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3 weeks ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman |Jonathan Romney |Kate Stables |Ben Walters
The first uncanny figure that appears in The Woman in the Yard is a ghost in the machine: an iPhone recording of David (Russell Hornsby), whose tragic death in a car accident has left his wife Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) badly injured, buckling on shattered legs beneath the weight of the payments on the isolated and increasingly dilapidated farmhouse they’d purchased together as a live-in fixer-upper.
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4 weeks ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Jonathan Romney |Kate Stables |Ben Walters |Sophie Monks Kaufman
As unlikely career turns go, The End pretty much beats all. This is the first fiction feature – a musical, at that – by Joshua Oppenheimer, whose controversial co-directed documentary The Act of Killing (2012) used highly interventional, artificial methods in confronting its subjects with their guilt as former members of Indonesian death squads.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Ben Walters |Kate Stables |Sophie Monks Kaufman |Maria Delgado
“We need murders,” muses Abbé Grisolles (Jacques Develay) toward the end of Misericordia. Grisolles keeps his beady eye trained on the various members of his flock in Saint-Martial, a small, rundown village in the Massif Central, the southern French highland district that generally serves as the backdrop for the films of Alain Guiraudie. We need murders, Grisolles proposes, because they offer opportunities for humility, compassion and mercy (in Latin: misericordia).
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Kate Stables |Ben Walters |Sophie Monks Kaufman |Maria Delgado
“You’re the actor. The best actor in the world” Vito Genovese’s estranged wife (an unruly Kathrine Narducci) bawls across the courtroom at her vicious gangster husband. Since he’s played by Robert de Niro, busily performing here as both Vito and his crime capo nemesis Frank Costello, there’s a sharp, knowing bark of audience laughter.
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Jul 26, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kim Newman |Chris Shields |Ben Walters |Samuel Thomas Davies
Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool, was initially a parody of DC comics villain Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke, who has featured in live-action and animated films and TV shows but has long since been eclipsed in pop culture by the comedy cover version. If another massive IP amalgamation takes place, there’d be mileage in a grudge fight between the licensed jester of Marvel and his presumably fed-up inspiration.
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Jul 26, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Daniella Alconaba |Chris Shields |Ben Walters |Samuel Thomas Davies
As a summer of sports crowds our screens, with Wimbledon and the European Championship passing the baton to the Olympic Games, Younger documents the personal lives of four female athletes over 60, celebrating another side to a traditionally youth-focused sporting world. Metal clanks in Younger’s opening scene as Joylyn, a lifelong runner, cumbersomely unloads medals, plaques and trophies won from tournaments. Red ribbons cover the floor, entangled as if to form one colossal achievement.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Katie McCabe |Chris Shields |Ben Walters |Katie McCabeReviews
A special dread runs through Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, the kind that burrows into the mind of a child during summer, when oceans of time appear in place of the usual routines, and loneliness creeps in. For 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), that time is spent anxiously observing her mother Janet as she moves through relationships in their countercultural western Massachusetts milieu over some quietly eventful weeks in 1991.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Chris Shields |Ben Walters |Samuel Thomas Davies |Carmen Gray
In Tatiana Huezo’s latest feature, The Echo, darkly rich natural imagery and crystalline sound combine to create a poetically forceful impression of the small Mexican village that gives the film its name. Between the landscapes we see and the sounds we hear – of galloping hooves, bleating animals and distant thunder – human narratives wriggle in, highlighting the role of women in a rural society that seems to exist somewhere outside time.
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Jul 22, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Ben Walters |Samuel Thomas Davies |Carmen Gray |John Bleasdale
“It seems like you’re always somewhere else lately,” muses the mother of Owen (Justice Smith), a frustrated teenager in an ordinarily stifling American suburb in the late 1990s. The fraught question of elsewhere, its threats and promises, permeates I Saw the TV Glow, as it permeated director Jane Schoenbrun’s previous feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and as it permeated the 1990s TV shows from which this new film takes inspiration.
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Mar 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | James Naremore |Adam Scovell |Dan Callahan |Ben Walters
Cinephiles throughout the world are mourning the recent passing of David Bordwell, who died aged 76 after a year’s illness from interstitial pulmonary fibrosis. Bordwell was the Aristotle of cinema study. He gave us a full-scale poetics of the feature film, and his clearly articulated writings transcend the boundaries between academic research, journalistic criticism and the practice of filmmakers. Although he’s no longer with us, his name and works will endure.
