film reviews
Nick Hasted

Lee Haven Jones’ Welsh-language folk-horror debut dissects a family’s treachery to the land in eventually apocalyptic fashion. It starts in silent, jagged style, the characters seeming as artificial as their minimalist house, abstract paintings and intensely designed rooms, set down like a lunar outpost in rugged Welsh farmland.

Markie Robson-Scott
Back in 1995, the name Brandon Lee made the headlines. Not the Brandon Lee as in son of Bruce, who’d recently met his death on the set of The Crow, but a schoolboy who’d chosen to use the same name.
 
A strange hoax was uncovered. Lee was, in fact, Brian MacKinnon, and he was not 16 but 32, posing as a fifth-former at the august Bearsden Academy in Glasgow. He did, indeed, go back to his old school, where he was a pupil, first time around, in the 1970s.
Nick Hasted

This is a romantic historical epic with elan, giving sensual immediacy to a fanciful secret history of the Eiffel Tower, here inspired by a forbidden, rekindled romance between Gustave Eiffel (Romain Duris) and Arlette Bourgès (Sex Education’s Emma Mackey).

Demetrios Matheou

Writer/director Jordan Peele’s first two features were horror films with bells on, their genuinely creepy chills accompanied by sharp, satirical social comment. Both were so good that there seemed absolutely no reason to doubt the next. 

Nick Hasted

Bankruptcy, rubble, rape and murder: Manhattan in the Seventies could be grim, as multiple New York punk memoirs make clear. The trade-off was the art, steaming and burning in the stinking, crucially cheap degradation. Punk was just one symptomatic part of a crumbling Lower East Side where old Beats, folkies, jazzers, poets, theatre, film and visual artists also lived.

Graham Fuller

Give Them Wings is the biopic of Paul Hodgson, who seven months after he was born in 1965 was diagnosed with meningococcal meningitis. If that wasn’t bad enough, he survived his precarious childhood to become a devout fan of Durham’s hapless Darlington FC – it’s criminal that this low-budget British indie wasn’t titled Give Them Wingers.

Sebastian Scotney

The French seaside has been the setting for all kinds of summer holiday capers. We are used to the idea that this is a place where young people set about finding out who they are. At the top of the quality spectrum are Éric Rohmer’s well-observed comedies of manners like Pauline at the Beach (1983) and A Summer's Tale (1996). Down at the bottom, there are shockers like Axelle Laffont’s Milf (2018).

Demetrios Matheou

One of the best scenes in this Brad Pitt starrer takes place in the quiet car of a Japanese bullet train, as two men seek to kill each without leaving their seats or disturbing their fellow passengers. Aside from being amusingly and skilfully executed, the conceit lends the scene a restraint that is sorely missing from the rest of this cartoonishly hyper-active movie.

David Thompson

The trailer for Panah Panahi’s award-winning first feature Hit the Road is one of the most misleading I’ve yet seen thanks to its jaunty Western pop soundtrack and reassuring caption that the movie resembles an Iranian Little Miss Sunshine.

Sarah Kent

Katia and Maurice Krafft spent their married life going from one volcanic eruption to the next. These self-styled “volcano runners” were not just thrill seekers, but serious volcanologists keen to gain a better understanding of how volcanoes work so as to further science and save lives.