Sarah Manvel 
Just as there’s a thin line between love and hate, there’s a thin line between romance and horror. What from one perspective shows love conquering all can also be seen as a person (usually a woman) having to deny their career, their sexuality and their independence in order to be …
Content Warning: This is a review of the movie Baby John, and it includes disturbing topics, including discussion of rape, torture, and violence against women and children. No matter where you are in the world, police propaganda has the same problem: how to justify violence meted out by cops with …
There is a clear point of view in No Other Land: what is happening in the West Bank is wrong. Frankly it’s all the more powerful for its righteous commitment to this line. But just because something is an unusual, well-made and remarkable documentary doesn’t make it a crucial piece …
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings saga struck such a colossal nerve when it was first published because it was a reaction to the loss of the first World War. The displacement of the muddy, modern conflict into a deliberately regressive story of magic and magical creatures …
The year I got divorced my job sent me to a career event for women in our line of work that purported to be a fundraiser for a domestic abuse charity. What it actually entailed was a group of wealthy women reassuring each other, with no sense of irony, that …
Nickel Boys, an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, has attempted to meet the current moment by telling a story of horrendous racism and child abuse with neither racism nor violence in it. This is worse than the biographies of Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr. …
The problem with The Problem with People is that it is so determined to be light-hearted in how it deals with an unpleasant aspect of human nature – our talent for conflict – that it is neither realistic enough nor cheerful enough. It works very hard both to provide enough …
While it is to be praised that so many dads are making movies for children these days, it does rather mean the dads are centering themselves in the movies, instead of the children for whom the movies are supposedly made. This is very frustrating, not least when it’s clear that …
It’s always wonderful to see an actor rise to the opportunity and become a great movie star, and there’s a moment late in Gladiator II where the switch visibly flips for Paul Mescal. He (and Daisy Edgar-Jones, who I have written about elsewhere) came out of nowhere in 2020’s lockdown …
A good story is about people with a problem and their attempts to solve it. Sometimes the problems are large – aliens are attacking! – and sometimes they are smaller. In Sofa, So Good, the problem is how to get a cheap sofa across town when you don’t have a …
There are few subjects more emotive than motherhood, but a story about a new way to enable motherhood/parenthood should not have taken why that is as granted. On stage before the world premiere of Joy at the London Film Festival, director Ben Taylor and star James Norton both spoke about the …
Animation is often seen as a genre for children, but that is because it is a genre for imagination. It’s a way of visually expressing stories that cannot be realistically or safely acted out. The stop-motion Memoir of a Snail, which has surprisingly won Best Film at this year’s London …
This Telugu-language movie was guaranteed major international distribution once N. T. Rama Rao Jr. agreed to star. After all, he was half of the leading duo in RRR, the Indian movie which so dramatically punched through to an international audience. Yet Devara Part 1 is not designed for an international …
It’s depressing to realize someone is coasting on their reputation instead of using their talent, and in fact making so little use of their talent that their reputation becomes suspect. This is the sorry state of affairs after seeing The Room Next Door, written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, that …
This 3 ½ hour long tale, complete with intermission, of a Jewish-Hungarian architect attempting to make his way in America after the second world war is what Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis wishes it had been. It is about human dignity in the face of incredible suffering, and the ways in …
Happy Holidays is possibly as apolitical as a Palestinian movie can get, which is to say not very. Writer-editor-director Scandar Copti, who won the Orrozonti prize for best screenplay at this year’s Venice Biennale, worked with non-professional actors in an non-linear fashion to depict a very bad few months in …
They live in Metz, a city in northeastern France close to the borders with both Germany and Luxembourg. Both sons, who are in their very early twenties, cheerfully live at home. The older Fus (Benjamin Voisin) studied to be a welder but has been unable to find paying work so …
Writer-director Francesca Comencini apparently decided that her entire audience for The Time It Takes would be people who already knew that she is the daughter of the late Italian film director Luigi Comencini. This was so obvious to her that neither the father (played by Fabrizio Gifuni) nor the daughter …
What you have to realize about Queer is that it is an adaptation of a book by William S. Burroughs, so the queerness on display here is less about sexuality, but more a way of looking at the world. William Lee, largely Lee to his friends (an astonishing Daniel Craig), …
The most anticipated film of the Venice Biennale this year was the epic Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2, which landed with something of a whimper instead of the bang it truly deserves. Kevin Costner’s project, the first part of which had its world premiere in Cannes this past …