Sarah Manvel 
A Prayer for the Dying has had the bad luck to arrive a year after Train Dreams, which also has a forest fire at its center, and a few years after Nosferatu, another shocking and stylised horror movie about a place consumed by a plague. But it is also very …
For a movie designed around a teenage pregnancy it’s a surprise that We Are All Strangers focuses on the baby’s father. What writer-director Anthony Chen is exploring here is how family responsibilities force young men to grow up. The assumption seems to be that women have achieved maturity already, regardless …
Cinema’s focus on the youth market ignores that there are considerable older audiences who love going to the movies but are generally underserved. From this perspective, most movies are either too violent or aimed at teenagers, none of which makes them travel to the theatre and take their money out …
In one way, the jazz biopic Everybody Digs Bill Evans is a resounding success as it introduces those of us who are not jazz fanatics to the life of the artist behind some huge hits and of the greatest live jazz recordings ever made. In another way, the jazz biopic …
Of course you’ve seen Frozen, the animated juggernaut which drew heavily both on Scandinavian culture and that of the Sámi, the people indigenous to the Arctic circle, for its story of female empowerment and the importance of bonds between siblings. But that was a story for children, made by people …
Music documentaries are very good at providing a sociological picture of the time and place where the band got together. If a band gets famous enough to participate in its own obituary, their lives of success on the road tend to blur into This is Spinal Tap. If there were …
The subject matter of We Believe You is unusually grim, but the grimness is offset by the institutional setting: a custody hearing in a Belgian family court, all pale office furniture and glass walls. Inside this bland setting a family and its lawyers have the most serious conversations of their …
Content warning: sexual assault, child-centric trauma Writer-director Beth de Araújo has been open that Josephine is based on a true incident from her childhood. The trouble is that knowing this fact hampers the ability to speak critically about the film. Anything negative might feel like a personal attack against the …
The unhappy true story on which Forsaken is based is one of the most traumatising situations in modern French history. It brought together several of the most hot-button issues of the modern era – freedom of speech and how the state handles issues of religion in a legally secular society …
The Cannes Film Festival normally chooses a lighthearted French movie as its opener, mainly to celebrate the kind of movie that doesn’t always get its due. Tragedy can be very easy to make, but comedy – especially romantic comedy – is tough. You need great control over mood, you need …
Who could have imagined that the choice of name for a baby born in 1995 in London to Kosovo Albanian parents would prove to have a global influence? The baby grew up with a short, easy to spell, and easy to pronounce name with an adorable meaning: ‘love.’ The unusual …
The choice to film in black and white is the wrong one for historical dramas. It signifies to a modern audience that this story is happening in ye olden days and therefore none of the historical nuances matter, because we are watching the distant and irrelevant past. Thanks to an …
Someday a movie featuring an argument about Predator vs Hobbit fanfiction will deserve a negative review, but today is not that day. The Incomer is completely deranged (complimentary), and its derangement is entirely character-based, giving the actors the freedom to go as wild as possible, which they did. It’s a …
Independent Nigerian cinema is so rare that it’s automatically worth a look, but nothing gets a pass based on its cultural background alone. Whether a story is set in Liverpool, Los Angeles or Lagos it needs to be viewed within the same critical framework, and if a concept is offensive …
Hot Water pulls off a very neat trick in the guise of a road movie: it makes thought process form. The act of driving thousands of miles is what provides the mother and son at the heart of this story huge catharsis without a great deal of big stuff happening. …
The concept behind Given Names (Prénoms) is so simple that it’s hard to believe no one has ever done it before. Filmmaker Nurith Aviv showed up at the apartments of various friends of hers with a bunch of flowers, and then listened to the friend talk about their first, or …
The concept of Run Amok is alarmingly close to bad taste. The execution of the concept of Run Amok also requires all the adults here to be really bad at adulting, which is unlikely. But if you can get past both of those things – a pretty large if – …
The end credits of The Musical contain this dedication: “To all our theater teachers, who taught us the power of spite.” If you just didn’t let out a bark of laughter or maybe twist your mouth in a wry grin of acknowledgement, you will have a very hard time enjoying …
Actors Will Poulter and Noah Centineo, who both also helped produce Union County, undoubtedly personally enabled this cinema-verité story of rural American drug addiction to get made. Large parts of Union County were filmed in a real drug court with the court’s workers and the court’s service users playing all …
During the Berlinale I swung by photography museum C|O Berlin to look at their exhibit of work by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (running until June 2026, and recommended). Her most famous photograph, “Mujer Ángel, Sonoran Desert, 1979,” shows an indigenous woman in traditional dress on the side of a hill, …