Rating: 3.5★
When Rocky arrived in 1976, it was one of those films that seemed to come from nowhere and land everywhere. Made on a budget that barely registered by Hollywood standards, written by and starring a virtually unknown Sylvester Stallone, it won three Academy Awards including Best Picture and turned its
Rating: 3.5★
Werner Herzog has spent much of his career seeking out people who have pressed themselves against the outer edges of human experience, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) may be the purest expression of that instinct he ever put on film. The subject is Dieter Dengler, a German-born
Country Hungary
Hey, You is a feast for the eyes. Péter Szoboszlay's Hungarian short is one of those pieces where you could pause on almost any frame and happily hang it on the wall, and while it is not fine-art realism, for its time and its means it is
Country Hungary
Golden Bird is a small, beautifully judged piece that does a surprising amount in seven minutes. The work of Dóra Keresztes and István Orosz, it is a striking black-and-white line drawing brought to life, and I liked it a great deal. Three and a half stars for a
Country Estonia
Incipit Vita Nova is a gloriously strange little thing, and I mean that as a high compliment. Hardi Volmer's Estonian short barely feels like an animation at first, playing more like a surreal live-action oddity, before it tips its hero into a fantastical world and the stop-
Rating: 3.5★
British cinema has a long habit of finding grace in the unglamorous corners of its own cities, and Scrapper (2023) fits squarely into that tradition. Writer-director Charlotte Regan sets her debut feature in a working-class London suburb, following twelve-year-old Georgie, who has been living alone in
Rating: 3.5★
By 2009, Walt Disney Animation Studios had spent the better part of a decade in something of an identity crisis. The golden run of the late 1980s and 1990s, the period critics tend to call the Disney Renaissance, had petered out, and the studio had spent the intervening years releasing
Rating: 3.5★
A Town Called Panic arrives from a corner of European animation that rarely gets much attention on this side of the Channel: the Belgian tradition of wilfully odd, low-budget, high-energy filmmaking that seems entirely unbothered by what anyone else is doing. The film grew out of a television
2020s
Every so often a documentary short comes along that reminds you how much can be achieved in under twenty minutes when a film-maker knows exactly what they are reaching for. Mars Verrone's Buckskin is one of those: a tender, beautiful and quietly educational portrait of the director&
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of documentary that uses the camera not as an observational tool but as an act of love, almost of conjuration. Dick Johnson Is Dead, released in 2020 and distributed through Netflix after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, belongs firmly to that tradition. Kirsten
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that demand you arrive prepared, and Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion is one of the less apologetic examples of the type. Released in 1997 by the Tokyo animation studio GAINAX, in partnership with Production I.G and Star Child Recording, the film was produced as
Rating: 3.5★
Katia and Maurice Krafft were, by most reasonable measures, operating at the outer limit of what a human being can choose to do and survive. The French volcanologist couple spent roughly two decades driving themselves as close as physically possible to active eruptions, camera in hand, building an extraordinary personal
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