Bradley Cooper’s third directorial feature, Is This Thing On?, is a more low-key and down-to-earth tale of one man’s middle-aged venture into standup comedy. Loosely based on the life of Liverpudlian comedian John Bishop, this story is gentle and rough around the edges about martial separation and finding yourself amid …
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 young Chilean filmmaker Diego Céspedes has a vigorous relationship with the Cannes Film Festival. His first short, El Verano del Léon Elétrico (The Summer of the Electric Lion), was part of the Cinefondation selection in 2018, which dedicates its program to films produced during the film school period. Four …
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 …
Being a mortician seems to be a fusion of roles with partial therapist and spiritual duties combined to occur behind the scenes. Washing the deceased is a thankless task which is thrust into the spotlight in Mortician with a humane portrayal of Mojtaba, who works within a mortuary and fulfils …
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 …
Following his 2021 Filmmakers of the Present debut Streams, Tunisian director and screenwriter Mehdi Hmili made his return at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, with the out-of-competition title Exile, which functions as part revenge thriller and part grief and social drama stylized in a way that evokes visual poetry and …
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. …
Before I even sat down to watch The Voice of Hind Rajab, its real-life story had already flooded my soul. Contrary to my personal tendency to go into screenings with little to no familiarity with the respective film, this time, my prior knowledge was complete. My curiosity and, frankly, my …
My expectations for Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt were, I confess, moderate, but they leaned toward cautious optimism. I like most of his films, with Challengers being my favorite, and I generally admire his work, even if I don’t consider myself an unconditional fan. However, the initial reception of this …
Curiosity and hope were my personal feelings going into the cinema to see Hamlet (2025). I knew beforehand this would be another transposition of Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy into a contemporary context, an exercise that’s always risky in itself. However, the decisive factor in giving the film a chance was, without …
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 …
This comedy-thriller manages to be both very funny and gruesomely violent, with an appetite for the strange and startling that had the Venice Film Festival audience barking with shock as often as laughing. For the most part, the bold mood swings work, largely thanks to a setting which includes several …
There is a fascinating new trend in cinema gathering steam: action movies with hardly any dialogue. Finland’s Sisu from 2022 shows Nazis being slaughtered without saying much about it, while America’s No One Will Save You from 2023 has a young woman fighting off an alien attack. And now Detroit …
One of the central figures of the newest generation of Brazilian cinema, Gabriel Mascaro, is already a well-known name on the international festival circuit. His 2015 film, Neon Bull (Boi Neon), premiered at the Venice Film Festival. His next work, Divine Love (Divino Amor), world premiered at the 2019 Sundance …
Of course the London Film Festival is the right place for the world premiere of Moss & Freud, a movie about two British people who understood more than most the power of an image. But since Kate Moss is one of its executive producers, Moss & Freud is unwilling to …
Winner of the Orrizonti Award for Best Film at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival, On the Road (En el Camino) is, at its core, a poignant tale of repressed desire bursting in the most undesirable of places. It’s the fifth feature from Mexican writer-director David Pablos, and it’s the …