Author Carmen Paddock

The luthier’s craft can seem one from another age, the archaic title passed down despite evolving instruments and musical styles. In today’s music industry, Reuben Cox is one of the most respected makers...

Halfway through Zero Fucks Given, the tale of a budget airline flight attendant and her colleagues, the team are taken out for a coaching day. Here, they run emergency and first aid drills over and over,...

This film was previously reviewed in March 2022 as part of our Glasgow Film Festival coverage. Harry Wootliff’s sophomore feature is poised between erotic psychodrama and thoroughly British kitchen sink...

In 2016, 40 years after London’s punk scene took off, John Corré burned £5 million worth of memorabilia - largely from the collections of his parents Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, who owned the...

Elie Grappe’s sports and politics drama, set against the 2013-2014 Maidan Uprising, skilfully captures societal unrest through the eyes of a youngster with ambitions she tries - and fails - to separate from...

The story is timeless even if the specifics are new. A young man, entitled, the world at his feet, has his eyes on investment banking supremacy. However, in his hubris he makes a crucial error and is banished...

Executive produced by Darren Aronofsky, Wladyka’s drama begins in stress and hopelessness and then drives this terrifying mood to the maximum. Kaylee (Kali Reis) is a former boxer whose sister vanished...

Fans of Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In will find familiar ground in her latest feature. She reunites with Juliette Binoche for another tale of a woman’s search for that elusive romantic spark, but this...

In the age of blockbusters, a microbudget debut is always an exciting prospect. Lanarkshire filmmaker Paul Morris’ first feature is set among an abandoned housing estate, overrun by gangs in camo and black...

Justin Kurzel’s explorations of masculinity in crisis continue with a drama loosely based on the events leading to the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, Australia - notably on the behaviour of its...

Food and the female body are a potent recipe for horror, and this recipe is taken to a supernatural extreme in Ruth Paxton’s domestic horror. After the horrifying (accidental?) death of the family patriarch...

Jeremy LaLonde’s near-future sci-fi, written prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, sees humanity threatened by an even more serious plague: a fungus in the world’s water supplies that leads to certain death,...

This film was previously reviewed in March 2021 as part of our Berlinale coverage. The teenagers passing through this Swiss halfway home have suffered various traumas and losses, but their ebullience and...

With at least eleven faithful and a dozen loose adaptations of Cyrano de Bergerac committed to film, Wright’s return to top romantic form stands out as a musical. The plot remains the same: soldier and poet...

This film was previously reviewed in October 2021 as part of our London Film Festival coverage. There may be rest now - Amin is an accomplished academic, living with his partner Kasper in Copenhagen,...