Rating: 3.0★
By the early 2000s, climate change had begun its slow migration from academic journals and environmental conferences into the popular consciousness, and Hollywood, being Hollywood, spotted an opportunity. The Day After Tomorrow arrived in May 2004 riding a wave of genuine cultural anxiety about global warming, its marketing leaning hard
5th Cinecitta Italian Doc Season
Roberto Rossellini did as much as anyone to change what cinema could be. The father of Italian neorealism, he dragged the camera out of the studio and into the rubble of a real, wounded country with Rome, Open City and Paisan, and the films he made went on to shape
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of documentary that asks almost nothing of you at first and then, quietly, takes everything. The Sailor (2021), directed by Slovak filmmaker Lucia Kašová and produced across Grenada and Slovakia, is precisely that sort of film. Its subject is Paul Earling Johnson, an eighty-year-
Rating: 3.5★
Roberto Durán is, by any measure, one of the most significant boxers of the twentieth century: a ferocious, street-hardened fighter from the Chorrillo neighbourhood of Panama City who rose to become world lightweight champion in 1972 and held the belt for six and a half years before going on
Rating: 2.5★
There are certain films that loom large in the collective memory simply by virtue of existing at the right moment in history, and Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959) is a fairly textbook example. Based on the centuries-old fairy tale made famous by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm,
Rating: 2.5★
Kidnap thrillers were practically their own cottage industry around the turn of the millennium. The genre had plenty of fuel: real-world anxieties about political instability in Latin America, the post-Cold War scramble of private military contractors and crisis negotiators, and a film industry hungry for adult dramas that
5th Cinecitta Italian Doc Season
The Italian documentary maker Gianluca Matarrese has built a name on pointing his camera at people who soon forget it is there. With I Want Her Dead he plants himself inside one feuding family in a remote Calabrian village, where a woman named Luisa is at war with her mother,
Rating: 2.5★
Robert Flaherty is one of those filmmakers whose reputation rests almost entirely on a handful of films made across a relatively short window, yet whose influence on documentary cinema is almost impossible to overstate. His debut feature, Nanook of the North (1922), established a model for location-based, observational filmmaking
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular breed of low-budget independent animation that arrives with almost no fanfare, earns its reputation entirely by word of mouth, and ends up outlasting films that cost a hundred times more to make. On-Gaku: Our Sound is squarely in that company. Based on Hiroyuki Ohashi&
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of road trip film that has less to do with the road and everything to do with the people sitting uncomfortably close to one another in it. A Real Pain (2024) belongs firmly in that tradition, though it swaps the car for a guided Holocaust
Muslim International Film Festival (MIFF)
Some films you watch, and some you live alongside. Birds of War belongs to the second kind. The filmmakers Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak, a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman, turn the camera on themselves and their own thirteen-year love story, assembled from
Rating: 3.0★
The Faroe Islands, that cluster of eighteen wind-battered specks of rock sitting halfway between Norway and Iceland, have rarely been the subject of narrative fiction film. The archipelago's population at the time of this film's production sat at around 45,000 people, a close-knit
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