Reviews

As talented a writer and performer as Sacha Baron Cohen is, the success of Borat always came down to one thing: its ability to shock. The moments where Borat’s clueless racism and sexism encouraged America...

Based on the 1982 young adult British novel Dance on My Grave by Aidan Chambers, François Ozon transports events to the North of France in the middle of the decade. Having read the impressionable book at...

With much of the world experiencing some degree of political and social unrest, it would seem a pertinent time for the release of New Order, Michel Franco’s dystopian thriller about societal collapse in...

Following his sublime directorial debut, God’s Own Country, Francis Lee once again delves into feelings of repression, loneliness and desire in Ammonite. Inspired by the life of trailblazing British...

In Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor, Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is an assassin who enters her targets’ minds in order to kill them. Though her work is remote (relevant in 2020, in the most sinister of...

In the opening minutes of Zanka Contact, a smart and funny sex worker named Rajae tells a dark joke about a car crash to her taxi driver. Moments later, she is in a dramatic crash herself. Larsen, a faded rock...

“There are civil trials and there are criminal trials. There’s no such thing as a political trial”. The Chicago 7’s lawyer is about to realise just how wrong he is. The second directorial feature from...

Lovers Rock is a humble prospect on paper- just over an hour long and set at an ordinary blues dance in Notting Hill in the early ‘80s. But with those simple ingredients, writer/director Steve McQueen and...

Step into any British university literature department and a debate on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness will be in full force. Is it a thoughtful examination of European imperialism, or a racist relic that...

Striding Into the Wind is a light hearted, coming-of-age romp that captures the turbulence of one’s early 20’s through the highs and lows of owning a car. Kun is an indecisive, final year film student,...

In one of the first scenes of Notturno we see a distraught mother mourning her lost son. She is stood wailing in a largely barren room, reliving his torture, reigniting her own pain. Her cries bounce off the...

Through several sinister vignettes, Bad Tales (originally titled Favolacce) covers the usual traumas of childhood: feeling inadequate about grades, awful canteen cooking, the terror of teenage pregnancy. In a...

This film was previously reviewed in June 2019 as part of our Edinburgh Film Festival coverage. Inspired by a pre-Dracula vampire novella, Emily Harris’ Gothic thriller plays fast and loose with its plot...

You could say a film about isolation, in 2020, is timely. But for all the many beats they have in common, forced separation and sudden grief leave different ashes in the mouth than abandonment. And it's that...

There's a story every creative falls for. It's the one where the off-beat genius, the colour-outside-the-lines character is finally given free rein with their crayons. Everything that comes before is hard, and...