The third of James Cameron’s world-building epics arrives 16 years after the first one, but only three after number two, Avatar: The Way of Water. Apparently proceedings were held up by Cameron and his army of technicians having to adjust to developments in technology, not least the gadgetry required for underwater performance capture.Anyway here it is, and the results (in 3D) are fairly awesome, not least the running time of three and a quarter hours. We find ourselves back on the planet Pandora, a kind of supernatural paradise where human-like beings and an extraordinary array of Read more ...

Fantômas was the creation of French pulp novelists Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, whose titular criminal genius made his first print appearance in 1911. An amoral sadist with a talent for disguise, Fantômas made his first film appearance two years later in a five-episode crime serial directed by Louis Feuillade. Feuillade’s sober, stripped-back adaptation was hugely influential and the template for subsequent attempts to put Fantômas on screen. Until the mid-1960s, that is, when André Hunebelle helmed three brightly coloured Fantômas romps which so enraged co-creator Allain that he Read more ...

Eugene Jarecki’s forensic investigation concludes that Julian Assange’s character flaws are dwarfed by the high crimes he exposed, and can’t justify the cruel and unusual punishment of his cramped Ecuadorian Embassy sanctuary. This reverses what he sees as self-interested manipulation of the official narrative, which stoked personal condemnation as a smokescreen for state slaughter and surveillance.Character has dominated Assange’s evolving cinema persona, which began with fellow Australian Robert Connolly’s admiring Underground (2012), an account of young Julian the teen hacker in the barely Read more ...

Family crises and relationship breakdowns are familiar subjects for films to tackle. Both are central to Aribam Syam Sharma’s 1990 feature Ishanou (The Chosen One), where divine intervention wreaks havoc on a middle-class family living in India’s remote north-eastern Manipur province. Husband and wife Dhanabir and Tampha (Kangabam Tomba and Anoubam Kiranmala) are celebrating their young daughter’s transition to adulthood by having her ears pierced as part of a Meitei religious ceremony. Tension between the pair is signalled early on when Tampha rebuff’s Dhanabir’s attempts to embrace her. The Read more ...

Chinese-American director Bing Liu’s first feature – his Minding the Gap, a wonderful documentary about himself and his skateboarding buddies in Illinois, was Oscar-nominated in 2019 – is based on Atticus Lish’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 2014 about an undocumented Uyghur immigrant and her relationship with an American soldier who’s done three consecutive tours in Iraq and has severe PTSD.The harsh reality of family abuse and violence in Minding the Gap might lead you to expect something as powerful here, especially as Liu has said that his mother’s immigrant experience mirrors Lish Read more ...

For everyone who thinks that the country house drama ought to be spelled without the "o", there's Fackham Hall, an energetic satire of all things Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, and even Agatha Christie. It arrives the same year that its main target, Downton Abbey, launched its "Grand Finale" movie. Surely we haven't seen the last of the Golden Age-set costume dramas that paint such a beguiling picture of the Great Depression: the genre is the lifeblood of the BBC. And what else would we do on a Sunday night?Written by sketch comedy veterans the Dawson Bros. and real-life brothers Jimmy and Read more ...

The village of Cesinova has the largest white stork population in Macedonia; every chimney and steeple is festooned with the scruffy nests of these enormous birds. We see the flock arriving in spring to reclaim their nesting spots. Perched on a huge mound of twigs and leaves, each pair settles in by tossing back their long necks and clattering their beaks in greeting.Once the eggs have been laid and the chicks hatched, the hard work begins; but the timing is perfect. The farmers are just beginning to plough their fields and we see the storks gobbling up any frogs, mice and snakes escaping the Read more ...

Hell has no fury like a stan scorned, as an Eminem song memorably established with respect to obsessed fanboys in the pop world, and this visually nimble not-quite-thriller shows us the further perils of celebrity disciples who get the hump.Britain’s Archie Madekwe plays Oliver, an up-and-coming music artist in LA, provider of pleasurable late-century-influenced pop and surrounded by the usual crew of Gen Z mates and loafers. In a clever opening scene, he gloms onto a nervous, shifty, college-dodging worker in a clothes store, and somehow the gulf in power and personality between them makes Read more ...

Even more than his new film, Jafar Panahi was a sensation at Cannes this year. For the first time in 15 years, the Iranian director was able to present a work in person at the festival. Two arrests by the Iranian government, which had followed his 2010s 20-year house arrest, had made him a prisoner of the state.Nevertheless, Panahi has continued to film without official permission. He managed to shoot five films this way, including Taxi Tehran which won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlinale. Shortly after his release in February 2023, he proceeded to make It Was Just an Accident, which won Read more ...

Fear of being alone with our own thoughts, as much as fear of missing out, prevents most of us from disconnecting from our electronic devices and braving even a few hours in total darkness. For a brave assortment of teenagers, though, the task of unplugging from social media – and reconnecting with their still-developing minds – is a year-long journey into the wilderness and back. Folktales, the new documentary from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, explores the Norwegian Folk School movement, which began in the mid-1840s as a way to bring education to rural children. Now the folk schools Read more ...

Fierce, unpredictable, complex, cussed, commie. Seymour Hersh would probably admit to all those descriptions of him except the last. Now at last the man who has dominated investigative journalism for 60 years has agreed to be investigated himself for a documentary made by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, 20 years after they first asked him.One could list the peaks of his career too – My Lai, Watergate, Abu Ghraib – recognising that these names also represent dark lows of modern American history. “Sy”, as he is known, claims that what a reporter personally believes isn’t the point, only what Read more ...

Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident is a shattering absurdist anti-caper – a kind of minimalist take on It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World inspired by Iran’s ongoing tragedy. His country's top director and one of the sharpest thorns in the Islamic Republic’s regime, Panahi was promoting his Palme’ d’Or-winner in New York last Monday when Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced him to a year’s imprisonment for “propagandia activities”. He’s also banned from overseas travel for two years and from joining social and political organisations. The Supreme Leader and his judges Read more ...