Reviews

Piranhas is at once a thoroughly conventional gangster movie and a fresh take on the genre. If you’ve seen a mob flick made since The Public Enemy you can guess most of the plot, but director Claudio...

Few films commit to their titles like Ordinary Love. This is a movie of calm, contemplative realism that never falsely raises its stakes as it studies the effect of a cancer diagnosis on a retired couple in...

No two Pablo Larraín films are quite the same but, even so, Ema marks a departure. An opaque story told mainly through dance and music, it has his stylistic flair but, sadly, lacks his usual ability to find...

If you’re going to make a movie about modern youth, you have to consult with modern youth. Too many films in this genre feel embarrassingly dated the instant they come out, and it’s to Sarah Gavron,...

It isn’t easy to imagine oneself feeling much sympathy for the characters of a film about the Apartheid-era South African army, upholding their violently racist laws. Perhaps Oliver Hermanus’s greatest...

Originally published as part of our London Film Festival coverage in October 2019 As much as American cinema is based in LA, it’s New York that has always been the country’s most iconic on-screen...

With a rollout soured by director Michael Winterbottom being pressured by Sony to make its end credits less political, Greed arrives with little question when it comes to its anti-corporatist credentials....

A film like The Painted Bird does not want to be ‘liked’. It wants to shock, to disgust, to viscerally move, to make you reconsider just how civilised mankind really is. Seeking such reactions is a gamble...

If, at the start of the year, you were asked which Steven Soderbergh project sounded more exciting between ‘the one shot entirely on an iPhone’ and ‘the one starring Meryl Streep’, then it would have...

Despite its flippant title, For the Birds is a difficult watch. The documentary centres on Kathy Murphy, a rural New Yorker whose decades-long, all-consuming hobby of raising barnyard fowl has raised...

Nelly Ben Hayoun has a Hannah Arendt fixation. The stated point of the charismatic designer/director’s new documentary is to use Arendt’s philosophy as a springboard to find “the origin of knowledge”....

The fictionalised cinematic memoir is an inherently self-indulgent genre, yet actor-turned-writer Shia LaBeouf and director Alma Har’el use this intense introspection to capture the interpersonal and...

Nick Rowland’s feature debut, based on a short story, starts with explosive, explicit violence that immediately and effectively establishes the world: unforgiving, honour-bound, and never without the threat...

The summary of Lingua Franca below could mislead you into expecting some sort of topical melodrama, featuring the big issues of today blown up to cinema scale. Instead, the film is a slow-paced, slice-of-life...

Who do you send to kill the best killer in the world? Pioneering director Ang Lee’s 14th feature sees an ageing hitman seeking retirement. But learning the truth about his final hit puts the sensationally...