Film

In late 2018, France ground to ahalt on the back of the gilets jaunes protests in which naffed-off labourers downed tools and expressed their grief on the streets. In Paris, members of the law enforcement anti-gang brigade (BRI) were handed aremit to tool up as quickly as possible and take whatever steps were necessary to

Nostalgia for the Nineties has, by now, overtaken pop-cultural nostalgia for the Eighties. You can see it in the cut of everyone’s jeans and arenewed enthusiasm for Mazzy Star as much as you can the visual style of broadcast animé like Ghost in the Shell or Goodbye, Lara. Forgotten Island, the new film from Puss

It’s hard not to feel numb to today’s endlessly grim headlines. Anti-migrant blockades in Portsmouth; Reform lobbing political hot potatoes left, right and centre; streamers slashing life-saving dinghies for metrics. Contemporary politics has been glutted with grimness. Yet, in Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood’s 2026film Rebellion,areport on Seventies/​Eighties radical social justice movements stemming from Bradford,

Amanda Kramer has long been fascinated by the strange, often funny ways we perform ourselves into being. With By Design, which finally makes its way to the UK, Kramer takes this curiosity into the realm of objects with the story of awoman (Juliette Lewis) who desperately wants to to swap bodies with awooden chair, raising

For 75 of the 80minutes of Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’sNAZA, we are in the dark. Only literally, for the words we hear spoken from the dimly lit rooftops of Tel Aviv could not be any clearer. They come from the mouths of former IDF soldiers, whose faces are obscured by night and whose voices

Camille (Juliette Lewis) seems to have perfected the art of being present without ever quite being seen. But to be seen is to be known, and to be known is to be loved – or so one would think. Her weekly lunches with her friends Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney) are only exercises

This is afantastic film, in all senses of the word. Brad Bird, part of the original Pixar brain trust, who contributed to arguably one of the late golden ages of American feature animation, is back with awork – alabour of love, no less – that would happily rub its chrome-plated shoulders among the eccentric likes

A spiritual summation of Yeoh’s career until that point,The Stunt Womansets out to explore alandscape of rampant risk, but doesn’t go very far. Wide-eyed and ambitious yet playful and sensitive, Yeoh’s eponymous character Ah Kam hustles her way into astunt unit, led by Master Tung (Sammo Hung, astalwart action filmmaker himself). She becomes emotionally enmeshed

I never went to film school, but Iknow from friends and the dripfeed chatter of academic folk tales that the first lesson you learn on the first day, one that becomes amantra to all budding future filmmakers, is this: don’t ever make amovie where Derek Jarman is the bad guy. It’s just not agood idea

Kopple’s film itself has an elegiac quality to it, the rugged beauty in her setting and in the weathered faces of its working-class inhabitants often reading as testimony from avanished world. Yet part of the reason why the years have been kind is that the film is so steeped in nostalgia to begin with. It’s

Among the many things David Fincher’sThe Social Networkgave us back in 2010 – countless memes, one of the greatest teaser trailers of all time, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ arrival as acomposing duo for the ages – was asense that tech wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg might just be abad actor. Naturally one would be suspicious that

In 1953, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first humans to reach the summit of Mount Everest. But for all the films that have since been made about the mountain, it has rarely been allowed to belong to the people who live in its shadow. Jennifer Peedom’s Tenzing attempts to redress that imbalance, shifting

The basic fact of the matter is, if you really want to nudge up the quality or impact of afilm you’re making – any film – then you could do alot worse than hire actor Monica Dolan as your lead. Although the films she tends to star in often aren’t massively high profile, she is

In Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming The Odyssey, ancient Troy is played by the Ksar of Aït Benhaddou, an 11th-century Moroccan fortress known for imposing mountain ranges nearby, golden Saharan sun and a30 per cent tax rebate. The film has attracted considerable debate about historical authenticity, with intrigued onlookers scrutinising everything from costume to casting. Nobody, however,

At the absolute least, debutant director Padraic McKinley is probably going to be bombarded with work offers on the back of this feisty first feature about agroup of convicts coerced into assisting with agold heist during the Great Depression. Ethan Hawke is really quite good as aclean-cut shitkicker named Murphy who is sent down for

For those still bitter that renegade Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu’s divisive theatreland satire Birdman beat out Richard Linklater’s Boyhood for the best picture Oscar in 2015, his latest dramedy sounds like athreat rather than apromise. Tom Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, the larger-than-life American oligarch who’s accidentally doomed the world with his reckless North

For generations of Sudanese women, cotton meant money of their own. Grandmothers spun raw fibres into thread and sold it, granting women who might otherwise have no income adegree of independence. It was also one of Sudan’s great colonial commodities, grown for wealth that largely travelled elsewhere. In Suzannah Mirghani’s Cotton Queen, those fibres come

A teen girl’s best friend is more important than her first kiss and while few would willingly admit to this simple truth, it governs the world of girlhood as we know it. Admiration, rivalry and erotic ambivalence colour the pages of Flic (Marni Duggan) and Minna’s (Galaxie Clear) yearbook at an all-all girls boarding school

We’re calling it the biggest Oscar snub of modern times – Charles Melton should have been recognised for his tremendous performance in Todd Haynes’ May December as ayoung man groomed by and subsequently married to an older woman (played by Julianne Moore). He didn’t allow that to worry him, and instead leaned into his work,

The films didn’t exactly support Ichise’s 2005 statement that ​“Japanese horror is scarier than American horror”, but they were exemplary of his unwavering belief in the genre as an inexpensive, and therefore, low-risk arena for experimentation. Many of these kinds of absurdist horror-hybrids were ultimately able to ride the J‑Horror wave overseas to great success: