Dragonfly is based on a simple idea: how dangerous it is to trust anyone while you’re weakened, whether through old age, disability or both. Unfortunately it is also so worried that we won’t understand the nuances of this very good idea that it overdoes things, and collapses. This is very …
Enzo (Eloy Pohu) is sixteen or seventeen, a dangerous age. He’s still very much a child, but thinks he isn’t. Having a scooter and some limited amounts of freedom isn’t quite adulthood, but he is too young and too privileged to know that. He lives with his parents Marion and …
This could have been a play and may well get a second life as a play, because its single set, very talky script and clever staging keep us in the room for the 100-minute runtime. It is heavily inspired by real events but also plays fast and loose as required …
Mark Jenkin’s formidable stamp as a director giving voice to Cornish voices has led to one of the best debuts of the last decade in the form of the breathtakingly unique Bait, a study of heightened tensions between the locals in a deprived fishing village and the rich-out-of-towners who have …
“Assassination can be no more guarded against than death by lightning; it is best not to worry about either.” With these words early in his presidency, James Garfield may have sealed his fate. Shot by Charles J. Guiteau and dying six months after taking office in 1881, the United States …
Content Note: The following contains spoilers for episode 2 of It: Welcome to Derry. The show also deals with child death/harm and mental institutions, so proceed with caution if those are sensitive subjects. The end of episode 1 of It: Welcome to Derry was a significant shocker, with several kids who seemed like …
A pillion is a seat for a passenger behind a motorcyclist. This simple, not-overly-familiar word captures the whole experience of Colin (Harry Melling) in Harry Lighton’s feature directorial debut adapted from the 2020 novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones. In Pillion, Colin is shy, still living at home with his …
The prestigious publication, Screen International, publishes a yearly article about buzzy films they would like to see playing in the festival circuit. In this year’s piece, Forastera by Lucía Aleñar Iglesias is one of the films mentioned there. It is an impressive feature to include in the list alongside notable …
Writer-director-cinematographer-editor-composer Mark Jenkin has an idiosyncratic vision for Rose of Nevada, not just in how many of the behind the camera jobs he does himself, but also in how his corner of England is portrayed onscreen. For Mr. Jenkin is not English but Cornish (and you better believe there’s a …
Back when I was younger, Nicholas Sparks had cornered the market of romance books, with some of the most heartbreaking novels that have ever taken the world by storm. From The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, and Dear John, Sparks’ stories were designed to make readers cry as they volley …
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 …
“Just Hedda is fine.” With these prickly, precise words, Hedda (Tessa Thompson) immediately establishes her self-image and control thereof. Hedda is the recently married wife of up-and-coming scholar George Tesman (Tom Bateman), but the legacy left by her father General Gabler – including his guns – is one she takes …
In Bona (1980), Filipino auteur Lino Brocka tacitly reckons with his country’s fascination with idle worship and swift salvation through his signature melodrama and social realism. The film was not among the triptych of landmark movies that redefined Philippine cinema and catapulted the director to the international scene. Those titles—Tinimbang …
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 …