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. …
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 …
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 …
Who could have imagined that the choice of name for a baby born in 1995 in London to Kosovo Albanian parents would prove to have a global influence? The baby grew up with a short, easy to spell, and easy to pronounce name with an adorable meaning: ‘love.’ The unusual …
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 …
If you thought that David Mackenzie’s previous film, Relay, was stupid, you haven’t seen anything yet. In his latest disaster, Fuze, Mackenzie, and screenwriter Ben Hopkins somehow screw up a tried-and-true pressure-cooker that should elicit strong popcorn thrills and not total bewilderment. However, instead of sticking to the film’s original …
Based on James McBride’s award-winning novel, the 2020 Showtime miniseries The Good Lord Bird takes an uproariously irreverent approach to some of the most tumultuous times in United States history – namely, militant abolitionist John Brown and his 1859 raid on the US military armoury at Harper’s Ferry, events that …
In modern Ukrainian filmmaking, Valentyn Vasyanovych is one of the best-known names on the festival circuit. His films Atlantis and Reflection premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In this sense, the director has already been discussing the Russia-Ukraine conflict in his work. Reflection narrates the kidnapping of a Ukrainian surgeon …
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. …
Love+War is the second film in 2025 by Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. Their first release, Lost in the Jungle, follows the survival of four children in the Colombian Amazon after a plane crash in the woods. The new projects from the Academy Award-winning recipients had premieres at two crucial …
Jalmari Helander’s blood-soaked Sisu was a true hidden gem. A Finnish answer John Wick or Rambo, the title is a fitting one: it comes from a Finnish concept with no exact English translation, yet roughly means a unique kind of resilience that allows one to overcome the most extreme of …
Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1982 debut novel, A Pale View of Hills, is an elegant and nuanced examination of identity for post-war Japan. Kei Ishikawa’s ambitious but unsubtle adaptation can’t capture the spirit of his gorgeous writing. The novel and the film are narrated by Etsuko, who appears in two timelines. In …
The Choral is the kind of movie at which the British film industry excels: made for audiences who like their stories flavoured strongly with nostalgia, and who like to read between the lines for their hard-hitting topics. These movies tend to play better overseas, where the historical trappings and the …
The generic title underplays the importance of this French war film, which does something utterly shocking from an American perspective: it pays respect to France’s allies, too. Not since the days of World War II movies have any American films bothered to mark our allies, even in passing. (A brief …