★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★★★ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★☆☆☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★★★ 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 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. […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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, […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ Ali Abbasi’s sophomore feature Border is a folkloric movie on monstrous love and what it means to be human. Not so much Beauty and the Beast as Beast and the Beast, Border is one of those films that almost from […]
★★★☆☆ French writer and director Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel, a drama of gay love in early-nineties Paris, is a meandering, novelistic piece that manages to be perfectly fine without ever really being great. The new film from Honoré – miserably […]
★★★★★ Oscar-winning Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida, My Summer of Love) enters the front-running for the Cannes Palme d’Or with his new film Cold War, a beautifully composed tone poem to doomed love in Cold War Europe. Less is most […]
★★★☆☆ There is the uncanny sense of art imitating life in Eric Styles’ poignant, end of life drama, featuring John Hurt’s swansong. That Good Night is about a man dealing with his impending death and Hurt was himself terminally ill […]
★★★☆☆ A tense thriller inspired by true events, Entebbe explores one of the most daring hostage rescue missions ever attempted, and by combining vivid historical details with suspense, it is a powerful depiction of an international crisis that shook the […]
★★★★☆ Leprosy, poverty and a story of social exclusion are the unlikely ingredients for the deeply engaging and often funny road movie Yomeddine, which entered the competition for the Palme d’Or at the 71st Cannes Film Festival earlier today. Beshay […]
