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The Eternal Daughter
(2022)
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Helen Charman
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In The Eternal Daughter we are invited to consider the way history expresses itself within an individual psyche and the ways in which our relationships are stymied and obstructed by their own pasts.
Posted Mar 02, 2023
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She Said
(2022)
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Rebecca Liu
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The film is most resonant when it understands its own limits, while not losing sight of its hopes.
Posted Jan 26, 2023
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Aftersun
(2022)
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Nathalie Olah
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The delicate portrayal of how social and financial pressures impact the children of those at the sharp end of them, is what ultimately makes Aftersun so haunting and difficult to forget.
Posted Jan 26, 2023
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Triangle of Sadness
(2022)
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Georgie Carr
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Most comfortable in its all-out blaze of high fashion, yachts, expensive food, and jewellery, the film’s cynicism and formal sleight-of-hand lacquer over any sense of radical political excitement.
Posted Oct 27, 2022
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Piaffe
(2022)
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Laura Staab
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Everything in Piaffe is attractive, including the title.
Posted Oct 21, 2022
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Earwig
(2021)
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Laura Staab
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While Earwig opens with an ear in close-up, this is a call to listen out for more than just language -- to Warren Ellis’ eldritch use of the ondes Martenot on the score, for instance, or for the sounds of smashing glass.
Posted Jun 23, 2022
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Happening
(2021)
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Alice Blackhurst
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It is a relief, then, that Diwan’s Happening avoids, for the most part, a sensationalist or spectacular approach.
Posted Apr 28, 2022
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The Lost Daughter
(2021)
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Rebecca Liu
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Gyllenhaal's portrait of an anti-holiday filled with minor annoyances mirrors the intimate, self-conscious and at times unsettling nature of Ferrante's novel.
Posted Jan 21, 2022
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Spencer
(2021)
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Georgie Carr
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Simultaneously wary and celebratory of biographical limitation, Larraín tweaks the conventions of the genre, ironising idealist conceptions of history through scenes that explore how intensity of feeling can appear like depth of action.
Posted Dec 29, 2021
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The Power of the Dog
(2021)
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Rebecca Liu
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As seen by the way Peter and Phil's fraught relationship is at once infused with tenderness and violence, hope and contempt, Campion's masterful filmmaking could have easily held more in the frame.
Posted Dec 02, 2021
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Censor
(2021)
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Katherine Connell
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Through its protagonist, Censor questions whether art needs to contain moralising directives, without ever reducing Enid to an archetype or symbol.
Posted Nov 04, 2021
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Shiva Baby
(2020)
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Bessie Rubinstein
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Shiva Baby [has] a lack of focus and ultimately disorienting message...
Posted Jul 01, 2021
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Promising Young Woman
(2020)
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Rebecca Liu
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Promising Young Woman explored suffering and revenge and fell short...
Posted Apr 23, 2021
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The Scary of Sixty-First
(2021)
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Jessa Crispin
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It's not scary and it's not funny; it's just a thing that is happening on the screen...we can only hope that whatever Nekrasova decides to do next, she does it with something other than a bored smirk.
Posted Mar 29, 2021
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Born in Flames
(1983)
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Romy Opperman
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Born in Flames exceeds the coordinates and determinations of the present order of things by unmasking the way in which power replicates itself through a colonisation of time.
Posted Mar 19, 2021
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Simple Passion
(2020)
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Alice Blackhurst
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The film feels caught between the book's original nineties context and the present day's hyper-mediated and contentious landscape...
Posted Mar 16, 2021
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The Cloud in Her Room
(2020)
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Rebecca Liu
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The effect of A Cloud's depiction of alienation, loneliness, and longing in contemporary city life is uncanny and almost fantastical.
Posted Mar 05, 2021
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On the Rocks
(2020)
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Georgie Carr
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Coppola never pushes past the individual to the group, the city, society. Although we know there is life out there in the world, we never see it.
Posted Nov 25, 2020
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Bortom det synliga - filmen om Hilma af Klint
(2019)
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Esmé Hogeveen
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The cross-disciplinary curiosity found in her searching and ebullient works suggests a period wherein notions of futurity and research into the natural world carried less dire implications.
Posted Oct 29, 2020
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I'm Thinking of Ending Things
(2020)
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Bessie Rubinstein
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What might Charlie Kaufman have left to tell us about men living in internal torment, agonising, for the most part, over idealised but ultimately disappointing women? According [I'm Thinking of Ending Things], the answer is "not much".
Posted Oct 08, 2020
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Nomadland
(2020)
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Esmé Hogeveen
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Over the course of the film, we are able to ascertain a sense of Fern's circumstances, but more specificity around her and other characters' daily struggles and successes would render Nomadland's narrative much more real and engaging.
Posted Oct 02, 2020
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The Fever
(2019)
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Bessie Rubinstein
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Maybe the most interesting dimension of Justino's story is that the monkeys and man sharing space and language prompted the latter to channel his energy toward healing rather than harm.
Posted Sep 03, 2020
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First Cow
(2019)
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Bessie Rubinstein
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In Reichardt's unsentimental hands, though, simplicity comes not as solace but rather as an unsweetened truth: today we reap the seeds of America's poisonous past.
Posted Aug 07, 2020
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Krabi, 2562
(2019)
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Phoebe Campion
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Through its meditative exploration of landscape as locus for mystery, memory and deep time, KRABI subtly unsettles the forms and intentions of ethnographic documentary and cinematic 'recovery...'
Posted Jun 29, 2020
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Never Rarely Sometimes Always
(2020)
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Bessie Rubinstein
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In Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Hittman lays out the stakes of a moral argument around women's bodies.
Posted Apr 16, 2020
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Parasite
(2019)
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Rebecca Liu
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Thinking very metaphorically may not lead to our salvation, but the consciousness it induces just might.
Posted Feb 14, 2020
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Charlie's Angels
(2019)
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Rebecca Liu
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There is no room for complexity, ambiguity, or thought: no space, in effect, for any interpretation that has not already been carefully spoon-fed to its audience.
Posted Jan 23, 2020
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Little Women
(2019)
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Georgie Carr
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Gerwig's Little Women in fact fails to engage with the proto-feminist spirit of the original, let alone the radical potential for which a modern adaptation might allow.
Posted Dec 31, 2019
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Atlantics
(2019)
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Rebecca Liu
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Through layered, textured storytelling, Diop explores what closure might look like in worlds where economic inequality and political violence have made such abrupt endings so common.
Posted Dec 20, 2019
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Sibyl
(2019)
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Alice Blackhurst
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Justine Triet's latest film, Sibyl (2019), asks refreshing questions about declining investments in psychoanalysis in a post-digital age, and chronicles how the mechanisms of late capitalism shield us from ethical complexity.
Posted Oct 25, 2019
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Hustlers
(2019)
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Rebecca Liu
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It is a nuanced, generous depiction of sidelined workplaces and the lives of the women who work in them.
Posted Oct 02, 2019
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Too Late to Die Young
(2018)
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Bessie Rubinstein
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A tender portrait of children deserting their fidelity to the optimism in which they can no longer believe.
Posted Sep 26, 2019
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Antigone
(2019)
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Georgie Carr
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Sophie Deraspe's film adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone updates the central themes of the original -- family, exile, state power and sacrifice -- to reflect the struggles of a family of first generation Algerian immigrants in Montreal.
Posted Sep 20, 2019
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Lina From Lima
(2019)
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Katherine Connell
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Lina from Lima's strength lies in the ways González resists an impulse to solve or emphatically comment on the liminality of Lina's circumstances.
Posted Sep 20, 2019
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The Farewell
(2019)
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Rebecca Liu
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This apparent simplicity also contains emotional depth. Each frame of the family in The Farewell carries heaviness and lightness at once, indicative of the pain hidden behind everybody's performative happiness.
Posted Sep 20, 2019
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The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
(2019)
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Esmé Hogeveen
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Tailfeathers and Hepburn give us a grounded interrogation of these topics. Their script, along with Norm Li's cinematography, focuses on the presence of violence as a pervasive aspect of female experience.
Posted Sep 17, 2019
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Here for Life
(2019)
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Georgie Carr
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Politics contains the beautiful and the mundane, the film suggests, and we should value both if we are to effectively communicate an image of the individual and their world.
Posted Sep 05, 2019
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Maternal
(2019)
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Georgie Carr
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Maternal makes clear that this lack of nuance belongs to the life the film depicts: the clash between two ideologies of motherhood - the spiritual vs. worldly - is culturally embedded, inescapable for the girls of the hogar.
Posted Aug 16, 2019
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Giraffe
(2019)
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Missouri Williams
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Giraffe makes no explicit judgement on what we call progress, but a sense of dread is created through contrasts between natural and artificial, green vegetation and concrete, ethnologist and builder.
Posted Aug 16, 2019
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Animals
(2019)
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Mary McGill
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Hyde reminds us that it is not only the ability to choose that counts but the quality, diversity and liberating potential of the choices available, something which, even today, continues to leave so much to be desired.
Posted Aug 08, 2019
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Never Look Away
(2018)
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Georgie Carr
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The film makes a strong case for the idea that a society can be judged by its relationship to art - that there is a strong correlation between artistic faculty and political morality.
Posted Aug 05, 2019
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Vita & Virginia
(2018)
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Martha Perotto-Wills
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Vita & Virginia is disappointing mostly because it takes one of the most beloved, influential, and strange lesbian relationships of the 20th century and makes it into something basically ordinary, a mannered cliché.
Posted Jul 12, 2019
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The Chambermaid
(2018)
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Hannah Paveck
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The Chambermaid exposes not only the often-occluded labour of the hotel chambermaid, but also the restricted field of agency and the precarious alignments these conditions of labour can produce.
Posted Jun 21, 2019
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Heroes Don't Die
(2019)
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Rebecca Liu
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[A] bold and ambitious feature.
Posted Jun 12, 2019
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Portrait of a Lady on Fire
(2019)
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Rebecca Liu
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Portrait de la jeune fille en feu - a study of two women pursuing lives larger than the ones they've been given - chooses the spirit over formalism; poetry over realism; myth over history.
Posted Jun 04, 2019
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Beanpole
(2019)
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Bessie Rubinstein
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By concentrating on parallel reproductive drives, Balagov relinquishes the personal, turning the womb into his metaphor.
Posted Jun 04, 2019
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High Life
(2018)
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Hannah Paveck
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The narrative's non-linear unfolding is shot through with a strangeness that rewards repeat viewing.
Posted May 31, 2019
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Madeline's Madeline
(2018)
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Emily Watlington
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Madeline's Madeline explores the boundaries between representation and exploitation, a must-see...
Posted May 28, 2019
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The Swallows of Kabul
(2019)
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Bessie Rubinstein
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The style suits the substance. Swallows, set during the Taliban's five year regime, grapples with the ability to live meaningfully when self-expression is never without fear.
Posted May 24, 2019
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A Brother's Love
(2019)
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Rebecca Liu
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La femme de mon frère asks whether that waiting may in fact be life itself, and celebrates the fact that we don't have to wait alone.
Posted May 24, 2019
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