Author Stephanie Watts

A little over a year after it became legal for women to drive in Saudi Arabia, to open a Saudi Arabian film with the image of a woman behind the wheel feels like a triumph. This is just how director Haifaa...

The opening of Jawline is not dissimilar to a scene from Ingrid Goes West. 16 year-old Austyn Tester is on an impromptu, increasingly long photoshoot, posing and giving pointers to his friend who’s in the...

It can be difficult to fully forgive. Forgiving others can be trying, and self-forgiveness can sometimes feel downright impossible. Rocketman, the glitzy, musical biopic of Elton John’s life, is grounded in...

After the success of It, it’s no wonder studios are scrambling to re-adapt more of Stephen King’s work. Pet Sematary has enough gruesome, dark content to potentially have audiences hiding under the covers...

Captain Marvel, the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first solo female superhero film since the series began with 2008's Iron Man, has been capturing the hearts of many critics and audience members this...

Captain Marvel is an origin story that’s been a long time coming: the first Marvel female superhero to get her own movie, since the franchise kicked off 11 years ago with Iron Man. This feels like a...

What would you do if you were a 10-year-old orphan in Japan? Form a rock band with your three orphan friends and become a pop sensation, of course. And in We Are Little Zombies, Makoto Nagahisa’s debut...

In Elisa y Marcela, director Isabel Coixet brings a tender story of love and desperation in a time of intolerance to the big screen (and small, with the film being distributed by Netflix). At times less...

“He said I’m not fat,” says Verida to her horrified friend in Flesh Out. The man who has insulted her so much is her fiancé, for whom the young Verida is trying to gain as much weight as possible...

Bing Liu’s Oscar-nominated documentary, Minding the Gap, begins by following the lives of group of skateboarders who find solace in being able to get out and skate when life gets too much. But the film is...

The third instalment in a surprise hero trilogy revealed in 2017’s Split, Glass is a very messy (but very fun) twist on the superhero movie that brings all of M. Night’s hard work since 2000’s...

Yann Demange’s second film after the tense ’71 takes him to 1980s Detroit to tell the story of Rick Jr. (newcomer Richie Merritt), a boy who is coerced into becoming an undercover drug informant for the...

Paul Dano’s directorial debut comes in the form of Wildlife, a drama about a teenage boy who watches his parents’ marriage fall apart. The film reflects on the mess of relationships and takes parents off...

This review was originally published as part of our Toronto International Film Festival coverage on 16/09/2018. Diamantino cannot really be pinned down as one genre. Mixing sci-fi, comedy, fantasy and much...

Zhang Yimou makes his return after 2016’s rather disappointing The Great Wall – the most expensive production made in China – with Shadow, a dark tale of a warrior who uses his lookalike in an attempt...