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…

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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…

“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.

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.

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.

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…

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,…

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 …

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.

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…

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…

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…

One can’t help but wonder how exactly Na Hong-jin’s fourth feature made it into Cannes competition, the cinematic standard of which is, according to artistic director Thierry Frémaux, so high that …

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…

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…

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.

Director Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars is steeped in grief. Set in a post-apocalyptic world after a flu eradicated most of the population, the characters are engulfed with the immensity of this loss…

Director Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars is steeped in grief. Set in a post-apocalyptic world after a flu eradicated most of the population, the characters are engulfed with the immensity of this loss. Their family members. The small things, like going to the grocery store. An entire way of life is gone, and all that is left in its wake is trying to survive. The Dog Stars is a film about finding a will to go on, about carrying the grief with you and not letting it drive you into despair.

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 of hidden cameras and a palette of the most hideous shades, all aggressively oversaturated, make David Bolen’s cinematography both a reflection of the world the characters are part of and an (anti-)aesthetic copy of their formative success show. The latter is Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator. Created at the height of reality TV, each episode would feature a varying number of filmed encounters of so-called decoys—adults posing as children as young as 12—and the titular wannabe-abusers whom they had met online.

Looking at Derek Jarman's titular historical drama today, it’s easy to be swept away by its innovative settings and wild costumes, its artistic daring and queer self-awareness. But it’s hard to imagine how revolutionary and risky the project actually was at that time and how hostile and homophobic the UK, its politics, laws, and morals, were in 1991. Roughly 35 years later, Theo Rollason looks back at the creation of Jarman’s Edward II as well as its social and political impact. It was a time when, as a protester for gay rights points out in one of the engaging archival scenes, Britain had more anti-gay laws than any other Western country. 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance. It is rapturously entertaining and gaudy at times, an ode to the slashers of the 1980s while also being a fun and gory slasher on its own terms and a reckoning with the ills of those films. Director Jane Schoenbrun takes on a meta approach, deconstructing the genre as it follows film director Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) who, after receiving praise for her debut feature film at Sundance, is working on a remake of the fictional slasher…

Amziah King (Matthew McConaughey) is a man of almost mythic proportions. Everywhere he goes, life seems to happen. People flock to him, his warmth and charisma envelop them in the heat of his inter…

Conceived after nearly two decades of collaboration between the prominent photographer and the renowned filmmaker, and feeling about as long, Fabio Lovino’s personal portrait of Marco Bellocc…