Romanian writer-director Andrei Epure already tested the premise of his feature debut Don’t Let Me Die, which premiered in the Filmmakers of the Present section of the 2025 Locarno Film Festival, in his 2021 short film Intercom 15, an entry in Cannes’ Critics’ Week. In fact, exactly seven minutes into …
I was 40 before I got my first tattoo. Since then, I have added to my collection, but I have avoided many pop culture references because I have seen too many of my favorites fall over the years. But the one that I have is of the Vince Gilligan show, Breaking …
I started my home viewing of Goodbye June with no real expectations, being solely driven by a genuine curiosity about what Kate Winslet (Titanic) could achieve now that she has taken the director’s chair. I didn’t know much about the project, other than it was set during the Christmas season, …
We seem to have entered a season in which video adaptations can no longer be written off as trash before we even watch them. One of the most lauded adaptations has been Amazon’s Fallout, coming back for season 2. Even though I have still not played the game (despite having “New …
Usually, the cinema portrays tragedies that occur as incidents or natural disasters, if we call them that. The seasonal ones do not get representation on the big screen. Some regions are more susceptible to tornadoes, natural fires, and earthquakes. They are due to the geographical and geological compositions of those …
Jeff Nichols is one of the best directors that America has to offer and Midnight Special was a delight to revisit for its timely science fiction themes rooted in immigration and fear of a controlling government. A father and son are forced on the run when the father learns his …
Ready or Not tackles a difficult topic – very young teenagers playing very adult games – with a level of sympathy for their misadventures which makes the tough subject easy to watch. Writer Lynn Ruane and director Claire Frances Byrne talked at the Irish Film Festival London screening I attended …
Renoir, the sophomore feature from Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa, continues her cinematic exploration of the notions of death, old age, and loneliness, preoccupations that loom over her body of work, such as in her feature debut Plan 75 (2022), the anthology film Ten Years Japan (2018), which she co-directed with …
James L. Brooks is a legend in American popular culture. In the 1970s, he co-created groundbreaking TV shows like Room 222 and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a breakthrough sitcom that influenced plenty of showrunners in subsequent periods of TV. Yet, in the 1980s, Brooks achieved success in film with …
Each generation faces the inevitable clash with the ones before. They were morally superior, enjoyed life better, and lived through their days properly. The generational clash is arguably never fading. Each age gap has divergences within the collective of individuals, particularly in their relationships with the environment and with society …
Shown in a moment of global and political strife, one cannot fault an audience who might be wary of another immigrant drama like Souleymane’s Story, especially when a white filmmaker is behind it and considering how Hollywood and other major studios have depicted and taken advantage of such narratives. Even …
Throughout the complicated formation of Latin America, Catholicism became the norm for the so-called civilization of native populations. Hence, ever since its inception, the new continent has been a Catholic region, colonized mainly by the Portuguese and Spanish. Despite the colonial wounds, the imperial process carries severe traumas, particularly in …
When the screening I attended of Colors of Time finished, the woman next to me mentioned how unusual it is to see a movie without a whisper of violence in it. She is right: some slightly hurt feelings are as bad as it gets here. But this is not to …
It seems that Train Dreams is so named because of how spectacular and innovative the technology of train travel was to the life at the centre of the film. It is set almost entirely in Idaho and western Washington state and shows a style of living that might as well …
Some might say Lady, which had its world premiere at the London Film Festival, is Saltburn meets What We Do in the Shadows. That’s not correct, as it’s both those movies meets Florence Foster Jenkins. By which I mean, Lady is a faux-documentary about an utterly deluded and impossibly wealthy …
Following its Sundance world premiere in early 2025, The Things You Kill, the third feature from Iranian filmmaker Alireza Khatami, is set to screen in Philippine theaters as part of the 2025 QCinema International Film Festival. Selected as the Canadian submission for the 2026 Oscar Best International Feature Film category, …
It’s so ordinary nowadays for crime stories to have an absolutely terrific setup leading to a whimper of an ending, so when one plays its cards as well as A Private Life does it should be praised from the rooftops. In the last twenty or so years Jodie Foster has …
This examination of privilege in the modern American moment tries to have its cake and eat it, and while there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, the badly-titled Dreams botches the recipe. Considering that ballet is at the center of this movie and director Michel Franco (and his cinematographer Yves Cape) …
The greatest glory of Pillion is that its sexual boldness is in service to an important point about self-determination and personal desire. We can watch this for the action, the message, or both. Though don’t get your hopes up too high: not a great deal of ‘action’ is shown, although …
Selected as Italy’s official contender for best international feature film at the 2026 Oscars, Francesco Costabile’s sophomore feature Familia carries the thematic preoccupations of their directorial debut Una Femmina: The Code of Silence, a crime drama loosely based on Italian journalist Lirio Abbate’s investigative book, which wrestles with women victims …