Rating: 3.5★
The question at the heart of Saint Maud is a wonderfully simple, unnerving one: is this young woman a saint in the making, or is she quietly losing her mind? That single ambiguity, held carefully and never cheaply resolved, is what makes Rose Glass's debut such a compulsive
Rating: 3.5★
Some films impress you. A few make you sit up and wonder how on earth they were made at all. The Tale of the Fox is firmly the latter. This is a stop-motion feature very nearly ninety years old, the painstaking puppet work of Władysław Starewicz and his daughter
Rating: 3.5★
The story behind This Is Not a Film is almost more extraordinary than anything within it. In 2010, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was handed a six-year prison sentence and a staggering twenty-year ban on making films, for the crime of supporting the opposition during Iran's
Rating: 3.5★
There is something quietly extraordinary about the project behind A Thousand Suns, and it starts with a piece of cinema history. Back in 1973, the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty made Touki Bouki, a landmark of African cinema about two young lovers dreaming of escape to Paris. It is a
Rating: 3.5★
Whisky is a strange one to recommend. On paper, everything about it should be a chore, and yet I found it quietly gripping in a way I did not see coming. That almost never happens to me with films like this, and I am still not entirely sure how it
Rating: 3.5★
There is a slightly awkward truth I have had to make my peace with after working my way through a fair chunk of Ingmar Bergman's filmography: I keep coming away respecting these films rather than loving them. I admire them. I think about them afterwards. And then I
Rating: 3.5★
Few things in a thriller satisfy quite like being unable to guess what comes next, and A Tale of Two Sisters kept me wrong-footed almost the whole way through. I'd settle into what felt like a firm theory, the pieces seeming to click into place, and then
Rating: 3.5★
There is a nice surprise waiting in the credits of Twisters, and it is the kind of surprise that makes you sit up a little straighter in your seat. This giant, deafening summer tornado movie was directed by Lee Isaac Chung, the man behind Minari, one of the most tender
Rating: 3.5★
I came to The Maze Runner with my expectations set firmly to low. It sits on Letterboxd's "Top 250 Most Fans" list, which in my experience is often code for popular rather than good, and I had it filed away under interchangeable young-adult blockbuster, the
2020s
I came to Leave Me Alone partly for its lead. Kiran Sonia Sawar was wonderful in the miniseries Pure, a show I loved, and the chance to watch her carry a horror short was reason enough to say yes when the film-maker Shehroze Khan asked me to take a
Rating: 3.5★
Some films you watch for greatness, and some you watch to see where it all began. Dead of Night sits firmly in the second camp, and there is absolutely no shame in that. This 1945 Ealing Studios production is one of the foundation stones of British horror, made by a
Rating: 3.5★
I have watched and written about a lot of Wes Anderson by now, enough to call him one of my favourite directors, though I would stop short of calling him one of the best, and I think that distinction matters. The two are not the same thing. A favourite is
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