Christopher Machell

★★☆☆☆ Korean-American director Christina Yr. Lim’s latest is a sweet family drama headed by two charismatic leads and nicely drawn, criss-crossing relationships. Sadly, dangling narrative threads, a few overcooked performances and undeveloped themes keep For Taylor firmly on the b-side.

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★★★☆☆ Lola Quivoron’s debut fiction feature is an affecting and vital hybrid picture, part crime drama, part character study. Rodeo follows the exploits of Julia (Julie Ledru), a somewhat delinquent youth who boosts dirt bikes for the thrill of it, before falling in with a gang of bikers who help her hone her skills as…

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★★★★☆ In French Polynesia, High Commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel) manages the delicate tensions between islanders and the establishment, moving through society’s strata. Writer-director Albert Serra’s latest is a hazy fever dream of post-colonialist politics and ambition that, in its final minutes, lurches into apocalyptic mania.

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★★★★☆ Can love sustain in a relationship if it is not reciprocal; indeed is such a thing even love? With One Fine Morning, celebrated French director Mia Hansen-Løve presents complementary accounts of infatuation, love, and loss in a nuanced, moving study of the ways that love can sustain and consume us.

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★★★★★ Sent on a mission to establish a parish in a remote Icelandic settlement, Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) must brave harsh conditions, strange customs and existential dread in Hlynur Pálmason’s 19th century Nordic epic. Godland is the Icelandic director’s most accomplished work to date.

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★★★★★ Filmmaker Amanda Kramer’s latest is a surreal, erotic, and often romantic vision of nonconformity shot through the lens of classic Hollywood and inspired by the cinema of Kenneth Anger. In politics and the media, opportunistic hate-mongers whip up bigotry against gender non-conformity, while everyone in contemporary cinema is beautiful but no one is horny.

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★★★★☆ Putting her talents behind the camera, Chilean actor-turned-director Manuela Martelli’s debut feature is a gripping study of paranoia during the early years of the Pinochet regime. As historical noir, Martelli’s film is thrilling, but as a document of the comforts of complicity and the terror of resistance, 1976 is visceral.

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★★★☆☆ Her first film as director since 2017’s heady study of adolescence, Ava, Léa Mysius’ latest is an oft-gripping magical-realist mystery drama with faint whiffs of horror. While The Five Devils doesn’t quite have the clarity of vision of her previous picture, its emotion, erotically-charged themes and puzzle-box structure leave much to recommend.

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★★★☆☆ It’s 1918, and the elderly woman that terrorised the screaming youths of X is still a tender young thing, stuck on her parents’ farm and dreaming of a life of stardom in faraway Hollywood. How far removed from that wizened psychotic killer this cherubic vision now stands.

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★★★★☆ One year on from the events of the previous franchise entry, Ghostface is up to their old tricks again, slicing and dicing their way through a new batch of shrieking victims, the action now shifted to New York. With the new generation of Screamers now firmly installed, headed by the Carpenter sisters, can the…

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