Author Carmen Paddock

Denis Côté has embraced the challenge of pandemic cinema with a socially distanced look at the sound, fury, and nothingness of words. Social Hygiene plays out in five scenes, all centred around the writer...

As its title suggests, Avi Mograbi’s documentary presents like a textbook: with the director as narrator and guide, speaking directly into camera like a lecturer, the film interpolates talking heads from...

Cuneiform expert Alma works at Berlin’s prestigious Pergamon Museum, but like most academics she needs that last bit of funding. The fastest way to secure this is participation in an experiment with a...

Rhayne Vermette’s feature is deeply embedded in family and place. The director plays Renée, a woman returning to her rural family home in the Métis Nation, and the community welcomes her back with lively...

Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) wants everyone – sworn on God before the court – to know her heart is gold. Polished, honeyed phrases say all the right things: she is worried about her elderly charges, she...

This film was previously reviewed in February 2021 as part of our Berlinale Film Festival coverage. Brazil, 1899. Slavery has been abolished for 11 years. The women of the Soares family find their old...

This film was previously reviewed in February 2020 as part of our Berlinale Film Festival coverage. Hybrid documentaries often use their newly-filmed footage to advance narrative drama in the absence of its...

This film was previously reviewed in February 2020 as part of our Berlinale coverage. As the title suggests, The Twentieth Century opens at the close of the previous one. A young elite is groomed and ready...

Netflix’s romcom trilogy comes to an end as its heroine and narrator Lara Jean Covey (Lana Condor) awaits university acceptance letters, and she cannot wait to spend undergrad with dedicated boyfriend Peter...

For a man as loudly individual and extroverted as Truman Capote – bestselling author of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Ebs Burnough’s documentary begins remarkably intimately. Capote’s...

Jesper W. Nielsen’s film opens to archival shots of Holocaust atrocities and Nuremberg Trials, with a calm female voice narrating how, when psychologists subjected SS leaders and concentration camp guards to...

This film was previously reviewed in March 2020 as part of our Glasgow Film Festival coverage. Melina León weaves events and references from throughout Peru’s tumultuous 1980s into a feature debut that...

This film was previously reviewed in June 2019 as part of our Edinburgh Film Festival coverage. Inspired by a pre-Dracula vampire novella, Emily Harris’ Gothic thriller plays fast and loose with its plot...

This film was previously reviewed in February 2019 as part of our Berlinale Film Festival coverage. Austrian drama The Ground Beneath My Feet (Der Boden unter den Füßen) explores the cracks in a...

Thirty-one years after their first Excellent Adventure (and twenty-nine since the critically mixed Bogus Journey), Bill and Ted are back – and contrary to predictions, Wyld Stallyns have not yet written the...