Author Carmen Paddock

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...