Festivals
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Sheffield DocFest 2019: Our picks of the programme
This Thursday (6 June) the seven hills of Sheffield will once again open up to the innovators and icons of documentary cinema as UK festival season gem Doc/Fest returns for 2019. From the sweeping to the specific, highlights among this year’s programme promise to open the lens on the world we live in and how…
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Edinburgh 2019: Programme highlights
The full programme for this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival has been revealed, bolstering 18 world premieres and 72 UK premieres of films brought to the Scottish capital from countries all over. Now in its 73rd year, the world’s longest continuously running film festival is back and ready to take film lovers on a voyage…
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Cannes 2019: Sibyl review
★★★☆☆ Movies love certain professions and psychotherapy is certainly one. They have to listen to people’s problems while (usually) masking their own issues. From Richard Burton in Equus to Billy Crystal in Analyse This, there’s an undoubted attraction to a job which involves lots of listening to other people’s stories.
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Cannes 2019: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite wins Palme d’Or
It’s been a vintage edition of the Cannes Film Festival, with many excellent contenders in the competition. The Palme d’Or went to South Korean director Bong Joon-ho and his masterful black comedy thriller Parasite. It was a popular choice that bested the likes of Ken Loach, Justine Triet and Pedro Almodóvar.
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Cannes 2019: Oh Mercy! review
★★☆☆☆ It’s time the Cannes Film Festival called a moratorium on screening the works of French director Arnaud Desplechin until he can come back with work as good as A Christmas Tale. Co-written with Léa Mysius, Oh Mercy! has no business competing for the Palme d’Or.
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Cannes 2019: Portrait of a Lady on Fire review
★★★★☆ A highly flammable love affair smoulders in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a painter with a spark in her eye. Although she is always aware of convention and tradition, she also knows how to bend the rules to further her own pursuit of art. She smokes a…
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Cannes 2019: Little Joe review
★★★☆☆ Acclaimed Austrian director Jessica Hausner enters the race for this year’s Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival with Little Joe, a modest work of satirical sci-fi starring Emily Beecham and Ben Whishaw as two genetic engineers who create a “happy” plant.
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Cannes 2019: Sorry We Missed You review
★★★★☆ Following his 2016 Palme d’Or triumph with I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach returns to the Cannes Film Festival with Sorry We Missed You, a furious denunciation of zero-hours Britain. We begin in a familiar place: in the dark. A man with a Mancunian accent is being interviewed for a job.
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Cannes 2019: Les Misérables review
★★★★☆ From its powerful far right-baiting opening image of a football-mad French kid of Arabic heritage draped in the country’s iconic flag to an unsettling and mayhem-filled finale, Ladj Ly’s gripping play on Victor Hugo’s humanist masterwork, Les Misérables, is uncompromising, angry-as-hell political cinema. Set over the course of two days during last year’s World…
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Cannes 2019: The Dead Don’t Die review
★★☆☆☆ Arch American indie icon and silver fox Jim Jarmusch lurches up the Cannes Croisette with the opening film The Dead Don’t Die, an undeadpan comedy which dies halfway through and fails to reanimate itself. Jarmusch’s previous exercises in genre have been triumphant morphings of cinema staples into his own world view. Down by Law…
