New Movies

★★★★★ Aki Kaurismäki takes the bare bones of a romance plot and weaves utter movie magic. Fallen Leaves (2023) deserves something from this year’s jury, but which prize exactly? That’s up to them, but if it doesn’t pick up anything at all, expect to hear cries of ‘robbed!’ bellowing from the Croisette, at the closing ceremony and in the press. In the film, there is a dog named Chaplin. It is the perfect name for the hound who finds a...

★★★★★ A bucolic idyll. A summer's day spent by the river with family. A walk home through verdant woodland serenely lit by golden sunlight filtering through the canopy. Nature's cathedral. The sound of a woodpecker drumming a tree trunk somewhere in the distance. Or it machinegun fire? Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) is a masterclass in transforming the commonplace and everyday activities into the grotesque and the inhuman by virtue of the uniquely unpleasant setting in which they...

★★★★★ 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...

★★★★★ 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...