Author Carmen Paddock

Not many films can start with three minutes of explicit sex and proceed to be both smarter and more shocking from there, but Radu Jude’s latest manages to continually one-up itself in its exploration of...

Jonas Bak’s feature grows from the intimate domestic sphere to the overwhelming grandeur of world stages without ever losing sight of its central figure. In Germany’s Black Forest region, Anke is fresh...

Alice Diop’s latest documentary captures life in the Paris suburbs, meandering between characters, vignettes, and geographies of the city with inquisitiveness but without interrogation. The wildlife-watching...

At 66 minutes, Hong Sangsoo’s latest film is a masterclass in trimming fat from narrative bones. Introduction immediately pulls viewers into its lovable characters’ world, where their family- and...

The teenagers passing through this Swiss halfway home have suffered various traumas and losses, but their ebullience and irrepressible vitality as they share secrets and gleefully antagonise each other are...

Faruk is stuck. The teenager’s family lives among Sarajevo’s poorest, and he strikes out with older family members’ semi-legal dealings in an attempt to inject some excitement, if not escape, into his...

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...