Rating: 4.0★
There are films you watch and forget by the following morning, and there are films that crawl under your skin and refuse to leave. Obsession is very much the latter. I went in completely blind, which I'd strongly urge you to do as well, because the experience is
Rating: 4.0★
I honestly don't understand what went wrong at the box office with this one. Kenji Kamiyama's animated take on Tolkien came and went in late 2024 with barely a ripple, dismissed by critics and ignored by audiences, and I cannot for the life of me work
Rating: 4.0★
There's a structural trick at the heart of Lady Bird that I couldn't stop thinking about after the credits rolled, and once you clock it, the whole film snaps into a kind of elegant, almost geometric focus. Everything comes in pairs. Two names for the protagonist,
Rating: 4.0★
Walter Hill doesn't waste your time. That's the first thing you notice watching Hard Times, his 1975 debut feature, and it's a quality that separates him from most filmmakers working then or now. No fussy preamble, no overly explained backstory, no hand-holding. A
Rating: 4.0★
I'll be completely honest: when I first sat down to watch Lucia Kašová's documentary The Sailor, I wasn't entirely sure I was going to enjoy it. That might sound like a strange thing to admit up front, but there it is. The opening is
Rating: 4.0★
I'll be straight with you: the first thing I saw when I looked up On-Gaku: Our Sound was the main character's face, and I genuinely could not tell what was going on with his mouth. This weird, jagged zigzag sitting under his nose that made
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: 4.0★
Some documentaries inform you. The best ones change you. Jaha's Promise belongs firmly in that second category. I came away from it heartbroken, furious, and genuinely inspired, sometimes all three at once, and that emotional complexity is exactly what separates a truly vital piece of documentary filmmaking from
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment early in Memoria where Tilda Swinton's character jolts awake at a sound nobody else seems to hear, a deep, resonant thud that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and I genuinely wasn't sure what kind of film I was watching. Horror?
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment watching Grand Prix where you stop thinking about cinema entirely and just grip the armrest. John Frankenheimer mounted cameras directly onto the cars, put you inside the cockpit, and suddenly you're not sitting in a darkened room anymore. You're hurtling around
Raindance Film Festival
There is a strain of Iranian cinema that loves to point the camera at itself, to sit an actor in a chair, ask them to perform, and watch the truth leak out around the edges of the fiction. Mehrnoush Alia's debut feature 1001 Frames belongs firmly to that
Raindance Film Festival
There is a particular kind of Iranian film that takes something tiny, a debt, a misunderstanding, a single object, and stacks an almost unbearable amount of pressure on top of it. My Daughter's Hair, the first feature from director Hesam Farahmand, belongs firmly to that tradition, and it
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free