Film Reviews

★★ Johnny Depp makes a return to the big screen in Maïwenn’s 76th Festival de Cannes-opener Jeanne du Barry (2023), performing in the French language and delivering a low-key performance a million miles away from the drunken shtick of Jack Sparrow and eccentric characters for Tim Burton. It is a curious project for Depp. After we all got a glimpse behind the celebrity curtain during his trials for domestic abuse, he selected a film about a famous example of love...

★★★★★ There are some places God is not wanted. That's how it feels in Hlynur Pálmason’s astonishing late 19th century odyssey, in which a naïve Danish priest and amateur photography enthusiast sets off for Iceland, at the time a dependency of Denmark, to build a church in the relatively unknown south eastern part of the land. Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), the soldier for Christ, is a bit of an odd duck. Instead of travelling directly by boat to the south...

★★★★★ Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink (2023) is a terrifying horror odyssey exploring childhood anxieties and primal fears. It is unlike anything else around at the moment, and will certainly serve as a calling card for the Canadian director making his feature debut. Its chief artistic triumph resides in the murky low-res imagery and heavy digital grain, which produces extraordinary febrile tensions and dread-filled atmospherics. Skinamarink equally orchestrates a spine-chilling ambience via its eerie use of silence. Add to this a...

★★★★★ Have you ever seen a film and been caught completely off guard, by surprise, left wondering what the hell it is you’ve just seen? Well, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (2022) is such a film. Works like this are made for festivals such as Cannes, where you’re left initially perplexed and bewildered, but once you let its effect take grip, you’re very glad you saw it. Bold, frightening, intense, experimental, mysterious and dazzling, the Polish filmmaker’s movie about the life and...

★★★★☆ The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive. Those words, uttered by Private Joker, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam war film, Full Metal Jacket, echo in Mark Jenkins’ horror oddity, Enys Men. The Cornish director’s latest work is a committed avant-garde experiment, guided as much by Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and At Land (1944) as it is British classic The Wicker Man (1973), John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) or Herk Harvey’s Carnival...

★★★★★ It feels like the double Palme d'Or winning Dardenne brothers are falling out of critical fashion. Even though they continue making essential movies, tell stories that need to be told, tackle modern social issues from a left-wing perspective and with their customary nonjudgement and nuance. To quote a popular internet Simpsons meme: no, it’s the critics who are wrong. As per recent developments regarding their aesthetic, the Liège-based siblings again infuse their latest, Tori and Lokita (2022), with a...

★★★★☆ In recent times the acclaimed American indie auteur, James Gray, has opted for epic spectacles taking place in 1920s New York (The Immigrant, 2013), the Amazon jungle (The Lost City of Z, 2016) and outer space (Ad Astra, 2019). His latest, though set in early 1980s Queens, is a return of sorts to the family-focused dramas which made his name. Young Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) is a daydreamer. At school, he gets into trouble for drawing instead of...

★★★★★ Ruben Östlund’s The Square won the Palme d’Or in 2017. A social satirist, he loves nothing better than to skewer bourgeois pretentions, his past targets include masculinity and the art world. In his new film, Triangle of Sadness (2022), the Swedish director takes a bunch of brash and manipulative 1%ers on a voyage across the high seas and uses the framing device to explore class oppression and what happens when the elites don't get their way. Told in three...

★★★★★ Humans are changing. Humans are … evolving. In David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, people have started to grow extra organs in their bodies, whose functions are yet to be discerned. Some, like Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), have used this biological development for a new type of performance art. Along with Caprice (Lea Seydoux), a former surgeon turned fellow artist, Tenser allows his collaborator to cut open his body with a biotechnological machine, probe around and extract tumours and...