Sarah Manvel 
Cotton Queen is the debut film of Russian-Sudanese writer-director Suzannah Mirghani and very clearly made for an international audience. The establishing shots of laughing teenager cotton workers watching Tiktoks make sure, even if we know nothing about Sudan, we know it’s firmly in the now. And while it is Sudanese …
This movie, for which the English title should be My Tennis Coach and it’s weird that it isn’t, is an affable Italian road movie about the coming of age of a wannabe tennis player. The entire thing is built around the nuclear-level charm of Pierfrancesco Favino (who previously worked with …
Teenage self-assurance takes a serious hit in Stereo Girls but its sense of friendship and fun is strong enough to go to some dark places without losing its way. It’s an even bigger joy to see a movie about teenage girls who have such a strong sense of themselves, even …
Writer-director Mihai Mincan told the room at the Venice Film Festival that the idea of Milk Teeth came from a real case of a girl who disappeared carrying a bucket of walnut shells to the garbage. His movie also makes an interesting companion piece to another film from the festival, …
Writer-director Shahad Ameen begins her movie with the last thing you’d expect from a story set in Saudi Arabia: snow. The message of this image is clear: if stereotypes are all you know then you know nothing at all. And as we follow three people on a secret, dangerous journey, …
No deer longs for the hunter’s arrow, and no art designed to maintain the status quo is ever as good as it thinks it is. Say what you will about Luca Guadagnino, he has made three solid movies in the last eighteen months, a level of career output rarely seen since …
There are other directors who are better, there are others who are more stylish, but there is no director anywhere in the world who is more interesting than Werner Herzog. He was once shot on camera during an interview for British television and actually called the wound “insignificant” as the …
There has been a disturbing recent trend of setting stories in the afterlife, with the position that growth and change is really only possible after you are dead. This removes our agency, and posits that our situation is more important than our free will. This is especially aggravating when you …
Frankenstein is a masterpiece, an instant classic and a complete and utter triumph. It sticks very close to the source material while managing to be something fresh and new, it maintains its historic setting while never forgetting the current moment, and it all hangs on two extraordinary central performances that …
I texted a friend that I’d just seen a movie about how hard it is to be George Clooney and he immediately suggested we show Jay Kelly to every Palestinian. Perhaps there would be less sarcasm about world-famous middle-aged white male American millionaires in life crisis if there was any …
A movie can be bad and a wildly entertaining watch, as is the case here War 2. The fight scenes are so impossible that the opening night audience was laughing at them, and yet we were all riveted in our seats delighting at how each pow-bam-boom spectacle kept upping the …
Upon the news that Murderbot has been renewed for a second series, we can all breathe more easily. This first series is the demonstration of how the Pinocchio became a real boy, or in this case, a genderless sentient construct that, without its armor, looks like an augmented human. But …
Finally we have reached the episode named after the novel from which the TV show Murderbot is adapted, although it’s only the penultimate one. The ways in which the differing plot strands twist together is incredibly impressive, not least in the amount of damage Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) suffers: the face …
Brothers Chris and Paul Weitz are maintaining the breakneck pacing of this show with what seems like the greatest of ease. As the mysterious enemy finally becomes clearer, there is at least enough respite to allow Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) to operate on Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), and for the throuple subplot …
Another action-packed episode, and packed with more than one kind of action, if you know what I mean. It’s Arada the biologist (Tattiawna Jones) who realises quicker than the others what the two creatures are doing on top of the hopper, which has glass panels in its roof. Murderbot (Alexander …
This mid-series run of Murderbot is some of the tightest episodes of television in a while. This episode also contains a great deal of humour, backrubs, some awfully graphic surgery, and then some even more graphic violence. The tonal shifts flow more naturally than that description sounds, which is especially …
Before the review begins: an apology. I originally misgendered Murderbot in my reviews of the previous four episodes, which have now been corrected. A publicist got in touch to inform us that Murderbot has no gender; I should not have presumed the gender of the human actor playing it had …
One of the neatest tricks Carême has pulled over the course of this fine first season is erasing Napoleon. He is there, when he needs to be, but he never speaks and the face of the actor playing him is rarely shown. The focus on the power games swirling around …
After all the machinations of the previous episode it’s no wonder this course of Carême chooses a different focus for all its power struggles. The episode takes place entirely within Talleyrand’s (Jérémie Renier) estate and revolves around Hortense (Lily Taieb) unexpectedly going into labour. For those of you not keeping …
It is perhaps unfair to review a film based on the comments its director made at a festival Q&A, but what Kim A. Snyder said at the Sheffield DocFest summed up the flawed worldview of this film better than the documentary itself did. Filmed largely during the Biden years as …