It’s always exciting to see a popular actor subvert expectations. Not only does it allow the actor to flex different creative muscles, but it also shows audiences that there is more to them than meets the eye. 2025’s The Smashing Machine attempts this feat with its leading star, Dwayne Johnson. …
Dominga Sotomayor is one of the biggest names of the new generation of the Chilean cinema. Alongside Pablo Larraín and Sebastian Lelio, her films achieved the international recognition and received attention for their boldness. Her debut feature, De Jueves a Domingo, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Her most …
In 2011, in the context of the Arab Spring, the Yemeni revolution took place in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital. Thousands of protestors organized themselves in the streets of the city, and the government murdered dozens of them. The result was the popular uprising against the state’s violence, which led to the …
Wolfram, which is full of plot twists that should not be spoiled, contains one particular twist that makes it very difficult to review. I would therefore encourage you to read this review after you have seen the movie. Otherwise please read this months before you actually see it, forgetting everything …
The Education of Jane Cumming commits three cardinal sins. Firstly, the title character is not the heroine. Considering the power dynamics of the true story is based on, the kindest that can be said about that is this is not a good look. Secondly, the story here is based on …
The French director Lila Pinell presented her first feature film, Kiss and Cry, at the Cannes Film Festival in the ACID parallel section, which she co-directed with Chloé Mahieu. Four years later, she released Le Roi David (King David), a short film that premiered at the prestigious Vila do Conde …
The easy way to describe Ghost School is if High Noon was set in a small Pakistani village and Gary Cooper was an Urdu-speaking ten-year-old girl. The way in which one single determined person tries to get time-sensitive help shows their society from top to bottom and clearly reveals its …
The Semaine de la Critique is a spotlight for the debut feature at the Cannes Film Festival. One of the 2026 selections in Flesh and Fuel (Du fioul dans les artères) by Pierre le Gall, whose last effort is the 2018 short Doubout. It tells the story of Étienne (Alexis …
Yo is short for Yolanda, and Yolanda was Yolanda Shea, a Swiss woman who spoke four languages fluently and spent most of her adult life in northern California. At a rummage sale in her seventies, Yo met a woman in her twenties named Anna Fitch, and their relationship became unusually …
The concept for WAX & GOLD is almost laughably deranged. It aims to examine the history of Ethiopia generally and Haile Selassie personally by filming only within Hilton Addis. Mr. Selassie was personally involved in bringing this Western hotel to the country, to the point of helping to design it, …
Animation is the best art form we have at depicting messy real life, because it heightens reality through the unreal in a way that never loses its realism. Writer-director Yoshitoshi Shinomiya, who developed his skills as a background artist on movies such as Your Name, now bursts onto the world …
The deliberate stageyness of Trial of Hein takes a little while to make sense. The clothes are modest and homespun, the technology is that of life without electricity, the island setting is not named, and the houses in the village have front walls, doors and windows, but are open to …
In 2022, the debut feature film Tengo Sueños Eléctricos (I Have Electric Dreams) by the Costa Rican filmmaker Valentina Maurel made a potent appearance at that year’s Locarno Film Festival. It won the directing, actor (Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez), and actress (Daniela Marín Navarro) awards in the main competition. Later, the …
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 …
Sports dramas are a sub-genre that allows filmmakers to take multiple different approaches. They can narrate the Cinderella story of an underdog team, the individual evolution of its players, or the downside of being an athlete. In her debut feature, Charlotte Glynn takes the latter approach. The Gymnast is a …
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 …