Author Sophie Maxwell

This article contains spoilers... What does the word ‘witch’ mean to you? I think of cauldrons, Terry Pratchett’s novels, Sabrina and her cat Salem. Of course, there’s also the real-life Salem, the...

‘Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, born in the black neighbourhood of some American city, whether in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy. This...

Benjamín Naishtat’s Argentinian mystery Rojo follows Claudio (Darío Grandinetti), a prominent lawyer whose life begins to unravel after an odd encounter with a stranger. Set in 1975, Rojo’s Argentina is...

For what seems like the hundredth time, Steve Bannon positions himself next to a young woman for a photograph. With a flourish, he says "you go in the middle – a rose between two thorns." By the end of The...

Border South is the story of the migrant trail that leads from southern Mexico to the United States. The documentary explores life on the trail, alongside the lives of a Nicaraguan migrant and an American...

Tim Travers Hawkins’ documentary film XY Chelsea follows two years in the life of whistleblower and activist Chelsea Manning. In 2010, Manning leaked thousands of classified US government documents to...

Dome Karukoski’s biopic of J.R.R. Tolkien brings to life the origins of the author’s career, charting the course of a life taken over by imaginary worlds. Shivering in the trenches, a young Tolkien...

In his essay on Richard Eyre’s Iris Murdoch biopic Iris for the Guardian, Martin Amis claims that ‘very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.’ These supposed...

In recent years, horror and thriller fans have seen a wave of unusual and original films, confronting vital political themes (Get Out, 2017) and kicking back against tired generic tropes (Hereditary, 2018)....

For some, the thought of being trapped in a small room with a limited time to solve puzzles and escape is sheer nightmare fuel. Maybe your boss thinks such activities are the perfect team-building exercises....

In Asunción, Paraguay, a wealthy older couple are faced with financial crisis after Chiquita (Margarita Irun) is served with a prison sentence. Her partner, Chela (a riveting Ana Brun), is a nervous introvert...

In the Fade could be called a revenge thriller, but if that conjures an image of a titillating action movie, it couldn’t be more misleading. Fatih Akin’s film is a quiet but unrelenting tragedy, led by a...

Christopher Kelly’s A Cambodian Spring documents several years of protests in a small Phnom Penh community, whose inhabitants are facing eviction as part of the city's development plans. The film charts the...