Author Carmen Paddock

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,...

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...