★★★☆☆ Italian director Matteo Garrone returns to UK cinemas this week with a movie a world away from the English-language fantasy Tale of Tales. Crime flick Dogman is a solid effort bearing the influence and heritage of Neorealism and Federico Fellini. Marcello (Marcello Fonte) is a dog groomer living by the Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Stéphane Brizé and Vincent Lindon are fast becoming the Scorsese and De Niro of French social realist cinema. Their latest effort, At War, depicts union workers involved in strike action and a fight for self-respect and dignity. At War is a gripping leftist polemic about the plight of the Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs 2017, Chris Kelly’s A Cambodian Spring is an intimate and upsetting account of community activism and the shaping of modern Cambodia. “This is a fake democracy,” says a resident of the area around Boeung Kak Lake in Phnom Penh, which Continue Reading
★★★★☆ 2016’s Deadpool bucked the trend of sanitised superhero schlock with winking humour, copious gore, and f-bombs galore. So how does one follow-up one of the most refreshing blockbusters in recent memory? The answer, evidently, is more profanity, more Troma-esque ultra-violence, more snarky adolescent meta-commentary. In short: more Deadpool. Filling Continue Reading
★★★★★ Cannes favourite Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to the Croisette for the seventh time with Shoplifters, a quietly devastating portrayal of family and theft in contemporary Japan, and one of his best works of recent years. The survival of families has been a constant concern for Kore-eda. Whether it’s the abandoned Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Italian-Canadian director Panos Cosmatos enters Cannes Critics’ Week with his second film, the psychotropic arthouse horror Mandy, starring Nicolas Cage and Andrea Riseborough as a couple terrorised by cultists. Over the years, Nicolas Cage has acquired a reputation as a mad dog actor. Whether gurning through Bad Lieutenant or Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Spike Lee goes for the jugular of the alt-right movement and President Trump in this hilarious and vital Palme d’Or contender. A comic thriller about a black police officer going undercover to infiltrate the KKK, it’s amazingly based on a true story – despite what looks to be a Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Persona non grata and middle-aged man terrible Lars von Trier returns to UK cinema screens with serial killer black comedy The House That Jack Built, as slick as viscera and as vile as the subject it portrays. There’s a scene near the start of The House That Jack Built Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is the theme of Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces, a Chekhovian portrait of lives going to waste in an Iranian society of gender inequality and rural tradition. A young woman speaks directly to her phone, delivering a message, a plea to Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Gaspar Noé is back on form with Climax, a frenzied tale of a dance group training for an American tour. Their after-work party descends into a bacchanalian rave with episodes of drug-fuelled transgression, thanks to a bowl of sangria spiked with LSD. Set in 1996 and based on a true Continue Reading
★★★★★ Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont makes his directorial debut with Girl, a sympathetic and emotionally rich portrait of a 15-year-old girl, born in the body of a boy, who has aspirations of one day becoming a ballet dancer. Taking on the role of Lara is cisgender actor Victor Polster. A Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ The cinema legend that is Jean-Luc Godard returns to UK screens for one night only (2 December) with The Image Book, a visual palimpsest of ideas and a muttering meditation on the world as the octogenarian finds it today. As the old saying goes, there’s a lot that’s new Continue Reading
★★★★☆ French journalist Matilde H. (Emmanuelle Bercot) joins a battalion of female Kurdish fighters taking back their hometown against misogynist psychopaths ISIS, in Eva Husson’s impressive and righteously angry war film, Girls of the Sun. Based on a true events which occurred in 2015, with names changed to protect the Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Returning to Cannes for a fifth time, leading Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke presents his new film Ash Is Purest White, a story of love, sacrifice and betrayal spanning seventeen years of contemporary Chinese history. From as early as Platform, Jia has been linking the trajectories of his characters’ lives Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ With Arctic, Brazilian director Joe Penna’s debut feature offers audiences a conventional survival thriller of one man pitted against nature, which still manages to deliver the occasional moment of raw tension. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Overgård, a Danish explorer who is forced to crash-land his aircraft in the middle Continue Reading