August 3, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Meg 2: The Trench wastes an hour or so before finally delivering what we paid to see: giant, prehistoric sharks eating tourists.
August 3, 2023
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Dimitra Vlagopoulou shines in ‘Animal’, Sofia Exarchou’s sometimes sexy, sometimes poignant second feature film.
August 1, 2023
Stephen Dalton
Director Bertrand Mandico’s lurid saga of gender-queer decadence and visceral violence ‘Conann’ is a ravishing sensory feast for viewers with strong stomachs.
July 25, 2023
TFV Staff
Actor Lakeith Stanfield brings human heart to Justin Simien’s mediocre corporate horror comedy ‘Haunted Mansion’.
July 19, 2023
Alonso Duralde
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.
July 8, 2023
TFV Staff
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.
July 5, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Hits all the marks of an adrenaline-packed summer spy thriller, with pacing that makes 163 minutes zip right by.
July 4, 2023
Stephen Dalton
Death is not the end in Czech director Robert Hloz’s stylish and ambitious future-noir Euro-thriller debut ‘Restore Point’.
June 30, 2023
Stephen Dalton
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.
June 21, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Brash comedy gives way to heartfelt sentiment, but Jennifer Lawrence, whose multifaceted talent gets showcased here, carries the story across the finish line.
June 6, 2023
Alonso Duralde
The first and last 10 minutes demonstrate the winning superhero saga this might have been, but the middle two hours are devoted to sloppy, shameless fan service.
June 6, 2023
Alonso Duralde
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.
June 2, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Breathtaking maximalism, for fans of ‘RRR’ and ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (not to mention the previous animated Spider-Man movie).
May 28, 2023
Deborah Young
Anointed auteurs padded the competition while the scramble for tickets became exhausting.
May 26, 2023
Deborah Young
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.
May 24, 2023
Jay Weissberg
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.
May 24, 2023
Deborah Young
Marco Bellocchio’s tense, edge-of-seat historical thriller, ‘Kidnapped,’ is the devastating true story of a 6-year-old Jewish boy abducted in 1858 to be raised a Catholic.
May 23, 2023
Stephen Dalton
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’.
May 23, 2023
Deborah Young
A passionate, big-issue film from revered Spanish maestro Victor Erice, ‘Close Your Eyes” engagingly reflects on art, memory, identity and recapturing time past.
May 22, 2023
Alonso Duralde
Entertaining and impressive – but not enough to justify Disney’s ongoing effort to turn their traditionally animated features into mostly-CG animated features.
May 20, 2023
Stephen Dalton
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’.
May 19, 2023
Jay Weissberg
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.
May 17, 2023
Alonso Duralde
This isn’t merely a sprawling, ridiculous summer blockbuster — it’s the Platonic ideal of the sprawling, ridiculous summer blockbuster, a delight for fans of the loony franchise.
May 17, 2023
Stephen Dalton
’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’.
May 9, 2023
Alonso Duralde
The talent outshines the writing, but these travel companions make for a breezy Italian trip.
April 28, 2023
Alonso Duralde
James Gunn bids farewell to the MCU with a whimper, not a bang.
April 19, 2023
TFV Staff
‘The Film Verdict’ announces its first U.S.-based reviewer.
April 12, 2023
Clarence Tsui
Taiwanese arthouse A-lister Leon Dai and new actor Edward Tan front Singaporean filmmaker Jow Zhi Wei’s visually enchanting, structurally disciplined first feature.
April 5, 2023
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Six directors across Africa make shorts for Netflix.
March 23, 2023
Stephen Dalton
Ruggedly beautiful landscapes and elegant monochrome visuals help make up for a thin plot in Australian director Ivan Sen’s politically charged neo-western crime thriller ‘Limbo’.
March 13, 2023
Stephen Dalton
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.
February 25, 2023
Clarence Tsui
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.
February 23, 2023
Deborah Young
The latest YA fantasy adventure from Japanese anime master Makoto Shinkai is a beautifully written and animated work of the imagination that incorporates elements of ‘Your Name’ and ‘Weathering with You’ and often sails beyond them.
February 22, 2023
Jay Weissberg
Christian Petzold is in top form with this intimate summer drama that quietly builds to an unexpected, heart-wrenching finale.
February 20, 2023
Deborah Young
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.
February 20, 2023
Kevin Jagernauth
Frauke Finsterwalder delivers yet another take on the life of Empress Sisi, but can’t escape the long shadow of the much more spirited ‘Corsage’.
February 19, 2023
Deborah Young
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.
February 18, 2023
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
‘The Cemetery of Cinema’ conveys an important point about Guinea’s deplorable relationship with film archives, despite its director’s theatricality.
February 17, 2023
Deborah Young
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.
February 16, 2023
Stephen Dalton
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.
February 3, 2023
Carmen Gray
The ghosts of Playland Cafe, Boston’s oldest gay bar pre-demolition, return in this heartfelt, multi-layered tribute to marginalised history, DIY spirit and queer performance.
February 2, 2023
Deborah Young
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.
January 30, 2023
Stephen Dalton
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’.
January 25, 2023
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Using photos, footage, and fragmented clips, the mononymous director Lina presents an account of the Syrian Crisis as both a national and interpersonal tragedy.
January 17, 2023
Deborah Young
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.
December 22, 2022
Jay Weissberg
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.
December 17, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie lead a starry cast in ‘Babylon’, Damien Chazelle’s huge, ambitious but flawed love letter to Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties.
December 9, 2022
TFV Staff
“I can believe in cinema again!” The Indian director of ‘Last Film Show’ talks about making an ode to celluloid in the digital age.
December 8, 2022
TFV Staff
The Polish filmmaker discusses his bond with the animal star(s) of ‘EO’.
December 8, 2022
Deborah Young
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.
