★★★★☆ Fourteen, the follow-up to former Los Angeles Reader film critic Dan Sallitt’s incest drama The Unspeakable Act, is a subdued drama about a friendship ageing over time. A nuanced portrait of female camaraderie presented in all its messy complexity. […]
This year’s Filmfest Hamburg coincided with the city’s football derby. A fiercely contested match between the city’s two biggest clubs, the game was a fitting metaphor for a festival undergoing its own identity crisis. CineVue were in attendance, and we’ve […]
“If you give an audience all the answers they’ll forget you as soon as they leave the cinema. But, if you ask the right questions, they’ll think about you for days.” This was the advice of two-time Academy Award winner […]
★★★★☆ The debut feature from provocative French filmmaker Bertrand Mandico is a film of unadulterated artifice. An exhilarating and highly surreal tale of gender-warfare, The Wild Boys is a maximalist work of paperback eroticism that almost defies categorisation; a film […]
★★★★☆ An old man and a young boy meet by a dying tree. They’ve both taken different paths to get here, but somehow they share the same memories. A deeply affecting vision of the lost paradise of childhood, André Gil […]
One of the biggest names to emerge from Chile’s new golden era of cinema, Sebastián Lelio first achieved international recognition with his fourth film Gloria, a dynamic comedy-drama about a middle-aged woman’s ill-fated romance with a retired naval officer. This […]
★★★☆☆ Hackney-born actor, DJ and now filmmaker Idris Elba makes his directorial debut with Yardie, a Caribbean twist on the well-worn conventions of the British gangster movie, based on the book by Victor Headley. The film follows a Jamaican drug […]
★★★★☆ Acclaimed independent filmmaker Josephine Decker (Butter on the Latch, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) returns to UK cinemas with Madeline’s Madeline, a visionary study of the analogy between creativity and insanity. Acting requires pulling oneself inside-out psychologically and blurring […]
★★★☆☆ In light of the recent allegations of sexual harassment aimed squarely at the film industry, Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane – an i-Phone shot thriller about a woman pushed to the precipice of a mental breakdown – is a surprisingly shallow […]
★★★☆☆ Training his eye on the 2017 memorial service held at Berlin’s Treptower Park, a site of pilgrimage for the Soviet diaspora, Sergei Loznitsa’s Victory Day is an absorbing study of nationalism and the collective memory of traumatic experiences. After the Second […]
★★★☆☆ A series of provocative and often heartbreaking conversations between the past and the present, Irene Lusztig’s Yours in Sisterhood, is a collective portrait of feminism, and a beautiful paean to the lost art of letter writing. Beginning as an […]
★★★★☆ Powerfully conveying a longing for escape from ordinary life, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still is a strangely alluring, four-hour portrait of the disillusionment and hollow sense of emptiness experienced by those living in a society marked by violent […]
