Jude Law’s first appearance as Vladimir Putin is so eerily accurate the Venice Film Festival audience around me laughed in surprise. Who would have thought he could do it? Well congratulations to director Olivier Assayas and his casting director Antoinette Boulat, because the performance Mr. Law gives here is one …
Forty-four minutes into Magellan, we see the eponymous Portuguese navigator at the film’s center, deftly portrayed by Gael García Bernal, sitting still inside a 16th-century tavern, his mind drifting elsewhere. He grips a walking cane on one hand, then an oversized hat on the other. Lit candles beside him quietly …
Every episode of House of Guinness, Steven Knight’s newest television creation for Netflix, begins with a disclaimer and promise: “This fiction is inspired by true stories”. While based on many real people and events of 1860s Dublin (and further afield), House of Guinness is first and foremost concerned with being …
It is so hard to figure out how other people think that a movie like Silent Friend, which lays it all out step by step, is just so incredibly cool. The fact that it is hooked onto a real tree in a real place – an enormous ginkgo tree in …
We don’t choose our family. Love them, hate them, they are our families, and we are stuck with them. Some of us are blessed with living, supportive ones; others not so much, and the rest fall somewhere in between. Black Rabbit is a story of brothers who fall somewhere in …
Ron Howard is one of the most prolific directors working today. His films, like Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind, have stood the test of time. Whereas even with those winners, Howard has delivered misfires like In The Heart of The Sea and Hillbilly Elegy. It’s a varied career that, …
We live in a cinematic era fascinated by the origin stories of founders and their revolutionary creations, but not all of them seem as urgently relevant as that of Whitney Wolfe and Bumble. The promise of exploring the creation of a dating app designed as an antidote to the toxic …
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 …
Physical media shaped different generations of filmmakers. One of them, Alex Ross Perry, studies the golden age and the downfall of the video stores in Videoheaven. Consequently, the film explores the home video as the main distribution format after the original theatrical window. Known for his independent films, such as …
There are some shots of actress Suzu Hirose in A Pale View of Hills that are so gorgeous the audience at the Cannes Film Festival gasped aloud. Cinematographer Piotr Niemyjski clearly made heavy use of visual effects in his work – not least for the many gorgeous shots of Nagasaki …
No one quite knows what to do with director Fatih Akin. His explosive early movie Head-On was about the complex convergence of immigration and mental health issues between two Turkish-German punks. It’s one of the most violent and romantic movies ever made and also one of the smartest about intersectional …
Paul Mescal has the very rare talent of making unusually good choices. He has made a few damp squibs; nobody loved Carmen but me, and while his charisma carried his stage performance of A Streetcar Named Desire from London to Brooklyn, the whole show was misguided. That said, he has …
Stories about colonization seldom humanize the colonizers, and for good reason. Focusing on the victims of abuse should always be the priority. However, there is value in examining a colonizer’s motivations. In his film The New Boy, writer and director Warwick Thornton examines some of those motivations through the lens of …
The influence of The Zone of Interest is heavy on Two Prosecutors, a story about Stalinist terror that works as well as it does thanks to its discretion. It’s less about the sound design and more the enveloping knowledge of all the horrors out of frame. Anything that tried to …
This loving but very sad movie obeys a stereotype of Spanish cinema by handling a complex issue – in this case, domestic violence – through the eyes of a very small girl. The Spirit of the Beehive handled the Spanish civil war this way, as Summer 1993 handled AIDS and …
Silver Star, a determinedly quirky little movie, is a throwback to the indie cinema of the nineties in the best way. It stands and falls entirely on the actions of two unpredictable people, thrown together through a combination of foolishness and bad decisions, and who stick together through a combination …
The only flaw in the magnificent The Return is that, by virtue of the casting, the audience is able to predict the plot before the characters can. This is however an extremely small complaint in the grand scheme of an unusually subtle and thoughtful war movie. For one thing, it’s …
Based on the bestselling book by Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing rockets viewers back to 1972 Belfast with an explosive opening scene. The miniseries employs different framing devices to Keefe’s nonfiction tome, but both work to great effect. Widowed mother of ten Jean McConville (Judith Roddy) sends her eldest daughter …
From the moment the programme for the London Film Festival was announced, Nickel Boys quickly became one of my most anticipated films of the entire festival. Not only did the film receive positive reviews after its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival at the end of August, but its …
Steven McQueen’s latest film, Blitz, marks the director’s return to fiction, after focusing on documentary filmmaking in 2023. Naturally, this comes with a lot of excitement for fans of the director as well as for fans of the historical drama genre. With its period setting and focus on the Second …