You won’t have to wait long for directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson to answer the question at the top of most audience members’ minds when diving into Wicker. An adaptation of Ursula Mills’ “The Wicker Husband,” the directorial duo, who are also a real-life couple, know that most moviegoers wonder how on earth Olivia Colman’s …
Christopher Nolan may have made many a release that is regarded as his best; and that’s the telltale sign of a good director. You get debates over The Prestige, Interstellar, The Dark Knight, Memento and more, but one film that doesn’t crop up as often as it should is Dunkirk. …
It was notable at this year’s Cannes how many movies re-examined France and the Second World War. It’s been obvious for some years now how the French film industry has been retelling its own stories and creating blockbusters for home audiences without caring too much about how they’ll land overseas. …
Emmanuel Marre won the Best Screenplay Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for A Man of His Time aka Notre Salut, because it does the impossible: it is a comedy about the slide into fascism. But the film is clearly of personal as well as professional importance to Mr. …
In The Black Ball directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (known as Los Javis) and cinematographer Gris Jordana have created an unusually beautiful work of art. The Black Ball is kind and tender, very clear-eyed about the trauma of war and the misery of addiction. But above all it is …
Rwandan filmmaker Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo won the Camera d’Or – the prize for best debut feature in any of the festival’s competition strands – at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for Ben’Imana. This is a double achievement as Ben’Imana is also the first Rwandan film ever to compete at Cannes …
I had to go to France just to see De Gaulle: Liberté, and the movie is so good I just might do it again. Along with its first half, De Gaulle: Résistance, this is an extremely important movie for two reasons. Firstly, French cinema is now focused on films for …
Films festivals normally only reward a movie one single prize. If your movie wins, say, best actress, then it can’t also win the main festival award. But the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal at this year’s Venice Film Festival broke that rule for Woman Unknown: its lead actress Mathilde Arcel …
In 1789, Ben Franklin famously wrote that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” The Uprising, set 400 years before the American statesman put ink to paper, sure has an awful lot of both. It’s a story about the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in …
Writer-director Volker Schlöndorff probably remains best known for his 1979 film The Tin Drum, but that underestimates his career. He has been a solid and thoughtful filmmaker both in English and his native German for more than this half-century, without ever quite having a major hit that provides an easier …
The best film of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival premiered out of competition. La Bataille de Gaulle: L’Âge de Fer, which has the English title De Gaulle: Résistance, is an absolute triumph of cinema. It is a fast-paced and largely true historical epic that handles complex and layered political events …
It is a pleasant surprise that the two lead performances of Coward shared the Best Actor prize at this year’s Cannes. In the announcement, the jury mentioned that is because these performances change how masculinity is normally portrayed onscreen. But what the performances in Coward do is meet the current …
When a movie pulls its punches it’s always a good idea to ask why. In the case of Moulin, a biopic of a national hero of France from the second world war, the obvious answer is because it was designed with younger audiences in mind. As a primer for who …
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. …
The choice to film in black and white is the wrong one for historical dramas. It signifies to a modern audience that this story is happening in ye olden days and therefore none of the historical nuances matter, because we are watching the distant and irrelevant past. Thanks to an …
Becoming one of the latest actors to jump into the director’s chair, James McAvoy takes on a semi-true tale of music business bravado and bluster in California Schemin’. The title card sets the tone, cheekily saying its source material is a “true lie”. California Schemin’ follows two budding rappers, Gavin …
Neo-noir Americana gets a decidedly 21st-century update in The Lowdown, showrunner Sterlin Harjo’s latest series released at the end of 2025 and now streaming on Hulu / Disney+. Like the best of the classic noirs, the anxieties of our time might be bubbling away under the surface, but this is …
The King’s Warden was released in February 2026 and has already become one of the most successful movies in Korean history. That’s possibly because it tells a story already known to most Korean schoolchildren, like how American kids know about George Washington and the cherry tree. A boy king in …
Whereas Kelly Reichardt’s latest indie fare The Mastermind, a character study of an arguably decent criminal shot 1970s-style, starring the brilliant and now ubiquitous Josh O’Connor, tersely eviscerates our notion of a crime/heist movie — though the resulting picture feels rather coiled — Gus Van Sant’s comeback feature Dead Man’s …
Annemarie Jacir is a crucial filmmaker to understand modern Palestinian cinema. In 2003, she made history with her short film, Like Twenty Impossibles, the first Arab short selected at the Festival de Cannes, and later earned an Academy Award nomination. In her subsequent efforts, Jacir reached the principal international stages. …