Author Anahit Behrooz

This film was previously reviewed in October 2021 as part of our LFF coverage. Time and time again, across history and across societies, homophobia and its violence has always been upheld by the law. In...

This film was previously reviewed in October 2020 as part of our London Film Festival coverage. “You’re back on the dick,” a friend of Ben’s shrewdly observes minutes into their coffee date. She’s...

Two young people are running: towards each other, away from each other, with each other – the direction barely matters, just that they don’t stop. The sun burns bright overhead, casting everything in...

There is something deliriously off-kilter about Limbo, Ben Sharrock’s absurdist comedy about a group of asylum seekers awaiting processing on a remote Scottish island. Nothing is ever quite right. In its...

This film was previously reviewed in September 2021 as part of our Venice Film Festival coverage. Much has been made of Denis Villeneuve’s crusade for the physical institution of cinema but one thing is...

Will the COVID-19 pandemic ever end? Not if cinema has its way. For reasons that are bemusing at best, the film and television industry seems determined to preserve the misery of the last 18 months in...

This film was previously reviewed in September 2021 as part of our Venice Film Festival coverage. The Last Duel, Ridley Scott’s latest men-with-swords epic, is a medieval courtly tale for the #MeToo...

Land of Dreams, Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari’s eccentric political satire set in a dust-ridden United States where censuses collect dream data, is a profoundly American film – and a profoundly Iranian...

Watching Atlantide at the Venice Film Festival, in the heart of the Venice Lagoon, is a sobering experience. Gone are the hordes of tourists and expensive film stars, gone are the gondolas and fridge magnets...

It has been almost a decade since Benh Zeitlin released Beasts of the Southern Wild to rapturous acclaim and his long-awaited follow-up comes – at first – as something of a surprise. His directorial debut...

This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame Say what you will about the MCU, it is without a doubt cinema’s most punctual franchise. With 23 films released over 11 years, the arrival of a new...

Content warning: this film includes themes of rape. This awards season’s most divisive film is, at its heart, an object lesson in expectations and subversion. The set-up – a young woman targets...

It is difficult to know where to generically place Lázaro Ramos’ Executive Order. Set in a near future where Brazil’s Black population are forcibly deported to Africa, the film’s uncanny urban realism...

In Dan Harmon’s cult TV classic Community, cinephile Abed Nadir is obsessed with lending every proceeding a metatextual twist. Eventually, after one too many obscure film references and being directed at...

The End of Us is one of the first films to be produced by the recently established Buzzfeed Studios and it feels, appropriately, like an extended skit. The lighting has the flattened quality of Buzzfeed’s...