Physical presence is only a painful provisory in Massih Parsaei’s tender first-time feature, circling with its lonely protagonist through a cold urban landscape in which the longing for affec…

Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger is an audacious film. It is a true original, a film that has immediately divided audiences and critics alike upon its release. It is not hard to understand w…

Documentarian John Wilson attended a seminar on how to make a Hallmark movie for one reason: to learn how to make a commercially viable film about concrete. Wilson’s esoteric topic for The History …

Set over a languid summer on a remote Korean island, Yoon Dan-bi weaves a tender tale of the threshold from childlike naivety to adult feelings, from friendship to romance, from a lingering past to…

Is the title of David Ayer’s sentimental survival epic a reference to animalistic qualities in humans, or to human qualities in animals? Most likely, the moniker of the seasoned story of a br…

The voices are always there. From the first scene they follow Jamal (Jonathan Jules) around, whispering in his and the audience’s ears. That it’s all his fault, he is a loser, a liar, a sinner, a saint, chosen to protect Kayla (Saskia Chana) who just moved into the room next door. Jamal wants to invite her over for dinner, cook his favourite dish his mother used to make. But even routine tasks like going to the market for the ingredients and setting the table become a challenge with all the hissing and shouting in his mind.

As a story with a pedophile parent as its main character—with whom the audience is apparently supposed to empathize, at least that is what the director and co-writer does—Marlene Emilie Lyngstad's speculative psychopathological portrait is, of course, anything but the titular term. Nevertheless, it’s fitting, since “cute” is the first thing that comes to mind, in a decidedly derisive tone, in the face of the sensationalist story’s attempts at being provocative. The commercially advantageous seal is almost guaranteed for a drama giving a podium to perversion, as it’s represented by the outwardly unremarkable protagonist Richard (

It’s odd for a theatrical film to not truly require any moving images. But this is the case with Fernando Trueba's intuitive documentary on one of Spain’s nostalgically distinctive musical styles and its interpreters. Part concert film, part monograph, part homage, Bajañí allows its audience to succumb to the sounds and rhythm of the titular instrument. Bajañí means “guitar” in Caló, the traditional language of the Romani people in Spain and Portugal. It’s a fitting title, corresponding to the formal simplicity and acoustic flow of the scenes, effectively listening to the guitar songs and singing of flamenco guitarist…

From the moment that Onslaught begins, those familiar with the works of director John Carpenter will know what Onslaught’s director Adam Wingard is after. Using the Albertus font that Carpenter’s f…

Yet another hybrid of fiction and documentary at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, María Aparicio's cinematic city tour through Madrid evolves into a visualised narration of the life of Juan Bialet Massé and the struggle of the workers’ rights movement. For the latter, the Catalan-Argentine intellectual became a pivotal figure as a pioneer of Argentine labour law. Though this is only one of the many facets in the busy biography of the physician, lawyer, agronomist, and entrepreneur whose so-called Bialet Massé Report of 1904 investigated and publicised the working classes' cruel exploitation and harsh living conditions.

With the self-centered sophistication of a filmic family romance, Angelica Ruffier's debut documentary unearths supposedly forgotten feelings in the house where her brother and she spent part of their teenage years. The last of these becomes the titular time period; a formative moment, the emotional intensity and impact of which were blunted by the years. “The Beautiful Year,” to which the French original title translates, was marked by a sapphic infatuation with her schoolteacher Sylvie Bresson, but also fear of her father’s violent outbursts. After all, a bit of transgenerational trauma is almost obligatory in this newly emerged sub-genre of hybrid-documentary, or in Ruffier’s case, hybrid-drama.

Grief as an individual experience has become a widely accepted reality, polar to Naëmi Ada's dramatic scenario that looks at its opposite qualities. The German director instead approaches grief as a universal human experience with the ability to form an instant intimate connection between strangers. Having known and lost the same person creates an immediate bond between the ambivalent protagonist of her feature film debut and the bereaved of a young man she never met. This compelling, if highly improbable premise becomes the foundation and framework of a gentle character study exploring different kinds of loss, emotional separation, and instability.

On the cover, Marilyn Monroe might be the heroine of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s semi-biographical short film. But the glistening presence at its core is really Ellen Burstyn, who at 93 years old emb…

At a little under half an hour’s runtime, Avi Mograbi’s documentarist meditation carries the weight of a historic chronicle of forceful erasure and the determined persistence of life. S…

“The reality is a nightmare,” Laura Poitras said in an interview about her spectral short film, premiering out of competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival. The Oscar-winning director and produc…

Bryan (Austin Abrams) is an ordinary young man. He is finishing up his latest job, the delivery of an organ to a hospital, and is arguing with his girlfriend Michelle (Sara Paxton) on the phone. As…

Economic and ecological priorities are at the core of Lu Po-Shun's classic but also a tad conventional coming-of-age tale of two teenage boys from different sides of the timely conflict. The question of what’s more essential, the transition to sustainable energy sources or securing the livelihood of the local people, hovers over the newly established friendship of 13-year-old Jun (Jaden Wang) and the slightly younger Jasper (Aloysius Looi). Though tactically encouraged by Jasper’s father (Andie Chen), who recently moved to the small Taiwanese fishing village from Singapore on behalf of his solar power business, their bond is eyed with suspicion by Jun’s group of friends and local adults alike.

Physical presence is only a painful provisory in Massih Parsaei's tender first-time feature, circling with its lonely protagonist through a cold urban landscape in which the longing for affection can only be temporarily numbed. For Iman (Pooyesh Frozandeh), this happens through clandestine nightly encounters in public parks or side alleys. Emotionally and socially, the young Iranian exile remains a stranger in Berlin during a drab, depressing winter. It’s a time when the city reveals its most harrowing side, which can be especially challenging for those who haven’t been conditioned to it since childhood.

Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger is an audacious film. It is a true original, a film that has immediately divided audiences and critics alike upon its release. It is not hard to understand why with Iñárritu making numerous bold creative decisions throughout, adding layer-upon-layer to its initial setup and making multiple hard left-turns in developments that are best left unspoiled. Digger starts off following Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), the inheritor of a mutli-generational oil company, who has continued to grow his grandfather’s company and expanded their drilling operations to risky sites in Antarctica and Greenland.

Documentarian John Wilson attended a seminar on how to make a Hallmark movie for one reason: to learn how to make a commercially viable film about concrete. Wilson’s esoteric topic for The History of Concrete requires some help in determining the formula for his film to be appealing to producers. After learning that Hollywood has girl-bossed too far and current sensibilities are correcting course, amongst other Hallmark trends, he has all he needs.

Set over a languid summer on a remote Korean island, Yoon Dan-bi weaves a tender tale of the threshold from childlike naivety to adult feelings, from friendship to romance, from a lingering past to an uncertain future. The idyllic setting becomes a dreamy allegory for the world of youthful fantasies that is crumbling bit by bit under the increasing weight of adult responsibility and understanding. A crucial shift interrupts the calm routine of 17-year-old Jin (Sim Su-bin) when her childhood friend Dujae (Kim Eo-jin) returns from Seoul after his grandmother’s death.

Is the title of David Ayer's sentimental survival epic a reference to animalistic qualities in humans, or to human qualities in animals? Most likely, the moniker of the seasoned story of a brave man and his trusty canine companion fighting side by side to make it through an unforgiving wilderness is simply naming the reliable Hollywood narrative at the core of the minimalist plot. And admittedly, it apparently works, at least for those who love to see dogs as the better part of their humans, and don’t mind an uncomfortable undertone of militarism stalking a seemingly innocent tale.

Class differences and careerism are not only narratively at the core of Gael García Bernal’s diffuse directorial debut, which reveals more about both issues through its own shortcomings than …

This story the audience was about to see really happened, claims a text at the beginning of Francesco Carrozzini’s promotional portrait of Diesel founder Renzo Rosso. “So, yes, it’s true.” However,…

A certain kind of eclectic ennui seems ingrained in Federico Francioni and Samuele Sestieri’s meandering montage of its prototypical protagonist’s search for fulfilment. An actress on the bri…

On the cover, Marilyn Monroe might be the heroine of Maggie Gyllenhaal's semi-biographical short film. But the glistening presence at its core is really Ellen Burstyn, who at 93 years old embodies an imaginary elderly version of the iconic actress. The latter’s legendary physical presence, coined by Billy Wilder as the titular “flesh impact”, becomes an antithetical analogy of Burstyn’s mesmerizing aura. With an odd combination of confidence and insecurity, she walks into a New York black-box theatre to audition. Peter Sarsgaard and Sepideh Moafi, who play the director and producer, are initially irritated, explaining to her that she’s a couple of decades too old for the part.

At a little under half an hour's runtime, Avi Mograbi's documentarist meditation carries the weight of a historic chronicle of forceful erasure and the determined persistence of life. Set in a landscape haunted by the ghosts of a past that has supposedly been scrapped from it, the unassuming account of two elderly friends on a long walk weaves memory and trauma, war and friendship, into a cinematic exploration of individual and historic identity. Accompanied by his Arabic teacher and friend Ali Al-Azhari, the Israeli filmmaker goes in search of the destroyed Palestinian village of Saffuriya from which Al-Azhari was expelled during the 1948 Nakba.

“The reality is a nightmare,” Laura Poitras said in an interview about her spectral short film, premiering out of competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival. The Oscar-winning director and producer does this bitter fact justice by shrouding the grim reality of the kidnapping and abduction of migrant residents in the US by ICE in the style of genre cinema. The documentary itself is only 25 minutes, but that is enough for the unsettling account of the ICE enforcement surge in the wintry Minneapolis of 2024. This year the deportation rate of migrant citizens increased over 70 per cent, fuelled by the brutal tactics of the Trump administration.

The Dardenne brothers have dedicated their filmography to telling stories about marginalized individuals within European society. Their latest, Young Mothers, is a natural fit for the directors, de…

Bryan (Austin Abrams) is an ordinary young man. He is finishing up his latest job, the delivery of an organ to a hospital, and is arguing with his girlfriend Michelle (Sara Paxton) on the phone. As he prepares to leave and head home, he is called over by a nurse and offered the chance to make a “Schedule A” delivery, the highest priority and promising bonus pay, to Raccoon City. After initially being ready to call it a day and hash things out with Michelle in-person, Bryan quickly changes his tune when he hears about the extra money and even lies about having the gear on his car - namely chains for his tires - that will help him traverse the snowy mountain terrain leading to the city.

Despite the lack of intentional humour in Tristan Séguéla's overwrought courtroom affair, its title almost seems like an in-joke. “Bad Lawyer” would be more suitable for the shrill portrait of criminal-defence attorney Léonard Landry (Laurent Lafitte). His antics in court, where he finds himself as the defendant after a disastrous double-deployment in two concurrent trials, have the absurd hyperbole of the unruly behaviour from supposedly well-adjusted people, like Bad Teacher, Bad Santa, or Bad Moms. Though Landry’s actions, which never hindered his sweeping successes as a legal professional, are hardly more realistic than those of the characters in the mentioned ‘Bad’-films, either the director-co-writer or one of his three co-writers, Marcia Romano, Simon Jacquet, and Stéphane Sebag, wanted more serious material.

There comes a moment in Mario Martone’s curious mélange of comedy and creepiness, premiering out of competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, when the audience seems as exasperated as Ton…

A year ago, Kathryn Bigelow entered the Venice competition with her apocalyptic atomic strike thriller A House of Dynamite; a nerve-wracking what-if scenario about the USA reacting to a nuclear att…

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a story of juxtapositions. Drama and action. Pensive and over-the-top. Sacred and profane. Protection and endangerment. Mother and father. Latif (Mahershala A…

Class differences and careerism are not only narratively at the core of Gael García Bernal's diffuse directorial debut, which reveals more about both issues through its own shortcomings than its story. Its title is an unsubtle allusion to the hapless hero getting out of his depth after saving wealthy Mexican magnate Abel (Jorge Salinas) from drowning. This act of heroism happens on a Cuban beach where Camilo (portrayed by Bernal, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Mariano Pensotti) works as a lifeguard. His unspectacular routine is uprooted as Abel uses his millions to whizz him away to his Yucatán factory.

This story the audience was about to see really happened, claims a text at the beginning of Francesco Carrozzini’s promotional portrait of Diesel founder Renzo Rosso. “So, yes, it’s true.” However, many of the images and scenes are created with AI. ‘So, yes, it’s fake.’ The antithetical comparison is one of countless to come in the next 90 minutes; a tell-tale sign of texts generated by AI which the director and co-scriptwriter proudly presents as the defining force behind the (officially) first AI feature in the programme of the Venice Film Festival.

A certain kind of eclectic ennui seems ingrained in Federico Francioni and Samuele Sestieri's meandering montage of its prototypical protagonist’s search for fulfilment. An actress on the brink of mid-life crisis, Chiara (Carlotta Velda Mei) wanders through the Roman cityscape, unable to hold on to any permanent personal and professional engagement. For more than two hours the director-duo follows their female figment of male fantasies of erotic discontentment and narcissistic neediness through a precarious succession of jobs, fleeting experiences, performances and emotional displacements in a Rome at once physically obtrusive and optically surreal.

As ugly as the ethics behind the show and the showman at the centre of Lance Oppenheim’s media morality play are its vintage visuals. Grainy, slightly distorted images, the unfavorable angles…

There comes a moment in Mario Martone's curious mélange of comedy and creepiness, premiering out of competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, when the audience seems as exasperated as Toni Servillo's overchallenged protagonist with the perpetual proclamation of the titular term. In the director’s native Italian, Scherzetto means prank or, as it’s used in the sinister story, “gotcha!” The first time it is uttered by Servillo’s septuagenarian Daniele Mallarico, an illustrator whose mental state has aged as unfavourably as his drawings, it’s harmless enough. But every repetition lends the cue word a more uncomfortable undertone, not only on an acoustic level.

A year ago, Kathryn Bigelow entered the Venice competition with her apocalyptic atomic strike thriller A House of Dynamite; a nerve-wracking what-if scenario about the USA reacting to a nuclear attack of unknown origin, the formal mastery of which contrasted starkly with its highly problematic ideological implications. Now first-time director Alexandre Smia brings a European take on a strikingly similar scenario to the same festival, though his chamber play about a newly elected French president facing a nuclear crisis is screening out of competition. This is only apt given the in every sense smaller frame of the French follow-up that’s interesting at best as a polar opposite to Bigelow’s blockbuster.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a story of juxtapositions. Drama and action. Pensive and over-the-top. Sacred and profane. Protection and endangerment. Mother and father. Latif (Mahershala Ali) is a hitman. When he is away from home, his wife takes care of their two children and their newborn baby. Given his occupation, Latif has to maintain a distance between his work and his family. But when he receives a call in the middle of a job informing him that his wife has unexpectedly passed away, this distance starts to close.

The Secret Agent is a time machine transporting viewers to 1977 Brazil. The sights, sounds, and feeling, all come to life in director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sprawling neo-noir political thriller. …

Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead trilogy established the core elements of the franchise: ruthless ‘Deadites’ brought to life by reciting incantations from the Book of the Dead, slapstick comedy, and …

Anyone who watched Boots Riley’s debut feature film Sorry to Bother You knew to expect something unconventional from his follow-up, I Love Boosters. Riley delivers on this and then some with this s…

Discover the gripping tale of a father's fight for freedom and survival in 'The Weight'. A story of resilience during the Great Depression.

From the moment that Onslaught begins, those familiar with the works of director John Carpenter will know what Onslaught’s director Adam Wingard is after. Using the Albertus font that Carpenter’s f…

Discover the gripping tale of a father's fight for freedom and survival in 'The Weight'. A story of resilience during the Great Depression.

It’s the middle of the Great Depression. Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke) is a widowed father raising his daughter Penny (Avy Berry). The two share enough grit and spunk to counter the hardness of the times, The Weight opening with Murphy driving fast on a dirt road being chased by the police. Murphy vows never to be caught, and Penny encourages him to drive faster, embracing the thrills to be found in Murphy’s livelihood. The two share a close bond, Murphy enamored and protective as a father while Penny observes Murphy’s gritty demeanor and schemes, even providing him with her witty two cents on how to pull off a scam.

From the moment that Onslaught begins, those familiar with the works of director John Carpenter will know what Onslaught’s director Adam Wingard is after. Using the Albertus font that Carpenter’s films became known for, a synthy score, and soon revealing itself to be about government corruption and a group of outsiders having to fight for their lives, Onslaught wears its Carpenter influence on its sleeves. True to that, it is all centered on a “Hawksian woman”, an element Carpenter himself was influenced by in the works of Howard Hawks…

Making the move from woodsy New England to sprawling San Bernardino, California when I was nine years didn’t seem like a huge deal at the time. It’s easy to make new friends at that age, and despit…