film reviews
Nick Hasted

This Icelandic film begins in the titular land of steam, as rain and mist envelop an erratic car which soon tumbles to its doom.

Jill Chuah Masters

On the Record, the latest documentary from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (acclaimed directors of The Hunting Ground), dives into the sexual misconduct allegations against music mogul Russell Simmons, the so-called ‘Godf

Tom Baily

The Dead and the Others won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes in 2018, perhaps due to the supreme devotion to subject and place that this macabre work exhibits. It is a film of startling visual power and mood, with a drifting storyline that becomes bizarrely captivating.

Joseph Walsh

Ten years in the making, Thomas Clays third feature, starring Charles Dance and Maxine Peake, is a remarkable and potent example of genre-splicing British independent filmmaking. 

Joseph Walsh

Picture an antiquarian book dealer. Typically, its all Harris Tweed, horn-rimmed specs, and a slight disdain for actual customers. At the beginning of D.W.

Graham Fuller

Jeanne d’Arc was 19, she believed, when she was tried for heresy by her English enemies in Rouen in 1431. Of the actors who have played her onscreen – Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, Leelee Sobieski, Milla Jovovich among them – none has evinced more wolf-cub-like fierceness or childlike purity of purpose than does Lise Leplat Prudhomme. That’s because Prudhomme was 10 when she portrayed Jeanne from age 17 onwards in Joan of Arc, Bruno Dumont’s sequel to his 2017 Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc.

Demetrios Matheou

Frenchman Olivier Assayas is a writer/director who can produce small-scale, cerebral dramas (Personal ShopperClouds of Sil Maria) and muscular genre pieces, such as five-hour true-crime epic CarlosWasp Network falls into the latter camp, though given its spectacular, real-life material, it’s a disappointingly unengaging political thriller. 

Owen Richards

Thank goodness no-one’s going anywhere this year, because 7500 does for planes what Jaws did for bright yellow lilos. Set entirely within the cockpit of a passenger jet, this thriller trims all the fat, leaving a taut nightmare that pulls no punches.

Markie Robson-Scott

Yoram (Menashe Noy), a vet in a Tel Aviv safari park, knows how to treat a sick jaguar (startling to see such a magnificent beast in an oxygen mask) but he has no idea how to comfort his troubled 17-year-old daughter Roni (a powerful Zohar Meidan). Both are mourning the death of Roni’s mother a year ago, but all they can offer each other is a tortured silence.

India Lewis

The Pet Shop Boys' film It Couldn’t Happen Here, originally released in 1988, has been given a new outing on a BFI Blu-ray/DVD that contextualises it with special features. While it's an entertaining snapshot of a particular time in British and pop history, and while I don’t wish to be churlish, that's about as far as it goes.