Having recently explored heroin-heavy, vagabond living in Heaven Knows What (2014) and a bank robber’s desperation in Good Time (2017), directors Benny and Josh Safdie glimpse a different class…
Ever since Eve’s Bayou, Kasi Lemmons has foregrounded the need for black adolescents to realize the importance of their influence and existence in a society fundamentally…
Religious resentment dominates the order of service in Fernando Meirelles‘ The Two Popes, an adaptation of acclaimed screenwriter Anthony McCarten’s play about the unexpected resignation…
The King At first glance, adapting a story about the seat of privilege that is the throne might seem like an unexpected move for…
The Cave Since the Syrian Civil war began in 2011, there has been no shortage of documentaries about the plight of the nation’s people,…
In the aptly-titled Instinct, the one thing that Helina Reijn’s heavy, but hugely rewarding film seems to have a clear view on is that…
The scene is set. By arrangement, five wronged strangers convene for dinner at a high-rise apartment in Paris, all with an axe to grind…
In its attempts to chart the decaying values of a country in the midst of political turmoil, Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo is disruptive from the…
As the former assistant and protégé of the great Hirokazu Koreeda, Nanako Hirose has made a debut film that unsurprisingly doesn’t stray too far…
Ten minutes in and you would be forgiven for thinking that documentarian Marcus Lindeen has struck gold with The Raft, a seemingly ready-made story of…
Modestly assembled and expertly executed, David Wenham’s delightful debut feature Ellipsis conjures those occasions when human connection comes calling, often in spite of some general apathy. Employing…
It’s been 20 years since game-changer The Blair Witch Project hit cinemas, and yet the found-footage horror sub-genre is going strong. Just last year, both the well-regarded horror sequel Unfriended:…
The unconventional comedic drama Dear Ex has become a major success story for Taiwanese filmmakers Mag Hsu and Chih-yen Hsu. Nominated in eight categories at the Golden Horse…
Manolo Caro’s Perfect Strangers asks the question: how much do we really know about our nearest and dearest? Based on Paolo Genovese’s 2016 Italian comedy,…
It’s often been said that Mariah Carey has little humility, but how much of that is just for show? Four years on from the…
Despite a slew of savvy would-be war-propaganda films in the 1940s (headed by David O. Selznick’s Since You Went Away) that made the plight of army…
No stranger to treating lurid and uninviting subjects in a chilly fashion, Atom Egoyan’s glacial style of filmmaking has always been both a blessing…
It’s been a long 10 days at the 2014 LFF, but I’m back with news of films from the United States, the United Kingdom,…