My Favourite Cake review - woman, love, and freedom

The taxi cab has become a recurring motif in modern Iranian cinema, perhaps because it approximates to a kind of dissident bubble within the authoritarian state, a public space where individuals can have private and often subversive conversations.

Lee review - shaky biopic of an iconic photographer

Anyone who has seen Lee Miller’s photographs – those taken of her in the 1920s when she was a dazzling American beauty, those she took as a World War Two photojournalist – and read about her extraordinary life will have thought: this will make a great biopic.

Red Rooms review - the darkest of webs

A woman sits at her computer. She copy-pastes an address into a search engine. She goes to street view. She zooms in. Click. Opens a new tab. Click. Searches a name. There are no lines of green code on a black screen or indecipherable programmes that we associate with sketchy online activity. Instead the woman is doing the kind of amateur sleuthing that anybody with a computer and internet connection can do. 

Starve Acre review - unearthing the unearthly in a fine folk horror film

Blame the high cost of city housing, or killer smog. What else can explain a bright young couple’s move from 1970s Leeds to Starve Acre, an isolated, near-derelict farm in rural Yorkshire that has to be the spookiest back-to-the-land setting since The Wicker Man.

Paradise Is Burning review - O mother, where art thou?

Paradise Is Burning is one of those films that appears to be designed to convince the outside world that Sweden isn’t all IKEA interiors and ABBA sing-alongs. There are blissful long summer days spent in pine forests and plenty of lithe-limbed girls, but the focus here is on a social underclass that Ingmar Bergman rarely filmed.

Black Dog review - a drifter in China