Given that the British Red Cross has slammed Britain’s little archipelago of lock-ups for immigrants, and given that the government seems to have upped its xenophobia of late, this fictional look inside an immigration detention centre lands at a helpful time.It’s based, surprisingly enough, on the personal immigration experiences of producer Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, who here writes and directs her first feature. The length of the movie – a natty 80 minutes – reminded me at first of the BBC’s Play for Today strand of many aeons past, as did its TV-style 4-by-3 aspect ratio, its social-justice Read more ...

If you’re old enough to remember LPs and the lost art of reading sleeve notes (let alone writing them), this one’s for you. The titular session man is the fabled keyboard player Nicky Hopkins, whose teeming creativity and dancing digits left their indelible mark across an extraordinary swathe of records from the golden age of rock’n’roll.Among Hopkins’ most recognisable feats are his Jerry Lee Lewis-style romp through the Beatles’ "Revolution", contributions to several tracks on John Lennon’s Imagine including "Jealous Guy", rollicking ivory-tickling on George Harrison’s "Give Me Love", his Read more ...

Seemingly shot in a snow globe containing haunted mountains and a neo-noirish Alpine ‘burg, The Ice Tower is the most expressionistic but relatable of the French-Bosnian director Lucile Hadžihalilović’s eerie oneiric fables involving endangered motherless children.It’s also the prettiest and the queasiest, a glittering alt-Gothic showcase for Marion Cotillard as a toxic lynx-eyed movie diva. The long-damaged Cristina van der Berg, who as a girl was objectified and unhappily groomed for stardom, preys on the smitten adolescent orphan Jeanne (stealthy newcomer Clara Pacini) while acting – and Read more ...

What defines a life? Money and success? Happiness? Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams employs a narrator, much as Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven did, who fields big questions like those while drawing the audience in. Bentley’s voice is an omniscient one, its owner unseen. Like Malick, Bentley is scrutinising a small group of people living in a bygone era in a remote part of North America; Malick focused on the Texas panhandle, Bentley on small-town Idaho at the turn of the century. Here a logger called Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) ekes out a tough, often isolated living, moving with the Read more ...

Directed by Lynne Ramsay and based on the book by Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love is an unsettling dive into the disturbed psyche of Grace, played with mercurial brilliance by Jennifer Lawrence. Grace is a new mother still struggling to get accustomed to the demands of her baby, and with her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson), she has moved into the house that belonged to Jackson’s dead uncle, out in the remote backwoods of Montana.The plan is for Jackson to fix the place up, when he can get around to it. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, with Jackson’s parents living nearby Read more ...

“How can you tell she’s an alien?” asks Don (Aidan Delbis, an impressive neuro-divergent actor) of his cousin Teddy (the excellent Jesse Plemons).Yurgos Lanthimos’s gripping black comedy Bugonia (nothing to do with begonias, by the way, but a Greek word concerning bees’ ability to spontaneously generate from a cow’s carcass) is marvellously deranged, taking a conspiracy theory to its logical, or illogical, conclusion. The screenplay is adapted by Will Tracy (Succession; The Menu; The Regime) from Jang Joon-hwan’s film Save the Green Planet!. And Robbie Ryan’s cinematography using large-format 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...