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That the UK release of Albert Serra’s period feature almost coincides with the July 14 Bastille Day celebrations, during which revolutionaries exhumed the remnants of Louis XIV’s corpse, could be...

Pigs make for effective publicity stunts. While filmmakers, artists and activists have purposely exploited the porcine for its political worth, some politicians have found themselves at the centre of a media...

Song to Song is both very similar and very different to Terrence Malick’s small but precious early filmography. Touring musicians BV (Ryan Gosling) and Faye (Rooney Mara) are identifiable as Bill and...

It is only at the end of Sarmad Masud’s My Pure Land that we discover the film is based on the true story of Nazo Dharejo, a woman confronted with the armed robbers attempting to invade her land. The story...

Appearing on screen above its English translation, the Swedish title of Amanda Kernell’s debut feature Sameblod might provoke some interesting thoughts in the minds of its English-speaking audiences. A film...

In this council estate-set psychological thriller, Toby Jones must confront his Oedipal complex after a date that goes badly wrong. During the title sequence, Carl looks through the kaleidoscope he was...

Jungle-set political satire from Amit V. Masurkar picks on the Indian electoral process as the butt of its 104-minute-long joke. Much like politics, Newton is a comedy in which two ridiculous male egos make...

“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” As part of the Focus on Poland strand, EIFF is screening Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal’s The Sun, The Sun Blinded Me. In one scene, a priest sits down to eat a...

Dangerously straddling multiple genres, Godspeed is a comedy crime caper and unlikely-friendship road movie that struggles to decidedly define itself as anything other than confused. With genre-bending beloved...

The opening film of this year’s Sundance London film festival is Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Beatriz at Dinner. Arteta seats Salma Hayek, John Lithgow, Chloë Sevigny, and others uncomfortably around the...

Although Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda has been working for decades, and although his films have been celebrated across the festival circuit, he is not yet a household name. That kind of international...

In her fourth feature Marianna Palka (known for Good Dick) absurdly illustrates how, by just being in relation to her adulterous husband, society will inevitably judge the behaviour of the woman scorned as...

Following his impactful 2012 documentary Chasing Ice, documentarian and activist Jeff Orlowski now turns to that which lies below the surface of the ocean: reefs of coral that have bleached in colour due to...

Based on a short story written by David Quammen, Walking Out presents the struggle between a father and his son to reconcile their differences. Combine Casey Affleck’s parenting nightmare in Manchester by...

To immediately disappoint fans of Gustave Flaubert, I Am Not Madame Bovary has no likeness to Madame Bovary other than its title. Chosen by the film’s translators as a more recognisable defamation than the...