Reviews

The opening line of Woo Sang must be one of the boldest in recent memory. As the camera sweeps ominously across a modern cityscape, narrator and grieving father Yoo Joong-sik (Sul Kyung-gu) drops his...

“I was lucky enough to be able to write about movies in a way that people were willing to pay for,” Pauline Kael says in the opening of What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael when asked why she decided to...

Les insoumuses – the disobedient muses: actress Delphine Seyrig and filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos. Coming together in the early 1970s, they formed a collective focusing on feminist issues and film. They...

What would you do if you were a 10-year-old orphan in Japan? Form a rock band with your three orphan friends and become a pop sensation, of course. And in We Are Little Zombies, Makoto Nagahisa’s debut...

In Elisa y Marcela, director Isabel Coixet brings a tender story of love and desperation in a time of intolerance to the big screen (and small, with the film being distributed by Netflix). At times less...

Agnès Varda has in recent years become something of an internet phenomenon. Newly discovered by a younger generation, she has not only reached the status of a beloved icon, but also everyone's favourite...

Sports documentaries have been done to death, but when a compelling, relatable tale of athletic redemption meets an expert storytelling team, the result is a surefire hit. Ringside – following two teenage...

Similar to last year’s exceptional Waru, One Thousand Ropes deals with the intergenerational trauma of domestic abuse in New Zealand’s most disadvantaged groups without glossing over facts or showing...

Ritesh Batra excels at slow-burn romance and proves this once again in Photograph. Returning to his native Mumbai after several English-language projects, his latest film draws on the foundation of his 2013...

This Canadian documentary stems from work that began in 2009, when world environment experts began investigating whether the Earth had left the Holocene epoch and entered the Anthropocene, where humans shaped...

“He said I’m not fat,” says Verida to her horrified friend in Flesh Out. The man who has insulted her so much is her fiancé, for whom the young Verida is trying to gain as much weight as possible...

For a film set in motion by a death, Dafne bursts with life. The titular heroine (Carolina Raspanti) suddenly loses her mother in the film’s opening minutes – the accident is never fully explained, but...

The recruitment of white Europeans to the cause of ISIS is a topic which keeps coming up in films. Prolific French director André Téchiné is the latest to add to this list with his newest film, Farewell to...

When a film opens with its lead announcing in voiceover that the summer will never end, the beast of cliche rears its deadly horns. Sho Miyake’s decision to have wayward slacker Boku (Tasuku Emoto) declare...

Chiwetel Ejiofor’s acting career features many projects in which he explores African stories and identities across both the continent and the diaspora. Often, he does so under white and western directors,...