Christopher Machell

★★★★★ Four surviving members of a squad calling themselves the ‘5 Bloods’ return to Vietnam to recover their fallen brother’s remains and retrieve a sizeable bounty of lost gold bullion into the bargain. Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is not only his best recent film, but also one of the most vital of the year.…

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★★★★☆ In the febrile context of the #BlackLivesMatter protests arrives The Australian Dream, Daniel Gordon’s study of the appalling treatment of Aboriginal AFL star Adam Goodes by racist fans. The ensuing controversy exposed the structural racism at the heart of Australian society and is a timely exemplar of the endemic racism of the Global North. On…

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★★★☆☆ Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s Guest of Honour is an intriguing, but misshapen and sometimes bizarre family melodrama. After her father Jim’s (David Thewlis) death, Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) reflects on the key traumatic moments of their fraught relationship. Messy, convoluted, tiring: adjectives that describe Veronica’s near 30-year relationship with her father as well as…

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★★★★☆ Adapted from Colin Niel’s 2017 novel Seules les bêtes, German director Dominik Moll’s Only the Animals is a grippingly-realised mystery-thriller. Centring around the apparent murder of Evelyne Ducat (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and the five people connected by her death, Moll spins a yarn of deceit, ferocious attachment and guilt. Though it is primarily set…

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★★★★☆ Set in the titular southern Thai town, the futuristic-sounding date of Krabi, 2562 actually refer to the contemporaneous year in the Buddhist calendar. In filmmakers Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s first collaboration, Krabi, 2562’s title is the first of many nods to time as something subjective, and where futures, pasts and presents intersect. In…

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★★★★☆ Slipping under the radar at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, The County was nevertheless a hit with those who sought it out. Released on Curzon Home Cinema this week, this western-tinged, visceral Icelandic drama deserves as large an audience as possible. Despite the obvious Icelandic setting of Grímur Hákonarson’s (Rams) third fiction feature, its sublime rugged…

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★★☆☆☆ Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s seventh feature (and second out this month in the UK, the other being documentary Infinite Football), is a stylish and fitfully engaging crime thriller with a great concept, let down by incoherent plotting and impenetrable characterisation. Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), a middle-aged cop working for the Bucharest police force, is working…

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★☆☆☆☆ In her directorial debut Romantic Comedy, British musician and actor Elizabeth Sankey examines the history of one of cinema’s greatest and most enduring genres. Sadly, a love of romantic comedies and a sharp approach to editing are not enough to buoy up this hopelessly shallow documentary. Opening on a scene from the 2008 film…

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★★★★☆ Australian director Kitty Green’s fourth feature may be her first fiction film – after documentaries Casting JonBenet, Ukraine is Not A Brothel and The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul – but it is undoubtedly rooted in reality. Quietly raging, The Assistant is a bleakly precise study of complicity in workplace abuse. Movie producer assistant Jane’s (Julia Garner) day…

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★★★★☆ In the grip of apartheid and the long-running border war with Namibia (then South West Africa), the South African regime forces all white boys over the age of 16 to perform national service. South African writer-director Oliver Hermanus adapts André Carl van der Merwe’s novel about a closeted gay conscript brutalised by a system…

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