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Film Review: My Rembrandt
★★★★☆ There’s much more to Oeke Hoogendijk’s My Rembrandt than initially meets the eye. Taking a close, curatorial look, not at the life, times and oeuvre of the great painter himself, but of contemporary relationships with his work, her latest documentary explores, to great effect, the motives for possession, obsession and ongoing fascination with the…
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Film Review: Babyteeth
★★★☆☆ 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 in a relationship with drug…
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Film Review: Young Ahmed
★★★★☆ 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 true Muslim doesn’t shake a…
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Film Review: Perfect 10
★★★★☆ 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 (Box) is a talented young…
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Film Review: Flash Gordon
★★★★☆ 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 the pages. Adapted in 1980,…
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Film Review: Proxima
★★★★☆ 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 the canvas of space, revolving…
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Film Review: Make Up
★★★★☆ 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 film, the latest in a…
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Film Review: The Fight
★★★★★ 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 assault on civil rights. The…
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Film Review: The Traitor
★★★☆☆ 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 of an ambitious, punishing addition…
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Film Review: How to Build a Girl
★★★☆☆ 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 Wolverhampton estate, Johanna Morrigan (Beanie…
Cannes 2026