Rating: 3.0★
There's a peculiar pleasure in watching a film that you can tell has quietly influenced dozens of things you love, even when the film itself won't quite let you fully love it. That's the honest truth of my experience with Little by Little. Jean
Rating: 1.5★
There's a moment in Funny Games where one of the two young men tormenting a terrified family turns to the camera, looks you dead in the eye, and smirks. It's technically accomplished. It's also one of the most insufferable things I've ever
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment fairly early in Sugar Cane Alley where you stop watching and start remembering, even if Martinique in the 1930s is about as far from your own life as it's possible to get. That's the quiet miracle Euzhan Palcy pulls off here:
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment early in Tiger Stripes where you can feel the film it wants to be, and it's a genuinely exciting one. A young Malaysian girl, Zaffan, becomes the first among her friends to menstruate, and the world around her shifts in that quiet, cruel
Rating: 1.5★
There's a particular kind of disappointment that comes not from a film being offensive or catastrophically misguided, but from one that simply fails to justify its own existence. Megdan: Between Water and Fire (released in the UK as Return to the Ring) is that kind of film. It&
Rating: 3.5★
That closing scene. You know the one. A father sits with his son and says, without judgement, without awkwardness, exactly what any young person in pain needs to hear. It's one of the finest scenes I've watched in a very long time, and it alone would
Rating: 1.0★
There's a version of Cigarette (or Shigara, to use its Tigrinya title) that works. Fifteen minutes, a young lad picks up smoking, faces the consequences, learns his lesson. That's a perfectly decent skeleton for a public-health short, and the instinct behind it is genuinely good-
Rating: 2.5★
When Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais unleashed The Raid on the world in 2011, the response was somewhere between astonishment and mild disbelief. A Welsh director working in Indonesia with a relatively modest budget had produced one of the most viscerally efficient action films in years, a single-location siege
Rating: 1.5★
There's a certain kind of horror film that doesn't make you angry, doesn't make you scared, doesn't even make you laugh. It just sits there, on your screen, doing roughly the right things in roughly the right order, and then it ends.
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment about halfway through Lingui, the Sacred Bonds where the camera simply watches a woman work. No dialogue, no dramatic score, just hands moving and the sounds of daily labour filling the frame. It's the kind of moment that either locks you in completely
Rating: 3.0★
There's a genuinely fascinating film buried somewhere inside The Serpent and the Rainbow. A story about Vodou as a real instrument of political terror, about a powder that might actually simulate death, about the way colonial power structures exploit spiritual traditions for their own brutal ends. That'
Rating: 4.0★
There are sporting failures, and then there is conceding thirty-one goals in a single match. If you know anything about American Samoa's football team going into this documentary, you know that number. It hung over them for years, a punchline in highlight reels, a shorthand for sporting
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