Film

You come at the king, you bet­ter not miss – but unfor­tu­nate­ly, Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky), an aspir­ing rap­per and first-time kid­nap­per, who meant to abduct the son and heir of hip-hop mogul David King (Den­zel Wash­ing­ton), acci­den­tal­ly grabbed the chauffeur’s boy instead. No mat­ter, he still wants 17.5 mil­lion Swiss francs – cash, unmarked,
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The sight of Jodie Fos­ter speak­ing flu­ent French is the most engag­ing ele­ment of this limp and con­vo­lut­ed psy­chodra­ma from the usu­al­ly reli­able Rebec­ca Zlo­tows­ki. Fos­ter plays apsy­chi­a­trist named Lil­lian Stein­er who we meet just before she storms upstairs to tell her neigh­bour to turn down the vol­ume on ​‘Psy­cho Killer’ by The Talk­ingHeads. Soon
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You’d be right to want to exact cold revenge on aper­son who tor­tured you and plant­ed night­mare imagery of death and suf­fer­ing in your mind for life. Yet would you go so far as to mur­der them for the greater good, as penance for not only your own trau­ma, but for the many oth­ers who
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The Acad­e­my Awards may be aglitzy par­ty with an arbi­trary approach to dish­ing out Oscars but, with­in the cir­cus, are moments of grav­i­tas. Lás­zló Nemes is the embod­i­ment of grav­i­tas. His debutfea­ture,Son of Saul, is arelent­less immer­sion in the quest of aJew­ish pris­on­er whose job, in 1944, is to clear Auschwitz’s gas cham­bers of thedead.
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Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman chronicle the student movement for Palestine through the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University. With documentaries exploring very recent events, filmmakers can source all the relevant footage and interviews needed in a short period of time. But conventional wisdom suggests that the longer you spend grappling with your subject,
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Katell Quillévéré’s poetic French period drama is powered by an understated chemistry between Anaïs Demoustier and Vincent Lacoste. At a funeral, a character reads out the deceased’s favourite poem; it’s a blazing, lonely love poem that articulates the private space where passions light up the night. “For where secrets exist, life also begins,” says the
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Love and humour gives way to bitterness and rancour in this slick and involving portrait of an Iranian family in turmoil from Saeed Roustaee. It’s hard to imagine that you could go from loving a person deeply to loathing their guts and wanting them dead within a matter of seconds. Yet that sorry notion sits
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Belgium’s Dardenne brothers return with a typically emotive film about a group of very young women dealing with the dramas of childbirth. The opening ceremony of this year’s Cannes Film Festival acknowledged the recent death, at just 43 years of age, of Émilie Dequenne, who won Best Actress for her role as the title character
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The second instalment of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s lesbian genre film trilogy manages to just about snag a passing grade. Ethan Coen has earned the right to do whatever the hell he wants when it comes to making art. Whether that translates to whatever the hell WE, the audience, want is another matter entirely,
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Sebastián Lelio’s musical take on Chile’s MeToo movement is a misjudged gum-smacking mess. There is a delicate threshold separating self-awareness from petulance, and the directors who know how to best thread it understand that saying less often does the most. With The Wave, Sebastián Lelio offers a staunch, loud example of the opposite, crafting a
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We speak to the mastermind behind The Phoenician Scheme about family, fathers-in-law, and the great, grand plan of all things Wes Anderson. The Phoenician Scheme marks Wes Anderson’s twelfth feature film, starring Benicio Del Toro as Zsa-zsa Korda, a rich, ruthless businessman who sets out on a complex journey to secure his legacy with his
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An art theft spells disaster for Josh O’Connor in Kelly Reichardt’s excellent Vietnam-era heist dramedy. It’s difficult to say what truly motivates James Blaine Mooney (Josh O’Connor) to blow up his own life. Frustration, perhaps, with an uninspired suburban existance with his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and their two rambunctious sons Tommy and Carl (Jasper
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Bi Gan’s third feature is an epic in every sense of the word, taking viewers on a sprawling odyssey through cinema. Bi Gan’sResurrectionopens with a title card that sets the scene for his third feature: we’re in a future where the secret to eternal life has been discovered. It’s simple – don’t dream! Humans who
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