The French New Wave existed as a pinnacle moment in filmmaking. It served as a period of time that redefined “genre” by flipping conventions on their head. A master of that new ground of cinema was filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Films like Pierrot le Fou, Contempt, and Weekend revolutionized an industry. …
Meryn Cooper has one goal in Sable Sorensen’s Dire Bound: protect her sister. Their father died before Saela (her sister) was born and their mother slips further away every day thanks to her mental illness. All the two sisters have in the world is each other so that goal isn’t surprising. …
The young South Korean filmmaker Syeyoung Park is already very prolific at a youthful age. Since 2020, he has released five feature films: Love (between) Pickle in 2020, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra in 2022, Base Station in 2024, I’d Like That Corner Seat Over There, and The Fin in 2025. The …
I saw The Thursday Murder Club as an upcoming title on Netflix and I thought “that sounds interesting”. Then I found out that it was based on a book and I thought “even better!” so I decided to read the book before the movie came out. And let me tell …
There are few festivals like Arctangent, and that becomes clear when you set foot on the 5,000-capacity field in Somerset that this prog-rock festival calls home. It’s independent, not run by the big Ticketmaster/Live Nation backed festivals, and its small friendly appeal makes it one of the most charming, welcoming …
Before watching a new Ron Howard film, I always carry with me a certain map of expectations. The filmmaker behind A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Apollo 13 (1995) has built a career marked by human stories with strong emotional appeal, coupled with a classical, assured direction that’s rarely devoid of …
From the title of Blue Film, writer and director Elliott Tuttle’s feature debut suggests titillation. This unbelievably challenging work, however, is something far more slippery, enigmatic, and subversive than simple thrills within the milieu of modern sex work. Indeed, the on-screen sex scenes are brief and shot with a curious …
Preparing to watch a contemporary western is always an exercise in expectation and curiosity. The genre, so often revisited, can be both fertile ground for reinvention and a minefield of clichés. Tony Tost, in his first feature as writer and director, takes on this risky premise with Americana, a hybrid …
Rogue Trader is the RPG from Owlcat games that serves as an introduction into the mammoth Warhammer 40,000 universe – where you play a Rogue Trader; building a crew and traversing the world of the Imperium. Choices matter – you are faced with the option of staying dogmatically loyal to …
Author and writer Dennis Lehane has carved a niche in the crime and thriller genres. His credits include novels such as Live by Night and Gone Baby Gone, as well as screenplays like 2014’s underrated film The Drop. Lehane has even dipped his toe into television work with series such …
The French director Maureen Fazendeiro is known for her short documentary Sol Negro (Black Sun), a recitation of Henri Michaux‘s poem. After that, she joined the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, co-writing his Cannes award-winning Grand Tour, and co-directing the 2021 film, Diários de Otsoga (The Tsugua Diaries). Now, she directs …
A movie can be bad and a wildly entertaining watch, as is the case here War 2. The fight scenes are so impossible that the opening night audience was laughing at them, and yet we were all riveted in our seats delighting at how each pow-bam-boom spectacle kept upping the …
From John McPhail, the Glaswegian director behind cult favourite Anna and the Apocalypse, comes Grow, a delightfully daft and incredibly charming family film that follows Charlie (newcomer Priya-Rose Brookwell), a young girl with an almost supernatural instinct for horticulture on a mission to grow the world’s biggest pumpkin. After some …
Winner of the Bronze audience prize for Best Asian Feature at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival, I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn is a captivating romantic comedy that functions as yet another endearing paean to independent horror cinema from Japanese cult filmmaker Kenichi Ugana, following …
When Night Always Comes opens with news reports and radio shows hammering the housing crisis – wages too low to cover rent and basic expenses, evictions looming – the promise is clear: a direct plunge into a reality that pushes people to the edge. As the protagonist heads out to …
The prison of British masculinity is explored in On The Sea, the latest film from writer and director Helen Walsh. On the outside, Jack (Barry Ward) has a stable, traditional life. He has been married to Maggie (Liz White) for decades, and they expected to raise their son Tom (Henry …
Writer-director Mas Bouzidi taps into thematically familiar ground in his feature film debut Concessions. Not only is it a film about cinemas and the people who frequent them, but it is a film about the end of an era – in this case, the very cinema in question. It may …
Pittsburgh-based filmmaker and 3D animator Julian Glander plots his own Florida project in the whimsical coming-of-age movie Boys Go to Jupiter, an animated debut feature now playing in U.S. select theaters that inventively blends the allure of a retro mobile game with the disarming monotony of a sleepy suburb against …
The Palestinian experimental director Kamal Alijafari is one of the voices that portray the Palestinian diaspora during times of genocide. Last year, the director released A Fidai Film, an experiment on footage from the Israeli Army invasion in Beirut in 1982. Therefore, the film is a poignant documentation of the …
2025 is slowly turning into a banner year for Norwegian cinema, not least because of the Grand Prix acclaim of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, already touted as one of “The 100 Best Movies of the 2020s (So Far),” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Not long prior to that, Nina …