Sarah Manvel 
Please forgive me for saying the most surprising things about Twinless are twofold: it is unusually funny, with a very clear sense of how people interact in amusing ways with each other, with an equal and equally unusual sense of danger. Most of this centers around the plot twists which …
I think we can blame the English royal family. When TV shows like Succession, The Righteous Gemstones and Yellowstone decide to examine the interpersonal struggle for power within an unbelievable wealthy family, they’ve all worked from the same template: tyrannical father and absent or dead mother with three sons and …
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die takes the worst nightmares of the current moment and turns them into comedy, but the kind of comedy where if you didn’t laugh you’d cry. This is done in the lighthearted comic blockbuster style best described as a mash-up where 1990s French horror-comedy Delicatessen …
This Chilean-Argentinian coproduction is a Chilean story but was filmed in Argentina for reasons its subject matter makes obvious. The military coup in Chile in 1973 that started with the murder of Salvador Allende brought about (speaking with understatement here) such a traumatic time to the nation that the after-effects …
Talk about melodrama! It is not so much that this adaption of Wuthering Heights goes to eleven, but that this version of Wuthering Heights starts at eleven and keeps going and going, and going, without losing its momentum for a moment. This over-the-top depiction of secret and dangerous passion makes …
It’s only January but Scottish documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street is a very serious contender for best documentary of the year. It’s rare to feel a documentary so firmly plant the seed of possibility in the mind of its audience. But there are three things audiences need to know in …
The best thing about Girls & Boys is one of the main characters is trans and absolutely no one blinks an eye at this. This is not something that could be said when I ran around Dublin, back when just being a member of the gay student clubs was an …
Since seeing Trad I’ve been trying to remember another coming-of-age movie about a teenage girl in which she doesn’t come to the tiniest bit of harm. I can’t, making Trad so rare and unusual that only this fact makes it a must-see. If that wasn’t enough, it’s about a young …
The central plot point of The Stranger – a coloniser kills one of the colonised, and there are consequences – lands very differently now that it did when the original novella was published by Albert Camus in occupied France in 1942. For one thing, the world is trying with mixed …
As the title makes abundantly clear, Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri (which means ‘you’re mine, I’m yours, I’m yours, you’re mine’ in Hindi) is here to have its cake and eat it. Its explicit purpose is to make a 90s-style romance (this means old-fashioned, readers of a …
It is a cultural quirk of Indian cinema that they will show the most gruesome torture and murders in glorious close-up while simultaneously subtitling the language used during these scenes as “Dang!” and “You idiot!” If we are in a hard-R/18 environment, capable of being shown a man suspended off …
Most people in the West probably never saw A Step Into the Past, a one-season Hong Kong TV show from 2001 about a modern scientist who ends up back in the Qin dynasty. Therefore the major draw of Back to the Past, which finishes the plotlines of that TV show, …
It was Stephen Sondheim who wrote a song about the two things people can leave behind: children and art. What the Shakers, a small religious movement which began in the mid-1700s, left behind was their art. Some of this is their highly influential style of furniture, made plainly to emphasise …
A mishmash of moods held together by preposterous musical numbers is part of the appeal of most Indian cinema, but Telugu-language The RajaSaab holds together worse than most. There are three movies inside The RajaSaab struggling to get out: a haunted-house horror thriller, a paean to the grandmothers who raised …
The immediate reaction to this excellent movie – which on its surface is about an arrogant young American table-tennis player’s attempts to attend two world championships, one in London and the other in Tokyo, in the early 1950s – seems to be that no one wants to watch a movie …
Ready or Not tackles a difficult topic – very young teenagers playing very adult games – with a level of sympathy for their misadventures which makes the tough subject easy to watch. Writer Lynn Ruane and director Claire Frances Byrne talked at the Irish Film Festival London screening I attended …
This clever no-budget thriller is automatically recommended by me because it’s in the Irish language. Its aspirational depiction of life entirely inside the Irish language, which rarely happens in real life, is just wonderful to see. It is also a heist movie, with three women (two of whom are middle-aged) …
When the screening I attended of Colors of Time finished, the woman next to me mentioned how unusual it is to see a movie without a whisper of violence in it. She is right: some slightly hurt feelings are as bad as it gets here. But this is not to …
It seems that Train Dreams is so named because of how spectacular and innovative the technology of train travel was to the life at the centre of the film. It is set almost entirely in Idaho and western Washington state and shows a style of living that might as well …
Some might say Lady, which had its world premiere at the London Film Festival, is Saltburn meets What We Do in the Shadows. That’s not correct, as it’s both those movies meets Florence Foster Jenkins. By which I mean, Lady is a faux-documentary about an utterly deluded and impossibly wealthy …