Author Tom Bond

It’s rare to leave the cinema wishing a 90-minute film was longer, but Meryem Benm'Barek’s Sofia shows enough promise to demand a more substantial story. She wastes no time getting into the action, going...

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II is an endearing Japanese rom-com with a high-concept premise. Asako (Erika Karata) falls in love with Baku (Masashiro Higashide) at university, but he walks out of her...

The Dead and the Others is a complex creation from directors Joao Salaviza and Renee Nader Messora, which can’t be easily categorised into the usual fiction and documentary boxes. Developed alongside the...

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the kind of audacious filmmaking experiment for which film festivals like Cannes were invented. It favours mood and an ingenuity of image over any instinct to deliver a...

The spirit of ’68 is alive and kicking in At War, the latest politically charged drama from the formidable pairing of director Stéphane Brizé and actor Vincent Lindon. We’re thrown straight into the...

This film was previously reviewed on 23/05/17 as part of Cannes Film Festival. Roaring down the trail blazed by the likes of Lena Dunham’s Girls, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Gillian...

“Ever get the feeling you fucked up somewhere a long time ago and you’re living a bad version of the life you were supposed to have?” Under the Silver Lake, from It Follows director David Robert...

Argentinian writer-director Alejandro Fadel doesn’t pull any punches in his ghoulish and gory horror, Murder Me, Monster. His opening scene, a close-up of a woman with a slit throat slowly bleeding out and...

Lars Von Trier is back with The House that Jack Built, a 150-minute grotesque epic going deep inside the mind of a serial killer. Does it confirm his genius and justify his provocations or is it the...

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Film franchises prompt that question on a daily basis, with every semi-successful character or creation plundered for as many sequels and spin-offs as audiences...

You may expect a film about the current Pope to be of interest only to religious viewers, but veteran director Wim Wenders tries his hardest to generate a broader audience for his gentle documentary. This is a...

Hirokazu Kore-eda is on familiar ground with Shoplifters, the story of an unconventional family unit on the fringes of society who beg, steal and borrow to get by. It’s the most fun Kore-eda has been in...

In 2012, when Obama was president and racism in America seemed to be fading, Django Unchained featured a notorious scene with the Ku Klux Klan. Squabbling about eyeholes and spare bags, the white supremacist...

Alice Rohrwacher’s gentle domestic comedy, Happy as Lazzaro, is a hard film to define. It’s full of grim social realism, light conversational comedy, and surreal jumps in time that warp reality to make...

Ray Bradbury’s iconoclastic 1953 novel has not been this relevant for a long time. Fahrenheit 451 was written as a defence of books and intellectualism against the growth of TV and other mindless...