Sarah Manvel 
The Secret Agent won two major awards at this year’s Cannes film festival, Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho and Best Actor for Wagner Moura, an unusual and enormous compliment. The Secret Agent is a lot like Waiting for Godot, as it is two and a half hours of set-up …
Amir El-Masry is the lucky owner of one of the great faces in modern cinema, and he got to show it off not once but twice at this year’s London Film Festival. Unfortunately in neither case was it shown off to his best advantage. Giant managed somehow not to be …
Amir El-Masry is the lucky owner of one of the great faces in modern cinema, and he got to show it off not once but twice at this year’s London Film Festival. Unfortunately in neither case was it shown off to his best advantage. The less said about 100 Nights …
One of the benefits of all of us having professional-grade recording devices on our persons at all times is that we are able to document everything. One of the downsides to this is that it’s possible to cross-reference any even slightly true story with the real footage of the case. …
Rose Byrne’s magnificent performance grounds this takedown of modern motherhood (not parenthood) under capitalism, but If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is really about the flaws of modern American society. Its unmissable message is that America is completely ruled by its addictions and its impossible desire to get without …
The Choral is the kind of movie at which the British film industry excels: made for audiences who like their stories flavoured strongly with nostalgia, and who like to read between the lines for their hard-hitting topics. These movies tend to play better overseas, where the historical trappings and the …
Dragonfly is based on a simple idea: how dangerous it is to trust anyone while you’re weakened, whether through old age, disability or both. Unfortunately it is also so worried that we won’t understand the nuances of this very good idea that it overdoes things, and collapses. This is very …
Enzo (Eloy Pohu) is sixteen or seventeen, a dangerous age. He’s still very much a child, but thinks he isn’t. Having a scooter and some limited amounts of freedom isn’t quite adulthood, but he is too young and too privileged to know that. He lives with his parents Marion and …
This could have been a play and may well get a second life as a play, because its single set, very talky script and clever staging keep us in the room for the 100-minute runtime. It is heavily inspired by real events but also plays fast and loose as required …
If you know anything at all about classic movies, you know about Kim Novak. She was one of the last actors to be molded for stardom under the old studio system, and she had such an unhappy time being set up as a rival to Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth …
Writer-director-cinematographer-editor-composer Mark Jenkin has an idiosyncratic vision for Rose of Nevada, not just in how many of the behind the camera jobs he does himself, but also in how his corner of England is portrayed onscreen. For Mr. Jenkin is not English but Cornish (and you better believe there’s a …
As I left the London Film Festival screening of Christy, I heard a stunned young woman telling her friend that this is a horror movie. And it is, of the most ordinary kind. It is also a biopic of sporting triumph about the importance of getting up every single time …
It’s something of a surprise that Roofman has done the festival circuit. It’s the kind of comfortable movie that Hollywood used to churn out by the dozen: casually dripping with stars, a plot that handles serious issues with a light touch, product placement that combines the American fervours for nostalgia …
The sincerity with which Anemone begins with a child’s drawing of violence from the Northern Irish troubles does not bode well. And yet Daniel Day-Lewis, who has acted in two previous about the Troubles, In the Name of the Father and The Boxer, has taken his first acting role in …
At first glance La Grazia looks like another old-fashioned movie about responsibility and the care that we owe each other. Then the sound design by Mirko Perri and the score by Nick Donnelly kicks in, both heavily reliant on snippets of pulsing electronic music and thumping Italian rap, which somehow …
The plight of asylum seekers/illegal immigrants in the UK has recently become a very hot political potato. Groups of organised racists (or as some mealy-mouthed politicians would have it, ‘concerned citizens’) have attacked the buildings where some of the world’s most desperate people are kept under guard as they wait …
The trouble with the concept of Hamnet is twofold. On the one hand, one of its central characters is one of the most famous artists who ever existed. His life has been mined for every possible scrap over the centuries, and about him there is very little new to say. …
It is always, always interesting to see art about the making of other art. The choices people make, why those choices resonate, whether those choices were deliberate or accidental, and how much people get into their own way is always fascinating to watch. It certainly helps if you have a …
The emotional rollercoaster Giacomo Covi’s character undergoes in A Year of School is so relatable it’s obvious why he won the Best Actor prize in the Orrizonti strand of this year’s Venice Film Festival: a new prince has been crowned. In fact all four of the main actors in A …
In 2021 a small French movie called The World After Us played the festival circuit because it was one of the first modern movies to address life in the modern gig economy. It was a direct precursor to At Work, in that they are both about a novelist in Paris …