Author Calum Baker

In its interminable wardrobing, lavish setting and populist pro-Princess pitch, Spencer would seem to perfectly embody what Christopher Hitchens once labelled the “kitsch iconography” that surrounds its...

In a clean break from his occasionally successful biopic habit, director John Lee Hancock returns with an original screenplay and a plunge into the “dark side of America". By the end, his protagonists find...

Sócrates opens with a death, or rather a specific moment after that death. An abrupt cut shows us, in closeup, a woman laid on her back, eyes closed, with someone else’s hand touching her forehead and...

Arriving at a Normandy chateau, Englishman Bernard (Gethin Anthony) seems lost and pensive. His partner is pregnant, and this is clearly no good thing. He exits his car and immediately finds himself...

The Fight is a film of great baseline competence and only scant insight. As a document of four emblematic battles brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Trump administration—respectively...

Named for an old saw that under certain weather conditions one can commune with the dead, Hlynur Palmason’s A White, White Day thrives in exactly this melancholic liminality. Its two opening sequences...

Compelling images open this rural slow-burner, the third feature from French-Galician writer-director Oliver Laxe. A sea of trees, bathed in nocturnal blue, begins slowly – mysteriously – to collapse: one...

Lee (Bethany Anne Lind) has killed a man in her auto shop. With next to no clear context, we watch her wrap the body in plastic, bundle him into his own car, and drive to a local lake. She tosses the weapon...

For Elena McMahon, things start simple enough: after years’ hard work reporting global humanitarian atrocities, her paper reshuffles and she is demoted to following the US campaign trail. Her new subject:...

End of the Century is defined by ruptures: in sound, in time, in mode. The first 10 minutes or so are dialogue-free as we follow Ocho (Juan Barberini) through Barcelona, the camera unobtrusively panning with...

69 years ago, the inaugural issue of Cahiers du cinéma featured as its cover star Sunset Blvd. Suhaib Gasmelbari opens his documentary Talking About Trees along the same lines, as its subjects – a gang of...

In criticism, time-distance is everything: time to let a film sink in, time to give it more thought and more watches, and time to see what impact it has on the culture. Time also, often, for the artists...

The ground is littered with fantastic and fascinating titles that just failed to make our top 100 films of the decade: Margaret, Blade Runner 2049, Foxtrot. Somehow Michael Pearce’s “moody”, empty Ramsay...

Our countdown of the Top 100 Films of the Decade continues apace as we start reaching the titles with some very high aggregate scores. Debate continues to rage over the relative merits of (usually heavy)...

At its very best, cinema not only influences its audience but changes the very medium around it; a great film builds itself as it plays, showing you how to view it and redefining itself in real time. And this...