Maximilian von Thun

★★★★★ British director Andrew Haigh follows up the brilliant 45 Years and Weekend with another understated masterpiece, Lean on Pete, about a young man’s odyssey across America with his horse. Haigh demonstrates impressive versatility by moving from a drama about the collapsing marriage of a middle-class retired couple in genteel rural England, to one about…

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★★★★☆ Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy, In the Fog, Maidan) returns to fiction filmmaking with A Gentle Creature: a gloomy, timely tale of a nameless woman trying to track down her incarcerated husband in remote rural Russia. Since his last fictional work with In the Fog, Loznitsa has directed a slew of documentaries on challenging topics…

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★★★★★ New Year celebrations have only recently been and gone, but it may well prove difficult to find a more perfect film than Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in 2018. That shouldn’t come as a surprise from a director behind two of the great film masterpieces of the 21st century – There Will Be Blood…

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★★★★☆ The First World War might be overshadowed in the contemporary mind by its more famous sequel, but in some ways it is of greater historical importance. It destroyed once and for all the possibility of a heroic conception of war, which simply could not be reconciled with the brutal reality of trenches, chemical weapons…

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★★★☆☆ Jennifer Peedom’s Mountain contains some truly breathtaking imagery, but it reduces the sublime wonders of the peaks to mere daredevilry. In this collaboration between Peedom – whose previous Bafta-nominated effort Sherpa explored similar territory – and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, dramatic footage of climbers, skiers, mountain bikers and base jumpers treating their lives like…

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★★★★★ Ai Weiwei might be best known for his sculptures and installations, but with Human Flow he has created a masterpiece that truly captures the humanity at the heart of the global refugee crisis. Many films try to represent big ideas, but few do it successfully. Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow is a fortunate exception to…

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★★★★☆ An older man and a younger woman accidentally discover that, every night, they encounter each other in their dreams as a pair of deer. The premise of Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul sounds like the perfect recipe for rom-com cheesiness, yet it’s anything but.At first astounded, the couple draw closer together as their…

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★★★☆☆ If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to run a household in the midst of a civil war, look no further than Insyriated. Philippe Van Leeuw’s Berlin Audience Award winner is a gruelling if slightly underdeveloped portrayal of daily reality for millions of Syrian families.Watching a film set during an ongoing conflict like Insyriated,…

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★★★★☆ It’s always instructive to compare a director’s latest film with their previous efforts, and this is certainly the case with Laura Poitras’ Risk. Her first feature since 2014’s Citizenfour, the differences between the two are in this case more telling than the similarities.While both documentaries rely on unparalleled access to people (Julian Assange and…

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★★★★☆ Re-released in cinemas to mark Jack Nicholson’s 80th birthday, Milos Forman’s legendary 1975 tragicomedy One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey’s best-selling 1962 novel of the same name, has aged well. Its honest and forthright depiction of mental illness, combined with Nicholson’s tour-de-force bull in a china shop performance, means that…

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