★★★★☆ Ryu Seung-wan is a veteran of this kind of picture – his previous film, The Battleship Island, had a similar ‘escape from’ premise in a period setting – so it’s no surprise that Escape from Mogadishu is a rollicking masterclass in escalating tension.
★★★☆☆ When the legend becomes truth, print the legend. So goes Matt Eskey’s directorial debut, The Mojo Manifesto, a documentary in thrall to its subject. Luckily for us, its subject is Mojo Nixon (née Neill Kirby McMillan), the cartoonishly raucous musician and one of cow-punk’s leading proponents.
★★★☆☆ How do we balance modern faith with the often unsavoury legacies of religion, and how are those legacies used to excuse immoral behaviour in the present? Filmmaker Mariana Bastos gestures at these questions in her second feature (her first as solo director), a compelling magical realist drama.
★★★☆☆ In her debut feature, Canadian filmmaker Elizabeth Ayiku has a crafted a thoughtful and tender drama. Marshalling an excellent performance from A’Keyah Dasia Williams as protagonist Mya, Me Little Me is moving, if a little disjointed in its construction.
★★☆☆☆ Bill Posley’s debut feature sees its world premiere at this year’s festival. With its stylistic flourishes, one eye on social commentary and a solid genre premise, Bitch Ass shows potential for the writer-actor turned director.
★★★★☆ Jacques Audiard’s first feature since 2018’s The Sisters Brothers sees the acclaimed director return to his home town with a gorgeous, funny and tender romantic comedy, shot in luscious black and white. Paris, 13th District is a paean to the freedoms, the heartaches and the confusion of singledom.
★★★★☆ “There is no way out.” Lifer Viktor (Georg Friedrich) barks this at his decades-old friend and cellmate, Hans (Franz Rogowski), on the prospect of breaking out of their West German prison in 1969 in Austrian filmmaker Sebastian Miese’s second narrative feature.
★★★★☆ Robert Pattinson dons the cape and cowl to wreak vengeance on the city that took his parents’ lives, and in the process take down The Riddler (Paul Dano), Penguin (Colin Farrell) and Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Matt Reeves’ The Batman is just as moody but twice as smart as previous iterations.
★★☆☆☆ The late British director Roger Michell’s final film, The Duke is based on the true story of Kempton Bunton (played here by Jim Broadbent), a pensioner from Benwell in Newcastle upon Tyne who, in 1961, stole Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery.
★★★★☆ Following a group of teenage girls, La Mif is a nuanced and moving study of life in a care home in Geneva. No single performer – largely non-professional actors – in the piece stands above the rest. Rather, the cast work in unison to give a singular, outstanding ensemble performance.
★★★☆☆ Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s The Real Charlie Chaplin grapples with the conundrum at the heart of the silent era’s greatest clown: that no one could ever know really know the person behind the performance.
★★★★★ Adapted from the novel by Alexey Salnikov’s, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Petrov’s Flu is as dense and impenetrable as it is lurching, captivating and perplexing. It’s a captivating, purgatorial nightmare that describes the feverish breakdown of post-Soviet Russian society.
