January 30, 2024
Stephen Dalton
The feted Scottish film and video artist Rachel Maclean talks Barbie, James Bond, pink-punk maximalism and the subversive power of bad taste.
January 29, 2024
Stephen Dalton
The iconic Blondie singer narrates and appears in Kramer’s new documentary ‘So Unreal’, a mind-bending deep dive into prophetic cyberpunk cinema.
January 23, 2024
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
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.
January 15, 2024
Alonso Duralde
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Cold-War-in-space thriller benefits from a lean-and-mean B-movie sensibility crossed with seamless effects work and potent performances.
January 10, 2024
Alonso Duralde
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.
January 4, 2024
Alonso Duralde
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.
December 20, 2023
Alonso Duralde
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.
December 19, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Alice Walker’s saga of sisterhood and survival becomes a rousing and heartfelt screen musical.
December 4, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Musical prequel manages to find the sweet spot between the wicked psychedelia of the original Willy Wonka and the feel-good delights of the director’s Paddington movies.
December 2, 2023
Alonso Duralde
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.
November 27, 2023
Alonso Duralde
What was clearly designed to be a victory lap for Disney’s 100th anniversary will be mostly forgotten by the time the studio turns 101.
November 15, 2023
Alonso Duralde
While this sumptuously mounted production delivers as a sweeping war epic, one hopes Ridley Scott’s promised director’s cut will fill in the emotional and historical blanks.
November 9, 2023
Alonso Duralde
This tedious, overlong prequel sheds little new light on the Hunger Games universe, although Viola Davis and Jason Schwartzman camp it up with gusto.
November 8, 2023
Alonso Duralde
This admirable attempt at subverting superhero-movie formula and tone should have soared beyond where MCU movies typically go.
October 26, 2023
Alonso Duralde
This video-game adaptation never lives up to its premise’s potential as either a scary movie or an exercise in absurdism.
October 14, 2023
Alonso Duralde
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.
October 13, 2023
Carmen Gray
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.
October 10, 2023
Carmen Gray
Maria Fredriksson plunged into the doc-making deep end for her debut feature ‘The Gullspång Miracle’, screening at DOK Leipzig.
October 4, 2023
Alonso Duralde
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.
October 2, 2023
TFV Staff
This year’s San Sebastian was a sunny festival filled with discoveries.
September 28, 2023
Lucy Virgen
Revered Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice receives the Donostia Award at SSIFF.
September 26, 2023
Alonso Duralde
While lovely to look at, Gareth Edwards’ latest doesn’t make the case for why we should stop worrying and learn to love AI.
September 25, 2023
Deborah Young
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.
September 22, 2023
Alonso Duralde
If Expend4bles were any more by-the-numbers, it would have a numeral in its title. Oh, wait.
September 17, 2023
Stephen Dalton
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.
September 10, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Branagh’s most successful Agatha Christie adaptation to date finds mystery and suspense in period, setting, and another distinguished ensemble.
September 10, 2023
Kelly Jones
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 […]
September 8, 2023
Deborah Young
In ‘Woman of…’, the passive heroism of a Polish working class father of two who identifies as a woman is affectingly portrayed in the inimitable style of Malgorzata Szumowska and her co-director and D.P. Michal Englert (‘Never Gonna Snow Again’).
September 7, 2023
Jay Weissberg
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.
September 5, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Richard Linklater’s farce about a phony hired killer is charming and unpredictable, but it would benefit from dropping the “based on a true story” angle.
September 5, 2023
Deborah Young
A withering take-down of Rome’s vapid middle class, Pietro Castellitto’s (‘The Predators’) exuberant second feature ‘Enea’ is an amusing, fast-paced game that winks at gangster movies and bows in Venice competition.
September 4, 2023
Alonso Duralde
The gilded cage that was Priscilla Presley’s life with Elvis makes a perfect match for Sofia Coppola’s empathetic vision.
September 3, 2023
Alonso Duralde
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.
September 2, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Bradley Cooper’s ambitious sophomore directorial effort, about Leonard Bernstein’s married life, soars and sweeps in some passages while falling flat in others.
September 1, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone reteam for an audacious comic odyssey that defies genre and convention.
September 1, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Wes Anderson’s second Roald Dahl adaptation packs a feature’s worth of deadpan humor and aggressive visual style into just 37 minutes.
August 31, 2023
Alonso Duralde
In his first feature film in eight years, director Michael Mann passionately captures a life where the drive for success and the threat of disaster were intricately intertwined.
August 31, 2023
Alonso Duralde
In El conde, Pablo Larraín’s darkly comic horror-satire reveals that turning a real-life monster into the protagonist of his own monster movie is an effective way to process historical tragedy.
August 30, 2023
Stephen Dalton
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.
August 26, 2023
TFV Staff
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.)
August 25, 2023
Alonso Duralde
This queer comedy remains uncompromisingly outrageous and hilarious from start to finish, and if it’s too weird to be a box-office smash, then it has the makings of a future cult classic.
August 16, 2023
Alonso Duralde
‘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.
August 13, 2023
TFV Staff
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
August 11, 2023
Max Borg
Once again, the Avant Premiere Series lineup aims to explore the best of regional TV production in Sarajevo International Film Festival
August 10, 2023
Ben Nicholson
Lynne Ramsay, Charlie Kaufman and Mark Cousins Are Honoured at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival.
August 8, 2023
Alonso Duralde
This biopic of a gamer-turned-racer delivers sports-movie uplift and racing-movie thrills while never letting up on the product placement.
August 7, 2023
Jay Weissberg
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.
August 6, 2023
Max Borg
The President of the Locarno Film Festival for 23 years, Marco Solari makes a graceful bow as he steps offstage.
August 5, 2023
Jay Weissberg
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.
August 4, 2023
Jay Weissberg
If the end of the world really is approaching, Jude may be our most trenchant Cassandra.
