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Film Review: The Wild Pear Tree
★★★★★ The Wild Pear Tree is another towering cinematic experience from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The story of a father and son in conflict, it grapples with life’s big themes and the burden of family relationships. Ceylan’s films have the depth and richness of great literature, but he is equally adept at crafting transcendent…
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Cannes 2018: Ayka review
★★★★★ Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Ayka follows a young woman over five days bitterly cold days in a city she doesn’t really know. Attempting to flee from a terrible situation, but only finding an indifferent world and uncaring people, the Kazakhstani director has made one of Cannes 2018’s most formidable entries. Ayka (Samal Yeslyamova) is a 25-year-old…
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Film Review: Knife + Heart
★★★☆☆ Yann Gonzalez follows up 2013’s You and the Night with Knife + Heart, another retro flick featuring lashings of perversity and kinky desire. The film is headlined by a tremendous Vanessa Paradis, starring as a gay-porno producer trying to get over a broken heart. Gonzalez’s cinematic reveries are indebted to 1970s exploitation cinema and…
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Film Review: Capernaum
★★★★☆ Lebanese actress and director Nadine Labaki’s third directorial feature, Capernaum, is a stirring and essential social-realist drama about lives trapped in abject poverty, featuring a superb central performance from Zain Alrafeea. Labaki’s modest debut film Caramel, which played in the Un Certain Regard programme, back in 2007, was a low-key drama about a group of…
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Film Review: Whitney
★★★★☆ One year on from the release of Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me, Kevin MacDonald’s Whitney proves that there is always room for another documentary on the pop music icon. With access to close family and friends, MacDonald’s emotional documentary seeks to unearth just how one of the world’s greatest singers came to…
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Film Review: Under the Silver Lake
★★☆☆☆ It Follows director David Robert Mitchell returns to cinemas – and MUBI in the UK – this week with his third feature Under the Silver Lake, starring Andrew Garfield and Riley Keough. Firmly dividing critics at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, there’s sadly little to recommend about this LA-set mind-fuck. Sam (Garfield) likes staring at…
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Film Review: On Chesil Beach
★★☆☆☆ Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle) and Florence Ponting (Saoirse Ronan) are young, beautiful and in love. They’ve just married and taken a honeymoon on Chesil Beach in Dorset, where their marriage, and lives, slowly begin to unfold. As prestige literary adaptations go, On Chesil Beach has arrived with little fanfare. The May release day suggests no great…
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Film Review: Dogman
★★★☆☆ Italian director Matteo Garrone returns to UK cinemas this week with a movie a world away from the English-language fantasy Tale of Tales. Crime flick Dogman is a solid effort bearing the influence and heritage of Neorealism and Federico Fellini. Marcello (Marcello Fonte) is a dog groomer living by the seaside on the outskirts of…
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Cannes 2018: At War review
★★★★☆ Stéphane Brizé and Vincent Lindon are fast becoming the Scorsese and De Niro of French social realist cinema. Their latest effort, At War, depicts union workers involved in strike action and a fight for self-respect and dignity. At War is a gripping leftist polemic about the plight of the working class when faced with…
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Film Review: A Cambodian Spring
★★★☆☆ Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs 2017, Chris Kelly’s A Cambodian Spring is an intimate and upsetting account of community activism and the shaping of modern Cambodia. “This is a fake democracy,” says a resident of the area around Boeung Kak Lake in Phnom Penh, which the government has sold from…
VENICE 2026
