It’s been a while since a movie has been so good at textures, both visual and aural. In Satisfaction you get an extremely clear sense of the sensations the characters are experiencing and the world through which they are moving. The plot in itself is much less pleasant, as it’s …
On paper Low Rider sounds like fun: a grieving Londoner goes on a road trip across South Africa in order to connect with her father. Unfortunately Low Rider manages to take this solid concept and make it as dull and cliched as possible. People don’t talk with each other, but …
A lot of people are missing the point of The Bride! because they don’t want to consider the price paid for our entertainment. This is possibly because, in service to its original concept, this barnstorming horror movie contains only two original ideas not directly lifted from other films. The first …
The Mexican director Nicolás Pereda has proven himself as one of the most prominent filmmakers of the new generation. In the last three years, he released three films. Lázaro de Noche premiered at the 2024 FIDMarseille, and Cobre was also a world premiere at the French experimental film event in …
The King’s Warden was released in February 2026 and has already become one of the most successful movies in Korean history. That’s possibly because it tells a story already known to most Korean schoolchildren, like how American kids know about George Washington and the cherry tree. A boy king in …
It’s 2014 and Nadia (Monia Chokri) and Céline (Ella Rumpf) were recently legally able to get married in France. Hooray! And anyone who’s ever heard a playground chant knows what comes after love and marriage. Nadia is pregnant thanks to IVF and a Danish sperm donor, but Céline will have …
To paraphrase a great actor, we need art. We live in a world where everything is increasingly financialized, and things are often valued only by what they can return to our pockets, but this fixation on the monetary ignores the richness of our souls and hinders our processing of difficult …
It makes no sense when a movie spoils itself through its own marketing. The central relationship in Washed Up has a twist that you probably haven’t been able to avoid! This is a giant mistake, because most of the humour and a great deal of the charm comes in how …
If you think Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo’s aesthetics will get more refined after his films have, over the years, preferred a more digitized (read: pixelated, desaturated, out-of-focus) aesthetic, think again! His latest film, within a corpus of slow cinema experiments, What Does That Nature Say to You, contains many of …
Someday a movie in which a group of teenagers throw a mock funeral for a hamster, complete with stone-faced pallbearers carrying a small coffin past hordes of wailing kids dressed up to the nines, will deserve a bad review, but today is not that day. Black Burns Fast has an …
Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover arrives as Frankenstein tales are having a real cultural moment. With Guillermo del Toro’s film released last autumn (and picking up three Oscars) and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride currently in cinemas, Glowicki’s picture as director, co-writer (with Ben Petrie, who also stars) and star may not …
A clip has recently done the rounds of British social media of a well-known pundit asking a woman who she plans to vote for in an upcoming election. The woman says she doesn’t know, but she certainly won’t be voting for a particular candidate who she recently saw leaving a …
Content warning: descriptions of incredibly graphic violence from the start Sometimes a movie makes it apparent why we do the work we do. For example, if someone stabbed me in the shoulder, twisted the knife, and then stomped on the knife while it was still in my body, I might …
Re-released for its 30th anniversary last year, Martin Campbell’s 1995 super spy movie GoldenEye looks and feels particularly vintage, like something you’d watch on a holiday. The seventeenth title in the James Bond franchise, the film introduced a new 007 in Pierce Brosnan, who would end up playing the part …
In the Brazilian cinema history, there are classic examples of road trip films. One of them is Iracema by Jorge Bodansky and Orlando Senna, a time capsule on the Northern region of the country during the military dictatorship. Regionally, a landmark of the sensorial cinema in the country is Viajo …
Soul Patrol’s depiction of the Vietnam War combat experiences of a group of young black men is designed to restore their place within the military history of the American war machine, which at the time was still segregated as well as frequently openly racist. A great deal of the footage …
Filipino filmmaker Jerrold Tarog’s historical biopic trilogy, which began a decade ago, may just have run its course with Quezon, notwithstanding the latest installment’s prescient coda. The movie first played in Philippine theaters in October last year and screened in the Limelight program of the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam, …
Say what you will about the French, it seems like everyone in that nation possesses savoir-faire. That is to say, they know the correct way to behave in any scenario. Whether it’s supporting a colleague having a bad day, mopping up bodily fluids without making a big deal about it, …
Cinema works as a personal diary for filmmakers. The camera as an instrument substitutes the pen, words shift to images, and the stories build upon a different logic. Similar to the process of writing in a journal, there is a process involved in the act of storytelling. The written story …
Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake is a difficult film to watch. For 105 minutes, the Iraqi filmmaker’s directorial debut puts us in the middle of Saddam Hussein’s despotic reign and shows us harsh realities that many Western viewers are unfamiliar with. Even with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and economic sanctions …