Reviews

Rakel (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and Ingrid (Tora Christine Dietrichson) are at a locker room getting ready for an aikido class, one of the many spontaneous activities the roommates take part in together when the...

This film was previously reviewed in October 2020 as part of our London Film Festival coverage. In one of the first scenes of Notturno we see a distraught mother mourning her lost son. She is stood wailing...

As Disney bends another movie to its Disney+ Premier Access release strategy, the expected cinematic scope of Raya and the Last Dragon is curtailed by home viewing. The film hurtles in head-first with the...

Who We Were (Wir wer waren) switches the question of ecological destruction to one of identity, calling on experts including astronauts, marine biologists, economists, feminist scholars, social scientists, and...

Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love, and they set up a date before knowing the other’s name. Viewers know them as Giorgi (Giorgi Ambroladze) and Lisa (Oliko Barbakadze). Lisa walks home alone, and...

Comparisons to Before Sunrise are inevitable when two protagonists spend an evening wandering a city contemplating life. While Linklater’s trilogy is a more polished piece of work, Our Midnight doesn’t...

This film was previously reviewed in October 2020 as part of our coverage for Nightstream Film Festival. “You’re very lucky,” is the belittling phrase used throughout Natasha Kermani’s film, Lucky,...

Sometimes, a story is less about whether someone is guilty or innocent than it is about the pressures and perceptions surrounding and following an ambiguous action. The local police chief, Laurent (Jérémie...

In Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas’ portrait of an artist as a young man, migration, love, art, and family variously take centre stage. Young Parisian Labidi declares that he wants to write his first novel for...

Night Raiders begins with a prophecy, narrated in Cree over the images of sweeping North American forests. It tells of a swarm of giant mosquitoes and a saviour coming from the North to guide their people to...

Jonas Bak’s feature grows from the intimate domestic sphere to the overwhelming grandeur of world stages without ever losing sight of its central figure. In Germany’s Black Forest region, Anke is fresh...

At 66 minutes, Hong Sangsoo’s latest film is a masterclass in trimming fat from narrative bones. Introduction immediately pulls viewers into its lovable characters’ world, where their family- and...

Faruk is stuck. The teenager’s family lives among Sarajevo’s poorest, and he strikes out with older family members’ semi-legal dealings in an attempt to inject some excitement, if not escape, into his...

Vivian, the protagonist of Amy Poehler’s Moxie, starts the film timid, quietly submitting to the high school superlative of “most obedient”, and by the end of the film she is clad in a leather jacket...

Denis Côté has embraced the challenge of pandemic cinema with a socially distanced look at the sound, fury, and nothingness of words. Social Hygiene plays out in five scenes, all centred around the writer...