Ben Nicholson

1 week ago | bfi.org.uk | Nicole Flattery |Ben Nicholson |Samuel Thomas Davies |Simran Hans

Close to the end of Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, a documentary by Sinéad O’Shea, the writer and critic Andrew O’Hagan forms an assessment of O’Brien’s work. Her strength, he tells us, came from her ability “to embrace ambiguity, to see all around her”. He is referring specifically to her 1994 novel about the Troubles House of Splendid Isolation, but he could be talking about any of her books, including her scandalous debut The Country Girls.

1 week ago | bfi.org.uk | Philip KempReviews |Philip Kemp |Ben Nicholson |Samuel Thomas Davies

Alex Garland and Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza’s rigorous re-enactment of the 2006 Ramadi incident is a powerful depiction of combat but leaves little space for the audience to connect with its characters.

1 week ago | theskinny.co.uk | Ben Nicholson

“It's an illusion I had when starting this film – that it's going to be a catharsis, that it's going to be therapy for them to heal their wounds.” Maxime Jean-Baptiste is discussing his feature film Kouté vwa (Listen to the Voices), a powerful depiction of grief and trauma that fictionalises a real family tragedy. In 2012, the director’s cousin, Lucas Diomar, was killed in an act of gang violence.

1 week ago | bfi.org.uk | Samuel Thomas Davies |Ben Nicholson |Simran Hans |Anton Bitel

Using the couple’s own tape recordings and a patchwork of archive clips, Kevin Macdonald takes an intriguing show-don’t-tell approach to the first 18 months of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s move to New York in late 1971. 11 April 2025When John Lennon and Yoko Ono left the stately pile of Tittenhurst Park outside Ascot to move into a modest tworoom apartment on Bank Street in New York’s West Village, they installed a TV at the foot of the bed, got in, and never turned it off.

1 week ago | bfi.org.uk | Ben Nicholson |Samuel Thomas Davies |Simran Hans |Anton Bitel

Uberto Pasolini trades a fantastic voyage for an intense portrait of a marriage as the long-suffering Odysseus, played by Ralph Fiennes, returns from the Trojan War. 11 April 2025Uberto Pasolini’s reworking of The Odyssey shuns spectacle to craft a potent, grown-up character study that mines the emotional core of Homer’s epic.