Features

“Stars collide, worlds divide/What a pretty piece of flesh/You are a pretty piece of flesh”  —One Inch Punch, 'Pretty Piece of Flesh' There are films that are difficult to write about. Sometimes...

As Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) sleeps securely in her mother’s arms, a bright circle of light skittishly bounces across the door, its glow illuminating the murky shape of a key. Nelly and Marion (Gabrielle Sanz)...

Recent cinema has been marked by its reckoning with myths and legends: some based in truth, some overt fabrications, some lost to time, some painfully traceable. Spencer tackles the Royal Family; Dune brings a...

There is something deliriously off-kilter about Limbo, Ben Sharrock’s absurdist comedy about a group of asylum seekers awaiting processing on a remote Scottish island. Nothing is ever quite right. In its...

“To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.” In The Simpsons episode titled ‘Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment’, after battling humourless lawman Rex Banner, Homer Simpson...

A darkened interior frames a lone man striding across a dusty plain. It’s one of the most well-worn images in cinema, and it provides a powerful visual shorthand for the themes of any Western: domesticity vs...

Best Picture. Best Director. Best Actress. Winning over 100 awards in total, Nomadland’s success at the Oscars may have seemed, ultimately, inevitable, but there was still a surge of warranted joy when...

In a conversation with musician David Byrne, director Mike Mills said it’s his natural urge to make every film feel like the chorus of a song. Choruses are often the zeniths of a song. A wondrous combination...

With an outpouring of festival and critics’ awards over the last 18 months, it seemed almost certain that Kelly Reichardt’s stunning First Cow would garner a handful of Academy Awards nominations in early...

In its interminable wardrobing, lavish setting and populist pro-Princess pitch, Spencer would seem to perfectly embody what Christopher Hitchens once labelled the “kitsch iconography” that surrounds its...

The best films of 2021 marshalled all of the techniques of cinema to tell their stories in ways that could only be achieved within the medium of film. The Father mastered editing and production design, using...

Well, 2021 wasn't the improvement we all deserved after a dire 2020. Perhaps that was just wishful thinking. I sincerely hope that you and your family are safe and well, as we prepare to enter year three of...

There is a common misconception in filmmaking which presumes the director to have total and divine confidence in both their subject matter, and the various processes by which they tell the story. Ben Reed’s...

Douglas Sirk is a tough sell in a cynical age. Perhaps he would be in any. His plots are often shallow and seeped in wish-fulfilment; the performances are overwrought and slightly archaic; his sets, despite...

In Isla Badenoch’s The Elvermen, fish are the size of men and men are of mythical proportions. The film (which premiered on June 5, 2021 at Sheffield DocFest), was shot in a narrow window of time, between...