★★★★☆ Inspired by Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski’s latest is a darkly comic and moving fable about a wayward donkey living through fate’s tender mercies. EO is at once a cinematic curiosity, a compelling drama and a harrowing portrait of cruel whimsy.
★★★★☆ American director Darren Aronofsky has made a career out of exploring individuals who are physically and psychologically self-destructing in the throes of obsession. It could be the relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle; building a boat to avoid a genocidal flood; ballet or wrestling; drugs or food.
★★★★★ Documentary filmmaker Alice Diop’s (We, La Permanence) first narrative feature Saint Omer is a major achievement and an investigation into motherhood, judgment and the other. Kayije Kagame plays Rama, a university professor and writer who is working on a new book.
★★☆☆☆ After his girlfriend is killed in a brutal attack, former boxer and paramedic Jan (Milan Ondrík) falls into profound despair. Exploring themes of guilt, masculinity and justice, boxing-inflect crime film from Slovakian director Peter Bebjak shows much promise, but fails to coalesce into a coherent vision.
★★★☆☆ Bulgarian documentarian Andrey Paounov turns his hand to fiction in this adaptation of Yordan Radichkov’s 1974 play. January is an intriguing, eerie, ponderous narrative set entirely within the confines of a forest cabin. Religious allegories, monochrome photography and folk horror trappings ensue.
★★☆☆☆ Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans had all the ingredients to ascend as cinema’s new darling. Yet, as this semi-autobiographical film plods on, there is an unshakeable sense that in reaching for the stars, The Fabelmans instead lands somewhere more mediocre and disappointing.
★★★★☆ Whether it’s the neo-noir of We Own the Night, the ménage à trois of Two Lovers, or the sad-dad-in-space opera of Ad Astra, Gray has managed to pursue an intensely personal vision through a variety of genres. Now he’s back in UK cinemas with a more down to earth offering.
★★★☆☆ King T’Challa is dead, but the Kingdom of Wakanda must live on. After the tragic death of franchise star Chadwick Boseman, so too must the Marvel machine roll on and so, somehow, the Black Panther series must continue without its lead.
It is no secret that times are financially tough for many households’ incomes. In moments like this, luxuries are often the first to get scratched from household budgets. That often includes paying for television and movie subscriptions.
★★★☆☆ Actor Michael A. Goorjian may be best-known as Neve Campbell’s love interest in Party of Five, but he has been directing independent features since 1997. His paternal grandparents survived the Armenian genocide, and so his latest film Amerikatsi is a deeply personal film.
★★★★★ Jafar Panahi’s sentence of six years in prison this July is the latest instance of harassment that the director has received from Iranian authorities, stretching back as far as 2010. Panahi has made a film about escaping Iran – in which he plays himself making a film about escaping Iran.
It was a dark time for many in 1939. The Second World War had just kicked off and no one could’ve predicted the devastation it would cause. Naturally, people sought to escape the reality around them and immerse themselves in the world of film.
★★★★☆ Julia (It Follows’ Maika Monroe) has moved with husband Francis (Karl Glusman) from New York City for a new marketing job in Bucharest. Spending her days alone and struggling with the language barrier, Julia starts to feel that she is being spied on from the apartment opposite theirs.
★★★☆☆ Director Zach Cregger’s third feature is a tight, claustrophobic horror that starts strongly but descends into schlock and regrettable cliché in its final third. With surprises, compelling performances and strong visuals across the board, Barbarian warrants recommendation but with serious caveats.
★★★★★ If there was one criticism of Ruben Östlund’s The Square, it’s that his satire wasn’t so much shooting fish in a barrel as nuking a pod of whales in a glass of water. His new film, Triangle of Sadness, begins with a series of riffs on how vacuous the high fashion world is.
★★★★☆ Bros, a ground-breaking new romantic comedy, is the first Hollywood studio-backed picture to feature gay leads playing gay characters, with the supporting cast coming almost entirely from the LGBTQ community. It’s an important moment for representation on screen and surprisingly political in nature.
Set to be the ninth film in the Rocky franchise and the third of the legacy series, Creed III has received an all-revealing new trailer, which includes a release date of 3 March 2023. In the trailer, we learn about how the story advances to present us with a very different Adonis Creed to the one we left in Creed II, as well as his next opponent.
From jump scares to macabre costumes and eerie soundtracks, horror films are perfect for the Halloween season. This is the reason why audiences are eagerly on the lookout for good horror films when October comes around. Here, we’ll discuss some of the top retro horror films that you can watch with friends and family members this season.
★★★★☆ Oldboy director Park Chan-wook’s new film Decision to Leave is a cinematic psychopath test. Park Hae-il plays Hae-joon a police detective who doesn’t have enough murders to solve in Busan. His wife (Lee Jung-hyun) works in Ipo, a misty seaside town. With his partner (Go Kyung-pyo), Hae-joon finally gets given what looks like an interesting case.
★★★★☆ You Won’t Be Alone is the fiercely poet debut of Macedonian-Australian Goran Stolevski. Set in the land of his birth, North Macedonia, at some point in the 19th century, the film follows the unusual and sometimes fraught life of a shape-shifting witch played by various actors over the years.