies delivers the giant-monster-fighting goods, even if waiting for the grand finale occasionally feels like a chore.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
A franchise once built on comedy with some creepy ghosts on the side now feels more committed to nostalgic brand-building, sprinkled with forgettable scares and half-hearted attempts at humor.
Kung Fu Panda 4
Brisk, exciting and genuinely funny, ‘Kung Fu Panda 4’ is the highlight of this
long-running franchise, furthering the hero’s journey to enlightenment, working wonders
with its ensemble cast, and embracing the philosophical spirit of kung fu.
Dune: Part Two
The second chapter of Denis Villeneuve’s epic adaptation delivers on the visual grandeur and political intrigue, even if the characters tend to be reduced to their plot function.
The Empire
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’.
Suspended Time
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.
Another End
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.
My Favourite Cake
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.
Madame Web
Despite a tangled narrative web, this arachnid superhero saga makes a far better would-be tentpole in Sony’s Spider-verse than ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’ or ‘Morbius,’ thanks mainly to Dakota Johnson.
Lisa Frankenstein
This female-gaze take on 1980s teen movies must have looked great on paper, but it never comes to life on screen.
IFFR 2024: The Verdict
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.
“I like creating work that people are repulsed by”: An interview with Rachel Maclean
The feted Scottish film and video artist Rachel Maclean talks Barbie, James Bond, pink-punk maximalism and the subversive power of bad taste.
Adorable illusions: Debbie Harry and director Amanda Kramer discuss virtual reality, deepfake porn and New York punk.
The iconic Blondie singer narrates and appears in Kramer’s new documentary ‘So Unreal’, a mind-bending deep dive into prophetic cyberpunk cinema.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
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.
Mean Girls
A pleasant-enough musical reworking of the 2004 comedy, hitting the big screen on its way to becoming a slumber-party staple for decades to come.
Night Swim
This haunted-swimming-pool thriller goes from creepy to ridiculous and back again, but as January-dumped horror films go, it’s a cut above.
Alonso Duralde’s Top 10 Films of 2023
From personal journeys of discovery to man’s inhumanity to man, the stories shared in the films of 2023 speak to our moment in history and will continue to do so for generations to come.
The Color Purple
Alice Walker’s saga of sisterhood and survival becomes a rousing and heartfelt screen musical.
Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
More a retrospective documentary than a traditional concert film, this souvenir of Beyoncé’s recent smash tour will delight fans who want a peek behind the scenes even as those peeks occasionally distract from the artist’s extraordinary stagecraft.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
This tedious, overlong prequel sheds little new light on the Hunger Games universe, although Viola Davis and Jason Schwartzman camp it up with gusto.
The Marvels
This admirable attempt at subverting superhero-movie formula and tone should have soared beyond where MCU movies typically go.
Five Nights at Freddy’s
This video-game adaptation never lives up to its premise’s potential as either a scary movie or an exercise in absurdism.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
Nearly three hours of Taylor Swift in concert might be too much of a good thing for newcomers, but devotees will wish this beautifully shot and edited performance doc had been even longer.
White Angel — The End of Marinka
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.
TFV Talks To Maria Fredriksson about The Gullspång Miracle
Maria Fredriksson plunged into the doc-making deep end for her debut feature ‘The Gullspång Miracle’, screening at DOK Leipzig.
The Exorcist: Believer
It takes a village to perform an exorcism, and it takes the power of Ann Dowd and Ellen Burstyn to make this familiar material compelling.
San Sebastian 2023: The Verdict
This year’s San Sebastian was a sunny festival filled with discoveries.
Víctor Erice, Spanish Master
Revered Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice receives the Donostia Award at SSIFF.
The Creator
While lovely to look at, Gareth Edwards’ latest doesn’t make the case for why we should stop worrying and learn to love AI.
Sultana’s Dream
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.
Expend4bles
If Expend4bles were any more by-the-numbers, it would have a numeral in its title. Oh, wait.
Oldenburg Film Festival 2023: The Verdict
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.
A Haunting in Venice
Branagh’s most successful Agatha Christie adaptation to date finds mystery and suspense in period, setting, and another distinguished ensemble.
A Big Thanks to the Film Community as TFV Begins its 3rd Year
We opened our Venice dailies with an anniversary salute to both the Biennale’s 80th Mostra del Cinema and The Film Verdict’s entry into its third year. I’d like to end with a few words of gratitude to all the many film festivals that have embraced and supported our vision of providing the film community with...
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Lubo
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 Killer
David Fincher brings his considerable style and craft to this procedural about a professional assassin, but not even Michael Fassbender can make the character distinguishable from a thousand other cinematic hired guns.
Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone reteam for an audacious comic odyssey that defies genre and convention.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
Wes Anderson’s second Roald Dahl adaptation packs a feature’s worth of deadpan humor and aggressive visual style into just 37 minutes.
Chuck Chuck Baby
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.
Equalizer 3
The third film in Denzel Washington and Antoine Fuqua’s ultraviolent thriller series is the best one yet. (If only that meant more than it does.)
Blue Beetle
‘Blue Beetle’ is a superhero movie with laughs, action, cultural specificity and human-sized stakes — here’s hoping there’s room for this character in the next reboot of the DC Universe.
Charlie Kaufman and the Heart of Sarajevo
Kaufman’s style could be deemed ‘screwball,’ could be deemed ‘surreality,’ and should probably be called ‘Screw Reality’. He is honored in Sarajevo International Film Festival
Quality TV Competes at Sarajevo
Once again, the Avant Premiere Series lineup aims to explore the best of regional TV production in Sarajevo International Film Festival
29th Sarajevo Film Festival Opens Its Doors
Lynne Ramsay, Charlie Kaufman and Mark Cousins Are Honoured at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival.
Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story
This biopic of a gamer-turned-racer delivers sports-movie uplift and racing-movie thrills while never letting up on the product placement.
Stepne
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.
The Legacy of Marco Solari
The President of the Locarno Film Festival for 23 years, Marco Solari makes a graceful bow as he steps offstage.
The Vanishing Soldier
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.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
If the end of the world really is approaching, Jude may be our most trenchant Cassandra.
Meg 2: The Trench
Meg 2: The Trench wastes an hour or so before finally delivering what we paid to see: giant, prehistoric sharks eating tourists.
Haunted Mansion
Actor Lakeith Stanfield brings human heart to Justin Simien’s mediocre corporate horror comedy ‘Haunted Mansion’.
Oppenheimer
In ‘Oppenheimer’, writer-director Christopher Nolan has a stronger handle on the creation of the atomic bomb than on the inner life of the tortured genius behind that creation.
Karlovy Vary: The Verdict
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.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
Hits all the marks of an adrenaline-packed summer spy thriller, with pacing that makes 163 minutes zip right by.
Restore Point
Death is not the end in Czech director Robert Hloz’s stylish and ambitious future-noir Euro-thriller debut ‘Restore Point’.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
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.
No Hard Feelings
Brash comedy gives way to heartfelt sentiment, but Jennifer Lawrence, whose multifaceted talent gets showcased here, carries the story across the finish line.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
It might be damning with faint praise, but this reboot finds more fun (and visual coherence) in the toy robots than the five earlier efforts directed by Michael Bay.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Breathtaking maximalism, for fans of ‘RRR’ and ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (not to mention the previous animated Spider-Man movie).
Cannes 2023: The Verdict
Anointed auteurs padded the competition while the scramble for tickets became exhausting.
The Old Oak
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.
Pictures of Ghosts
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.
Asteroid City
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’.
Close Your Eyes
A passionate, big-issue film from revered Spanish maestro Victor Erice, ‘Close Your Eyes” engagingly reflects on art, memory, identity and recapturing time past.
The Little Mermaid (2023)
Entertaining and impressive – but not enough to justify Disney’s ongoing effort to turn their traditionally animated features into mostly-CG animated features.
Killers of the Flower Moon
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’.
About Dry Grasses
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.
Occupied City
’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’.
Book Club: The Next Chapter
The talent outshines the writing, but these travel companions make for a breezy Italian trip.
Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3
James Gunn bids farewell to the MCU with a whimper, not a bang.
Alonso Duralde Joins ‘The Film Verdict’ as Chief U.S. Film Critic
‘The Film Verdict’ announces its first U.S.-based reviewer.
Tomorrow Is A Long Time
Taiwanese arthouse A-lister Leon Dai and new actor Edward Tan front Singaporean filmmaker Jow Zhi Wei’s visually enchanting, structurally disciplined first feature.
Netflix and UNESCO Reimagine African Folktales
Six directors across Africa make shorts for Netflix.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Michelle Yeoh plays a kick-ass Chinese-American matriarch fighting the forces of darkness across multiple universes in ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’, a wildly inventive, prize-winning philosophical action comedy from writer-director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The winner of 7 Oscars, including Best Picture.
On the Adamant
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.
The Shadowless Tower
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.
Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey into the Desert
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.
The Cemetery of Cinema
‘The Cemetery of Cinema’ conveys an important point about Guinea’s deplorable relationship with film archives, despite its director’s theatricality.
BlackBerry
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.
She Came to Me
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.
Killing a Traitor
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.
Copenhagen Does Not Exist
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’.
5 Seasons of Revolution
Using photos, footage, and fragmented clips, the mononymous director Lina presents an account of the Syrian Crisis as both a national and interpersonal tragedy.
Cinema Sabaya
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.
Cairo Conspiracy
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.
TFV Interviews Pan Nalin
“I can believe in cinema again!” The Indian director of ‘Last Film Show’ talks about making an ode to celluloid in the digital age.
TFV Interviews Jerzy Skolimowski
The Polish filmmaker discusses his bond with the animal star(s) of ‘EO’.
Profile: Alice Diop
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.
Holy Spider
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.
River of Desire
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.
Something You Said Last Night
Luis De Filippis’ laid-back tale about an embattled but loving family on vacation pops with a riveting Carmen Madonia as the trans sister.
Black Stone
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’.
Subtraction
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.
Cowboy Poets
Mike Day’s gently ambling documentary offers a fragmentary look at the unique tradition of cowboy poetry.
Black Night
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.
San Sebastian: The Verdict
San Sebastian celebrated its 70th anniversary with grace and good programing.
The Wonder
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.
The Great Silence
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.
A Long Break
Years of guilt and shame are exorcised in Davit Pirtskhalava’s stagy drama tracking the aftershocks of bullying.
The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg solidifies his legendary origin story playing with truth, fiction, and the magic of moviemaking.
Vicenta B.
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.
Saint Omer
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.
Master Gardener
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.
Bones and All
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.
White Noise
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.
Safe Place
Raw, authentic emotion and inventive lyricism combine in Juraj Lerotic’s sensitive, devastating reckoning with an acute mental health crisis in the family.
Men of Deeds
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’.
Serviam – I Will Serve
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’.
Matter Out of Place
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.
Medusa Deluxe
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.
A Far Shore
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.
In Broad Daylight
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.
Beautiful Beings
Cruel and delicate, this Icelandic drama shows troubled kids as the product of the actions and inactions of adults.
Borders of Love
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.
Butterfly Vision
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.
The Ordinaries
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.
Woman on the Roof
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.
The Taking
Director Alexandre Philippe’s latest essay-film ‘The Taking’ is a thoughtful, visually ravishing, politically charged rumination on American cinema’s oldest rock stars.
Sick Of Myself
With a deft hand for black comedy, Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli takes his examination of modern narcissism to its body-horror extreme.
Mariupolis 2
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.
Triangle of Sadness
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.
Pacifiction
Spanish director Albert Serra’s slow-burning, suspenseful Tahiti-set tale pitches Benoît Magimel’s quasi-colonial official against nuclear conspiracies.
Leila’s Brothers
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.
Moonage Daydream
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.
Crimes of the Future
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.
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton star in ‘Mad Max’ creator George Miller’s ambitious but misfiring fairy-tale romance ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’.
Boy From Heaven
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.
Armageddon Time
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.
Father & Soldier
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.
Tchaikovsky’s Wife
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.
Top Gun: Maverick
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’
Wake Up Punk
Fashion icon Vivienne Westwood and her son Joe Corré attempt to reclaim punk’s radical roots in director Nigel Askew’s scrappy but engaging documentary ‘Wake Up Punk’.
World, Northern Hemisphere
Hossein Tehrani’s gently melancholy first feature about poor farm laborers, which won Tokyo’s Asian Future competition, reveals a strong new Iranian voice.
My Old School
Scottish director Jono McLeod’s debut documentary ‘My Old School’ is a highly entertaining account of an outlandish fraud and its lingering aftershocks.
The Devil’s Drivers
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.
Boiling Point
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.
No Simple Way Home
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 Novelist’s Film
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.
Leonora Addio
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.
Myanmar Diaries
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.
Both Sides of the Blade
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.
Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day?
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.
A Human Position
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,
Kung Fu Zohra
French director Mabrouk El Mechri’s screwball action comedy about domestic violence, Kung Fu Zohra is admirably audacious but misses the target.
To Love Again
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.
Neptune Frost
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.
Babysitter
‘Babysitter’ steers clear of preachiness in its half-scolding and often amusing examination of sexual and sexist attitudes in the wake of #MeToo.
Nothing Compares
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.
The Worst Person in the World
An insightful exploration of youth, ambition, romance, and meaning through the lens of a young woman you both identify with and love to hate.
The Tragedy of Macbeth
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.
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
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.
The Tender Bar
George Clooney directs Ben Affleck in The Tender Bar, a warm-hearted but flat coming-of-age drama.
Rupture
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.
The Lost Daughter
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.
Plaza Catedral
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.
A Night of Knowing Nothing
A haunting low-fi meditation on memory, social class and political protest that won the Golden Eye documentary award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Alice, Through the Looking: À la recherche d’un lapin perdu
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.
The Power of the Dog
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.
Isaac
In his skillfully helmed first feature, Isaac (Izaokas), Lithuanian writer-director Jurgis Matulevicius delves into his country’s turbulent past under both Communism and Nazism, following a trio of friends in the 1960s whose lives are overshadowed by a massacre that took place during WWII. Mixing historical fact with an existential crime story, the film is bathed...
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Post Mortem
Filled with enough gyrating dead corpses to cast the next Zack Snyder movie several times over, director Péter Bergendy’s Hungarian horror flick Post Mortem is high on gore and jump scares, low on convincing storytelling and originality. It displays a solid level of craft, especially the heavy use of visual and makeup effects, but otherwise...
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The Four Walls
Bahman Ghobadi’s latest Kurdish story, shot in Istanbul, hovers between tragedy and humor without hitting the emotional high note it aims for.
Night Nursery
Moumouni Sanou’s award-winning documentary about the reality of working girls in Burkina Faso is marred by its lack of discretion.
Fati’s Choice
A Ghanaian woman makes an anti-migration decision her friends and family disagree with.
This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
Jeremiah Lemohang Mosese has made a masterpiece that showcases the great talent of the late Mary Twala and announces his own genius.
Eyimofe
Chuko and Ari Esiri’s Eyimofe, which is competing at Fespaco, combines two semi-overlapping stories of Nigerians on the edge. The first story is titled Spain, the second Italy. The idea in both titles is destination. In both stories, the Nigerian characters have come to believe that another life, one of happiness and devoid of material lack,...
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Eiffel
You don’t need to hold a doctorate in Freudian psychology, or to have labored through all 750 pages of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, to know that big towers built by ambitious men usually are, in one way or another, substitutes for their penises. And yet, in the highly romanticized biopic Eiffel, director Martin Bouboulon spends...
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Anatolian Leopard
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.
Prayers for the Stolen
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.
Benediction
The life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon movingly expresses the traumas of war and love in one of writer-director Terence Davies’ finest creations.
Silent Land
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.
Reflection
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.