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Boiling Point
It’s the busiest night of the year at a trendy London restaurant, and disaster is looming. The pressure rises, as the charismatic head chef scrambles to salvage the situation.
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The Worst Person in the World
Norway isn’t generally associated with romantic comedies, and the fact that the film features some genuinely upsetting moments for its characters might belie the categorisation, but Joachim Trier’s film delivers on the genre promise due to a sparkling performance by Renate Reinsve as Julie (echoes here of Strindberg’s Miss Julie), a character that at times…
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The Harder They Come
The subsequent role of the film in the popularisation of reggae has detracted from the fact that it’s actually an entertaining crime thriller whose appeal owed much to its social authenticity, notably the use of patois, which gave the film the sense of a national conversation about poverty and opportunity a decade after the early…
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Parallel Mothers
In keeping with Pedro Almodovar’s more recent work, notably Julieta (2016) and Pain and Glory (2019), this is a film about the weight of the past and the need for forgiveness. The story interweaves two threads: a drama of maternal confusion that could have been little better than soap opera in other hands, and an…
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Compartment No. 6
In the tradition of train films, which adds huit clos to the direction and serendipity of the road trip genre, Russian train films form class apart: claustrophobic quarters shared with a medley of imposed companions within; monotonous, unwelcoming taiga without; the tedious stasis of the long journey unalleviated by surly staff and bad food. Shooting…
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Wild Men
Danish cinema is having a moment. The last two years have seen the release of award-winning films like Another Round, Riders of Justice, Flee and The Guilty. Wild Men co-writer and director Thomas Deneskov credits the Danish Film Institute and public support: “The funding system allows us to really play, and not worry about making…
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Riders of Justice
A revenge thriller that combines deadpan humour and violence will inevitably evoke the Coen brothers, while the dynamic of a scarred older man and a young girl on a revenge mission has its precursors in films such as Kiss-Ass and Léon (that the young girl is also called Mathilde is surely no coincidence in a…
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Official Competition
Argentine directing duo Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn brings together two of Spain’s most famous actors: Penelope Cruz (Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner for Woody Allen’s Vicki Cristina Barcelona), plays indie darling director Lola Cuevas; Pedro Almodovar’s ‘male muse’, Antonio Banderas (Cannes Best Actor winner for Pain and Glory) the film star Felix Rivero. While…
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The Taste of Tea
The Taste of Tea has been referred to as a psychedelic version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, but this is to undersell the humour and warmth of Katsuhito Ishii’s tale of three generations of the Haruno family. There is no oppressive religion and little angst beyond the growing pains of the children, Sachiko and…
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The Doo Dah Man
The film features some of the classic tropes of American cinema, most obviously from the road-trip movie and the ill-assorted buddy movie, but this familiarity belies a more substantial story about fathers and sons, as well as a deeper literary tradition that goes back to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. A young man, Jake (Brittain), leaves…
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