Surrealism is not my favorite film genre, but I will make a massive exception if it’s in the hands of Boots Riley. Not unlike his debut, Riley’s latest feature, I Love Boosters, is a weird, vibrant, funny, thoughtful, hopeful thesis on collective action and workers’ rights. At a time when …
It’s a trope seen more often in romantic comedies, but on this level at least Paper Tiger innovates: it is the rare thriller that relies on The Idiot Plot. The only way everything in Paper Tiger happens is because all three main characters are complete and total idiots. It looks …
“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives” utters the popular opening credits narration from the daytime soap, Days of Our Lives. This also rings true for Ferzan Özpetek’s latest film Diamanti, which heavily peers through time’s hourglass in its depiction of the past and present …
Diego Luna has used the attention gained from the success of Andor to make a fascinating movie about a young Mexican woman’s tough life in Spain. Broadly speaking it is about the ways resentment and annoyance can spoil attempts to build a better life. Ashes also knows the power of …
Babe: Pig in the City this ain’t. There are some similarities, in that Hen was filmed using real animals with humans as incidental to the plot, but this Hungarian film set in Greece is so disturbing that it’s definitely not for kids. It is from the perspective of a black …
Two decades after his extensive and impactful work with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chidgasornpongse presents his debut feature, 9 Temples to Heaven (9 วัด สู่สวรรค์). The film is a selection of the Quinzaine des Cineastes of the Cannes Film Festival. The film follows a huge family of 9, who take their dying …
It’s always exciting to see a popular actor subvert expectations. Not only does it allow the actor to flex different creative muscles, but it also shows audiences that there is more to them than meets the eye. 2025’s The Smashing Machine attempts this feat with its leading star, Dwayne Johnson. …
Wolfram, which is full of plot twists that should not be spoiled, contains one particular twist that makes it very difficult to review. I would therefore encourage you to read this review after you have seen the movie. Otherwise please read this months before you actually see it, forgetting everything …
The Education of Jane Cumming commits three cardinal sins. Firstly, the title character is not the heroine. Considering the power dynamics of the true story is based on, the kindest that can be said about that is this is not a good look. Secondly, the story here is based on …
The easy way to describe Ghost School is if High Noon was set in a small Pakistani village and Gary Cooper was an Urdu-speaking ten-year-old girl. The way in which one single determined person tries to get time-sensitive help shows their society from top to bottom and clearly reveals its …
The Semaine de la Critique is a spotlight for the debut feature at the Cannes Film Festival. One of the 2026 selections in Flesh and Fuel (Du fioul dans les artères) by Pierre le Gall, whose last effort is the 2018 short Doubout. It tells the story of Étienne (Alexis …
The deliberate stageyness of Trial of Hein takes a little while to make sense. The clothes are modest and homespun, the technology is that of life without electricity, the island setting is not named, and the houses in the village have front walls, doors and windows, but are open to …
A Prayer for the Dying has had the bad luck to arrive a year after Train Dreams, which also has a forest fire at its center, and a few years after Nosferatu, another shocking and stylised horror movie about a place consumed by a plague. But it is also very …
In retrospect, it makes sense that EP Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy were always going to be the ones to bring Fallout to the screen – after all; what was HBO’s one-time flagship series Westworld if but a trail run? What was Person of Interest if not for a show …
For a movie designed around a teenage pregnancy it’s a surprise that We Are All Strangers focuses on the baby’s father. What writer-director Anthony Chen is exploring here is how family responsibilities force young men to grow up. The assumption seems to be that women have achieved maturity already, regardless …
Of course you’ve seen Frozen, the animated juggernaut which drew heavily both on Scandinavian culture and that of the Sámi, the people indigenous to the Arctic circle, for its story of female empowerment and the importance of bonds between siblings. But that was a story for children, made by people …
The subject matter of We Believe You is unusually grim, but the grimness is offset by the institutional setting: a custody hearing in a Belgian family court, all pale office furniture and glass walls. Inside this bland setting a family and its lawyers have the most serious conversations of their …
Content warning: sexual assault, child-centric trauma Writer-director Beth de Araújo has been open that Josephine is based on a true incident from her childhood. The trouble is that knowing this fact hampers the ability to speak critically about the film. Anything negative might feel like a personal attack against the …
Before discussing Hacks season five, I would like to give some context into my relationship with the show. Hacks premiered in 2021 as one of the first highly acclaimed MAX (Known as HBO Max at the time) series. Having started watching the show at the time, it became one of …
A Michael Jackson movie was always going to be riddled with curiosity. With a life and story as extensive as the late singer’s, it certainly was not going to appease everyone. Director Antoine Fuqua was saddled with a difficult task in Michael. How far can he go into the man’s …