In Cuerpo Celeste, the symbolically loaded debut feature from Chilean writer-director Nayra Ilic García, the past not only fractures the present and future but actively exists along with it as if they are all one and the same. The film explores that threshold, the possibility to re-encounter even something we …
In his debut directorial effort, French director Laurent Slama joins forces with Alex Lawter and Agathe Rousselle to deliver a story about a woman on suicidal watch in A Second Life. Set on the opening day of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, we follow Elisabeth (Rouselle), who is living …
Sentimental Value won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival thanks to the three central performances by Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning and Stellan Skarsgård. Director Joachim Trier has a real talent for pulling out the emotional subtexts of ordinary lives and figuring out why people make the choices …
In his debut feature, Backside, Mexican director Raúl O. Paz-Pastrana tells the untold stories behind one of the most crucial sports events in the United States, the Kentucky Derby. Every May, more than a hundred thousand people attend the traditional horse racing event at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky. Besides …
Romería is the movie above all others I have been recommending from this year’s Cannes Film Festival. That is because this is such a powerful story, told with such an incredible amount of love, that it is utterly impossible to be unaffected by it. And that is before I mention …
Without knowing absolutely anything about Deep Cover, I began watching it at home with zero expectations – sometimes, that’s truly the best way to discover little cinematic surprises throughout the year. The lack of anticipation allows one to fully enjoy the unpredictability of the humor and the narrative lightness of …
The Uruguayan director Lucia Garibaldi presents her sophomore feature, Un Futuro Brillante (A Bright Future), at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Her first film, Los Tiburones (The Sharks), premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Consequently, her subsequent work became a highly anticipated title on the festival circuit, and it …
Romane Bohringer is a French actor who, for her second film as director, has chosen to make an extremely personal story about her search for more information about her mother, Maggy, who left the family before she was a year old and died when Ms. Bohringer was in her early …
This enormous, sumptuous, magnificent movie is almost too much, which is not a complaint. Resurrection is one of those movies that decided to tell the story of a universe starting with a kitchen sink and then built out from there. It’s very long – 160 minutes in this edit – …
British gangster content has become a popular pastime for entertainment media enthusiasts. There’s a heightened quality that’s proven uproariously entertaining for viewers. British gangster classics such as Snatch, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Layer Cake, and the old-school The Long Good Friday proved this correct. One commonality amongst some …
Now here is where things get very good. There’s a sense of humour in Escape Velocity Protocol which we haven’t seen before, just as we haven’t seen violence this serious in Murderbot before. But the main issue here is the dichotomy between the world as Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) understands it …
We’re off to the races! Can free planets handle themselves? Can Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) stand to be “stuck with these people and their pheromones in a small craft”? Although for a being that claims not to care about people, it sure does spend a lot of time paying close attention …
In her sophomore effort, Suzannah Herbert premieres her film Natchez at the Tribeca Film Festival. The documentary title borrows its name from the city in Mississippi. In the 1800s, it was the city with the most millionaires in the world; cotton plantations and the slave trade were the main commercial …
The movie with the best title at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is also the kind of movie filmmakers love to make: a movie about making a movie. But less joyously, the setting here is present-day Egypt, a nation not currently enjoying the delights of democracy. The creatives involved, beginning …
The six hippie scientists from the non-corporation planet that Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) is tasked with protecting on their mining mission are as follows: Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), the admired mission leader, parent of seven, and terraforming expert who is secretly prone to panic attacks Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), the non-binary lawyer and …
The French/Polish director Julia Kowalski recently premiered her Que Ma Volonté Soit Faite (Her Will Be Done). It is a Quinzaine Des Cineastes selection and the director’s sophomore full-length feature, Crache Cœur (Raging Rose). The film narrates the story of Nawojka (Maria Wróbel), a girl from rural France whose parents …
The eponymous hero of this new TV show Murderbot, based on the first of The Murderbot Diaries series of novels by Martha Wells, is strictly speaking a cyborg. It – though sometimes its clients misgender it as a he – has a metallic structure covered with cloned human flesh, including …
Ukrainian directors Alina Gorlova, Yelizaveta Smith, and Simon Mozgovyi present their take on the war with Militantropos. The word, which appears after the title cards, comes from the Latin word Milit (soldier) and the Greek Antropos (human). The film uses the combination of those words to formulate its thesis on …
What is a “feel-good” movie? Is it just an uplifting story? Or something even more? That’s a tricky question that doesn’t have a distinct answer. Something that may be heartfelt to one person may be found schmaltzy and manipulative to another. Adding that idea to 2025 films makes the prospect …
Why is a movie about the aftermath of a Parisian career woman’s mental breakdown, set in a small town in eastern France, named after an area of the west coast of Ireland? Because in 1981 a French singer, Michel Sardou, had a massive hit with a song called “Les lacs …