Author Carmen Paddock

This film was previously reviewed in October 2019 as part of our London Film Festival coverage. Billie Piper’s audacious directorial debut follows imperfect – sometimes downright unpleasant – people....

Writer, director, and cinematographer Valentyn Vasyanovych’s film opens with a wordless execution and shallow burial captured on infrared cameras. Suddenly it is 2025 – one year after “the war” in an...

A young family uproot to a 19th century farmhouse in upstate New York after the husband lands a coveted academic position. The wife puts her artistic dreams on hold to support him and look after their young...

Off the back of awards darling Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s feature debut finally reaches UK screens six years after its initial release. Songs My Brothers Taught Me follows JaShaun Winters (JaShaun St. John) as...

“This story is based on true events from the imagined life of Fernande Grudet, aka Madame Claude” reads a title card opening the second feature biopic of the legendary mid-century French brothel owner....

This film was previously reviewed in February 2020 as part of our Berlinale Festival coverage. Anyone familiar with European folklore will have an idea of where Christian Petzold’s latest feature may end...

A three-and-a-half-hour documentary could feel like a school assignment, but director Maria Speth and subject Dieter Bachmann make spending time with one teacher and his diverse class a leisurely joy. Mr...

Polina (Alina Korol) works at her father’s fish shop. She sleeps poorly worrying about her family, and when an eccentric woman claims to be selling a tea to cure insomnia she buys some, half curious and half...

There are a couple of 2021 releases titled Limbo, and Soi Cheang’s gritty serial killer drama distinguishes itself with its relentless nastiness. Its cops and criminals use anything they can find as...

Who We Were (Wir wer waren) switches the question of ecological destruction to one of identity, calling on experts including astronauts, marine biologists, economists, feminist scholars, social scientists, and...

Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love, and they set up a date before knowing the other’s name. Viewers know them as Giorgi (Giorgi Ambroladze) and Lisa (Oliko Barbakadze). Lisa walks home alone, and...

Sometimes, a story is less about whether someone is guilty or innocent than it is about the pressures and perceptions surrounding and following an ambiguous action. The local police chief, Laurent (Jérémie...

In Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas’ portrait of an artist as a young man, migration, love, art, and family variously take centre stage. Young Parisian Labidi declares that he wants to write his first novel for...

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...