Lucy Popescu

★★★★☆ Rufus Norris’ terrific debut feature, Broken (2012), is about the rites of passage of Skunk (Eloise Lawrence), an 11-year girl growing up in a London cul-de-sac with her father Archie (Tim Roth) and brother Jed (Bill Milner). Three things trouble Skunk: her mother’s desertion, her diabetes and their unpredictable neighbours. Sweet, curious and naive,…

Continue

★★★★☆ Acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film, Like Someone in Love (2012), may be set and shot in Japan but it contains many of the auteur’s trademarks: long, single takes, conversational scenes in cars and images reflected in glass and mirrors. Most of Tokyo’s cityscape is framed through a car’s windscreen. Akiko (Rin Takanashi)…

Continue

★★★★☆ Before Midnight (2013) is the final part of an extraordinary trilogy, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. For those who have watched the previous two films, Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), it will feel as though you have grown and aged with the two central characters, Jesse…

Continue

★★★★☆ Cate Shortland’s quietly powerful sophomore film, Lore (2012), is set in Germany during the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This German-Australian co-production, based on the middle section of Rachel Seiffert’s 2001 novel The Dark Room, is told from the perspective of a young German girl who has to come to terms with…

Continue

★★★★☆ The DVD release of Ken Loach’s 2013 documentary The Spirit of ‘45 (courtesy of doc specialists Dogwoof) is particularly timely given the present government’s attempts to reform the National Health Service and the worldwide reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s recent death. Loach remains a staunch socialist and his film is, in large part, a celebration…

Continue

★★★★★ Michael Haneke’s latest award-winning feature, Amour (2012), is at times almost unbearable to watch. The film begins with a door crashing open as firemen break into an apartment to find the corpse of an old woman. She is lying on a bed, carefully dressed in black – her features are serene and she’s surrounded…

Continue

★★★★☆ A key voice within British television drama for the past three decades, Stephen Poliakoff makes gloriously flamboyant films with sprawling plots and all-star casts; Dancing on the Edge (2013), a five-part period drama set in the 1930s recently aired on terrestrial TV, is no exception. London is between two world wars and still feeling…

Continue

★★★★☆ A sterling British cast, including Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith and Tom Wilkinson, ensure that John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) has the feel-good factor without the cloying sentimentality of some romantic comedies. Based on Deborah Moggach’s novel These Foolish Things, six English OAPs arrive in the Indian city of Jaipur…

Continue

★★★★☆ Romanian director Radu Muntean’s intensely observed domestic drama Tuesday, After Christmas (2010) is about the end of a marriage and the start of an affair. Paul (Mimi Branescu), a well-off, middle-class Romanian living in Bucharest has to make a choice between the two women he loves. Happily married to Adriana (Mirela Oprisor), Paul has…

Continue

★★★☆☆ Love, loss and the transformative power of music are the central themes of Café de Flore (2011), Jean-Marc Vallée’s latest directorial outing starring Vanessa Paradis and Kevin Parent. Vallée admirably manages to interweave two stories, encompass two continents and track back and forth between the past and present. First we have the story of Jacqueline…

Continue