Author Carmen Paddock

This historical romance’s most striking, well-rounded quality is its immediate sense of place. While the setting was moved from Yorkshire to southern Scotland in the adaptation process, the small-town...

Twenty years ago Heath Ledger danced his way down some bleachers and into film legend with an enthusiastic rendition of ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’. Its lack of vocal finesse coupled with a total...

Dumbo hits UK cinemas this week, and it promises a stellar cast, some tear-jerking animation, and a hopeful return to form by Tim Burton. While judgement cannot yet be passed on the film itself, the most...

After an extraordinarily troubled pre-production and subsequent Netflix distribution, Triple Frontier may have been best left in the drawer. The action thriller follows five ex-special forces friends who...

This article discusses plot points of Benjamin, out in cinemas on Friday, and generalises freely about the lives and habits of young adults in the US and UK. Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade – out in the UK in...

Many films have explored the physical, mental, and emotional toll of starting a new life – whether by choice or force – in a foreign country. Joining this particular brand of coming-of-age story is...

Sports documentaries have been done to death, but when a compelling, relatable tale of athletic redemption meets an expert storytelling team, the result is a surefire hit. Ringside – following two teenage...

Similar to last year’s exceptional Waru, One Thousand Ropes deals with the intergenerational trauma of domestic abuse in New Zealand’s most disadvantaged groups without glossing over facts or showing...

This Canadian documentary stems from work that began in 2009, when world environment experts began investigating whether the Earth had left the Holocene epoch and entered the Anthropocene, where humans shaped...

For a film set in motion by a death, Dafne bursts with life. The titular heroine (Carolina Raspanti) suddenly loses her mother in the film’s opening minutes – the accident is never fully explained, but...

Sometimes, a film entrances so entirely that its plot matters little. This is the case with Turkish drama A Tale of Three Sisters (Kız Kardeşler), which follows its three headstrong heroines as each return...

Documentaries are meant to show facts objectively, but when the narrative style loses personal accounts in its passivity viewer engagement is tested, if not abandoned entirely. Kameni Govornici (The Stone...

Agnieszka Holland’s account of the man who exposed Stalin’s Ukrainian famine is a straightforward account whose tone occasionally jars with genre touches – these dynamic choices would work better if...

Gentrification is the enemy in Bait, Mark Jenkin’s black and white drama set on Cornwall’s fishing coast and the UK’s only entry to the Berlinale’s Forum programme this year. The philosophical and...

A film which opens with a closeup on its subject’s privates will not be to everyone’s taste. It is hard to separate the pornography throughout The Blue Flower of Novalis (A rosa azul de Novalis) from its...