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6 days ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Jane Giles |Adam Nayman |Kim Newman |Catherine Wheatley
Like Visconti’s erotically charged directorial debut Ossessione (1943), Motel Destino can in part be seen as a loose version of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Director Karim Aïnouz sets the action in the province where he was born, Ceará on the north-eastern coast of Brazil; together with cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Pina, 2011; Rocks, 2019; La chimera, 2023) he portrays an equatorial landscape fundamental to the film’s story.
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1 week ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman |Kim Newman |Catherine Wheatley |Imogen Smith
Celebrity resentments and insecurities are portrayed with unusual tenderness in this clever Hollywood Hills satire featuring Elizabeth Reaser, Walton Goggins, and Pedro Pascal. 6 May 2025Nadia Conners’ The Uninvited is a Hollywood Hills psychodrama; its caustic, quippy vision of flawed showbiz professionals stumbling through a dark night of the soul sits at the intersection of The Player (1992) and Sunset Blvd. (1950).
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1 week ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Kim Newman |Catherine Wheatley |Imogen Smith |Jessica Kiang
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has drifted since Avengers Endgame (2019), which tied up plotlines developed over a decade. Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) – one of the series’ biggest hits – jokes about the underperformance of subsequent MCU projects. Proposed replacements for major characters like Captain America and Black Panther haven’t exactly been embraced. Marvel Comics had a similar wobble in the 1990s, when they launched the instantly-dated ‘Heroes Reborn’ reboot.
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1 week ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Catherine Wheatley |Imogen Smith |Jessica Kiang |Nicolas Rapold
There are several versions of the myth of Parthenope. In one, she was a siren, who, heartbroken by her failure to seduce Ulysses, threw herself into the sea. After fishermen recovered her beautiful drowned body, they buried her, and the site of her interment grew into the city of Naples. In another, Parthenope was a mere mortal, in love with the centaur Vesuvius.
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2 weeks ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Catherine Wheatley |Jessica Kiang |Nicolas Rapold |Jessica Winter
Leonardo Van Dijl’s debut feature begins where Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) left off: on a tennis court, where a player mimes shots with an imaginary ball. This young woman is Julie, a rising star on the Belgian tennis circuit. Moments after we meet her, she’ll learn that her coach, Jeremy, has been suspended. The reasons for the suspension are opaque but, given that he’s been implicated in the suicide of his previous protégée, it’s natural that the club wants to speak to all its students.
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Jan 23, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Guy Lodge |Anton Bitel |Catherine Wheatley
From Tom Hanks’s role in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) to Keanu Reeves’s in The Lake House (2006), ‘architect’ has often been the Hollywood screenwriter’s go-to career for a male romantic lead: a neat mixture of masculine solidity and sensitive artistry, the movie architect dreams things and builds them and gets to stride importantly around construction sites in a sharp suit and hard hat.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel |Guy Lodge |Catherine Wheatley |Jessica Kiang
Leigh Whannell’s werewolf reimagining magnifies the shifting tensions within a young family as Christopher Abbott is cursed with a monstrous inheritance. 16 January 2025“This view never gets old, does it? No matter how many times you see it.” The speaker is Grady Lowell (Sam Jaeger), an ex-Marine survivalist and single father raising his young son Blake (Zac Chandler) with the toughest kind of love on their remote off-grid Oregon property.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Guy Lodge |Catherine Wheatley |Jessica Kiang |Arjun Sajip
“I could spend the rest of my life here,” says Margaret, a teenager played with a garish digital facelift by Robin Wright, as she snuggles up to her high school sweetheart Richard (Tom Hanks, given the same eerie CG botox treatment) early on in Here.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang |Anton Bitel |Guy Lodge |Catherine Wheatley
A notoriously blue movie gets a depressingly grey remake in Audrey Diwan’s dismal Emmanuelle, an ostensibly feminist take on the 1970s softcore phenomenon, that mainly serves the misconception that there is nothing witty or fun or remotely sexy about feminism. Say what you will about the objectionable original, at least you got the impression that the heroine of 1974’s Emmanuelle derived some pleasure from being the pliant plaything of the patriarchy.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Catherine Wheatley |Jessica Kiang |Arjun Sajip |Simran Hans
Fiction is littered with unwanted children. Their lots are rarely happy. From Oliver Twist to Harry Potter, these orphans are, as Dickens has it, pale with anxiety and sadness and the closeness of their prison. Longing for love while looking like death. Opening with a series of deformed, grimacing portraits – faces snarled into rictuses, as if Francis Bacon’s screaming portraits had sprung to terrible life – The Girl with the Needle takes Dickens’s simile horribly literally.
