★★★★☆ Maltese-American filmmaker Alex Camilleri’s Luzzu charts a course between the dispassionate neorealism of the Dardenne brothers and Gianfranco Rosi’s keen but objective documentarian eye. It is a touching parable of fathers and sons, tradition and modernity, principles versus practicality.
★★★★☆ Terence Davies’ first feature since 2016 is a moving biopic of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon: an anti-war film in the sense that we never see the conflict, yet its traumas echo throughout the life of its protagonist. Amidst the horrors of the Great War, army lieutenant and poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden) petitions to end the bloodshed.
★★★★★ Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun star as an elderly couple suffering through dementia and ill health in Gaspar Noé’s latest outing, Vortex. The Argentinian director’s follow up to 2019’s Lux Æterna is a typically difficult watch, subjecting us to the grinding indignities of old age, but it also a deeply moving study of lifelong love and loyalty to the bitter end.
★★☆☆☆ Actor, playwright, novelist and now screenwriter-director Leah Purcell – a Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri woman from rural Queensland – makes her debut with The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson.
★★★★☆ Sam Raimi returns to the Marvel fold with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s fitting that the director who started the modern superhero cycle is back to banish superhero fatigue with one of the most exhilarating entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date.
★★★☆☆ For his third feature documentary, filmmaker Kris Kaczor turns his focus to the life and legacy of SuAnne Big Crow, a high school state basketball champion from South Dakota. As a Lakota Native American, SuAnne became a source of great inspiration for her community.
★★★★☆ Nabil Ayouch’s Casablanca Beats takes as its template a dozen or so Hollywood dramas and comedies aimed at instilling the positive value of inspirational education. From Dead Poets Society to School of Rock, the pitch and the arc are fairly similar even as circumstances change.
★★★★☆ French director Audrey Diwan adapts Annie Erwaux’s 2001 autobiographical book about her traumatic experience of an abortion in 1963 France. Happening is a naturalistic, heart-breaking and relentless account of the multiple traumas and injustices that cascade when women are denied their basic bodily autonomy.
★★★★★ For most children, school is a frightening wilderness of social injustice and unchecked danger. With her first feature, Playground – part of last year’s Un Certain Regard lineup – Belgian filmmaker Laura Wandel captures this universal ordeal with a masterful sense of perspective and empathy.
★★★☆☆ Afro-Latin percussionist and multiple Grammy award nominee John Santos is the worthy subject of filmmaker Kathryn Golden’s first feature-length documentary, a lively and often compelling portrait of the man and his music.
★★★★☆ Based on the life of 17th century nun Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira) who enters into a relationship with fellow nun Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), Benedetta has all the religious symbolism, violence and nudity that we have come to expect from Dutch master Paul Verhoeven.
★★★☆☆ Based on the Norse myth that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Robert Eggers’ third film is a rollocking, rampaging Viking romp. The Northman is Eggers’ most ambitious project to date, but for all its howling spectacle and ultra-violent elemental machismo it is also his least successful.
