Film

Nadine Labaki’s Capharnaüm isn’t a subtle film, but it’s one that will hit you hard. The story of a young boy navigating the slums of Beirut, it’s an idealistic but well-intentioned attempt to try and confront some of the pre-established socio-political structures within Lebanon; a country where you need a piece of official paper just to prove you exist. It begins, however, as something almost satirical. 12-year-old Zain (Zain Al Rafera) is in jail, convicted of stabbing a neighbour for...

Coercive Control - a form of abuse in a relationship that works not through physical violence but threats and other means of controlling a partner’s behaviour - only became a crime in the UK in late 2015. I don’t think it’s a commonly used description, or a crime, in much of the US, but Allure touches on it in some chilling ways. Laura (Evan Rachel Wood) is about 30 and works for her Dad’s house cleaning company. On her first...

Debuting at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where first time director Léonor Serraille won the Camera d’Or prize, Jeune Femme is a restless look at the turbulent life of its protagonist Paula (Laetitia Dosch). She is struggling to come to terms with a break-up following a 10 year relationship with a successful photographer and is ricocheting from one impulsive decision to another. We first see her attempting to break into the apartment of her ex-boyfriend Joachim (Grégoire Monsaingeon). Her efforts...

“It’s good to look at life again, through another lens,” we’re told about halfway through The Eyes of Orson Welles, Mark Cousins’ swooning love letter to one of cinema’s greatest pioneers. Many will know Welles most prominently for his iconic screen roles – as newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, or Harry Lime in The Third Man. While others will recognise his pioneering work behind the camera – the ‘Hall of Mirrors’ sequence in The Lady from Shanghai,...

Adapted by Ian McEwan from his novel of the same name, On Chesil Beach follows newlyweds Florence (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle) as they honeymoon on the English coast. It is rather drab by modern standards – the beach consisting mostly of pebbles and the hotel resembling something from Fawlty Towers – but for 1962, the year the film is predominately set in, could legitimately be described as exotic. Through flashbacks we see their upbringings – Florence grew up in a...

Bounding along some five months after the release of The Last Jedi, Solo: A Star Wars Story is a film that appears to have been reverse engineered in the hopes of appeasing those few asinine fanboys who are still reeling from Rian Johnson’s forceful attempt to do more than simply pay homage to their beloved saga. Adopting the spirit of a plucky underdog, Solo is a scrappy, sweet-natured entry into the franchise, but one that never feels entirely sure of...

One wonders what it was about The House That Jack Built that persuaded Cannes director Thierry Fremaux to offer devious provocateur Lars von Trier a reprieve from his enforced exile. Presumably it wasn’t the scenes of duckling mutilation and toddler taxidermy that convinced him to change his mind, more likely it’s the fact that the whole thing comes across as a conceited exercise in navel-gazing that the festival’s programmers seem so keen to lap up. Still, at least the reports...

With Avengers: Infinity War still breaking box office records around the world, one could be forgiven for wanting a little respite from big epic superhero productions, even if it is from one which purports to pastiche and subvert this very genre. However, whether we like it or not, Deadpool 2 is here and with it we see the return of a particular brand of crude and immature humour which is guaranteed to break any record set by its predecessor. That...

“Dis joint is based upon some fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t.” The story of Colorado detective Ron Stallworth is one of those true-life tall tales that’s just so strange it couldn’t be fiction, and in the hands of Spike Lee it proves to be pure dynamite – the director returning to the Croisette for the first time since 1991, to inject some much-needed energy into a somewhat lifeless Cannes Film Festival. Stallworth – played with charismatic charm by John David...