Author Carmen Paddock

Florìan Jur’jev’s work across several decades has led to him inventing his own language for colour, art, and creation. As an architect, musician, filmmaker, and painter, his Renaissance qualities are...

Alla Sergeyevna Demidova is a seminal name on the Russian stage. Renowned for her tragic heroines, she forged a close relationship with directors Yuri Lyubimov and Anatoly Efros and their often troubled...

Two women wash up on a deserted beach. They seem to be tossed there by the waves, not by choice, but theirs was the choice to flee - something. They set up life in a surprisingly immaculate home, eating crabs...

With Nashville’s iconic music industry still largely devoid of LGBTQ+ household names, it is easy to spend a lifetime listening to country western music without realising gay women are behind many words and...

Daryn introduces his gym with a bright smile and positive spin on everything and everyone. He is proud of the fitness centre he inherited from his grandfather and bodybuilding father. Yes, his gym staff might...

A sense of failure - moral, intellectual, physical - pervades Benediction, Terence Davies’ biopic of the World War I poet (and survivor) Siegfried Sassoon. The older Sassoon attempts solace through...

As Stanton Carlisle leaves an unidentified body and his family home going up in flames, Guillermo del Toro establishes that his latest noir is far from a straight adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946...

It is difficult to make a thriller about history, especially events as well-known as the talks between Chamberlain’s Britain and Hitler’s Germany. Munich: The Edge of War, adapted from Robert Harris’...

As Olivia Colman’s spry narration whisks viewers back to a storybook fin-de-siècle London, Louis Wain struggles to keep his five sisters housed and fed. His one talent – drawing animals – has never been...

Recent cinema has been marked by its reckoning with myths and legends: some based in truth, some overt fabrications, some lost to time, some painfully traceable. Spencer tackles the Royal Family; Dune brings a...

“This is a social experiment!” the peppy school counselor cries, hoping the Jets and Sharks will put aside their war for one dance. The social, economic, and cultural stakes for these teenagers take centre...

The uncanny tips into the unnerving - and then the downright disturbing - with alacrity in Sandra Wollner’s tale of futuristic family trauma. The Trouble With Being Born, in the case of protagonist Ellie, is...

When a film takes every chance at extravagance, the chance of falling is equal or greater to the chance of flying. House of Gucci takes this gamble, and while it might not pay off entirely, the big-budget...

This film was previously reviewed in March 2021 as part of our Berlinale coverage. Not many films can start with three minutes of explicit sex and proceed to be both smarter and more shocking from there,...

Expat florist Jessica wakes to the sudden sound of a mysterious boom. She hears it again walking down the streets of Bogotá, and again having a short rest after visiting her sister Karen in hospital - a...