★★★☆☆ Shannon Murphy makes her feature debut with Babyteeth, a tragicomedy about a teenager facing terminal cancer. Teens dying young is a recurring theme, from Romeo + Juliet to The Fault in Our Stars. Milla (Eliza Scanlen) is one such case, a 15-year-old whose prospects look bleak but finds some solace Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Going in cold, the Dardenne brothers appearing to tackle the subject of radical Islam and a vulnerable boy falling prey to its teachings might be construed as reactionary and misguided. In their skilled and compassionate hands, however, Young Ahmed is a riveting story of a boy in crisis. “A Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Packed with raw, prickly emotion and featuring a terrific debut performance by Frankie Box, writer-director Eva Riley’s first feature Perfect 10 is an acutely observed and beautifully shot coming-of-age story. It is also a tender, fastidiously constructed portrait of working-class girlhood that shimmers with angst, vulnerability, and compassion. Leigh Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The superhero genre has, in recent years, dominated the global box office. Bringing the comic book to the big screen hasn’t historically been so successful or easy to produce. As old as Superman himself, Flash Gordon debuted in 1934 with readers captivated by the futuristic space landscapes filled in Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Alice Winocour’s Proxima follows French astronaut Sarah Loreau as she trains for a year-long space mission, with young daughter Stella in tow. It’s a fiery mix of ambition, mother-daughter love, female empowerment and childhood dreams – the gravities of each masterfully held together in the film, like planets in Continue Reading
★★★★☆ British director Claire Oakley’s feature debut is at once a brilliantly tense mystery-thriller and an impressionistic psychological portrait. Make Up taps into a rich Gothic tradition where repressed emotions find their vent in uncanny space and sexual awakening is realised through the imagination. The uncanny is vital to Oakley’s Continue Reading
★★★★★ By turns tragic, infuriating, enlightening, and moving, The Fight follows four civil rights cases brought against the Trump administration by the ACLU. This extraordinary documentary film from the directorial team behind 2016 hit Weiner shows us in vivid, vital detail what is really at stake in Donald Trump’s historic Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Is there ever honour in betrayal? If the system to which you swore a blood allegiance no longer upholds its traditional values, should you not speak out against it? The moral ambiguities and questions of legacy, friendship, family and integrity in Marco Bellochio’s The Traitor are the strongest points Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Adapting her semi-autobiographical novel How to Build a Girl for the screen, Caitlin Moran has created with co-writer John Niven and director Coky Giedroyc a funny and touching coming-of-age story that occasionally loses its way, just like its protagonist. Growing up with haphazard parents and too many siblings on a Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The opening moments of Alice, the debut feature from writer-director Josephine Mackerras, are pure domestic bliss. A twentysomething married couple, Alice (Emilie Piponnier) and François (Martin Swabey), playfully fight in their pristine kitchen, attend a high-brow dinner party and rush through breakfast with their young son in a sequence Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Inspired by the execution of Troy Davis in 2011 – whose conviction was dogged by controversy and who maintained his innocence to the end – Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency is a sombre, layered study of the human cost of capital punishment. One of this era’s most powerful actors, Alfre Woodard, Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ For his third feature, animator Salvador Simó turns his attentions to the early career of twentieth-century director, Luis Buñuel. Labyrinth of the Turtles is a charming and occasionally moving love letter to the legendary Spanish-Mexican surrealist, and at a spry 80 minutes, doesn’t outstay its welcome. Functioning as a biopic Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Colombian filmmaker Franco Lolli directs his second feature with astonishing confidence, crafting a tender family drama that captures the exhausting bitter-sweetness and competing priorities of family life in middle-age. Centred on a naturalistic, deeply empathetic turn from Carolina Sanin, Litigante transforms the banal into the elegiac. The first scene finds Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Enormous structures built of steel and glass, protecting their occupants from the infinite vacuum outside. Housed within are the flora and fauna of planet Earth, improbably situated on some alien surface. A testament to human ingenuity, the final conquering of the cosmos’ final frontier: such are the images conjured Continue Reading
★★★★☆ In thick fog, a car drifts through the winding roads of the Icelandic countryside before inexplicably veering off the verge, through the crash barrier and down into oblivion. Almost lyrical in its luminous bleakness, it’s a precise and devastating opener for director Hlynur Pálmason’s aptly-titled second feature A White, Continue Reading