Jessica Kiang

2 weeks ago | bfi.org.uk | Claire I. Monk |Adam Nayman |Tara Judah |Jessica Kiang

When Paul Verhoeven’s divisive Vegas melodrama first arrived in UK cinemas, critic Claire Monk was unconvinced by its relentless ‘tits-in-your-face’ voyeurism and flawed ideas about women’s sexual ‘power’. 9 June 2025As is clear from the plot summary alone, director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’s first collaboration since Basic Instinct (1992) is driven by preoccupations other than psychological and narrative credibility.

2 weeks ago | variety.com | Jessica Kiang

There is a term for the sparsely populated swath of France that extends southwest from the borders of Belgium and Luxembourg to the Pyrenees: the “empty diagonal” (“diagonale du vide“). Evocative of rural flight and small-town decline, the phrase was the title of French director Hubert Charuel‘s 2011 short film, set in his native Saint-Dizier to which Charuel and writing partner Claude Le Pape now return for his second feature.

2 weeks ago | bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Festivals |Jessica Kiang |Adam Nayman |Tara Judah

After the birth of her baby, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) experiences a psychological rupture that devours her life, her relationship with husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) and her own identity, in Lynne Ramsay’s ferociously maximalist psychodrama. 5 June 2025Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film FestivalHarrowing, beautiful and very possibly cursed, Lynne Ramsay’s magnificently unlovable adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel begins as it refuses to continue, in quiet.

3 weeks ago | variety.com | Jessica Kiang

The pleasures and the pitfalls of a hybrid format are both in evidence in French actress-turned-director Romane Bohringer‘s “Tell Her I Love Her,” a plaintive, affecting account of her struggle to come to terms with her mother’s abandonment, refracted through the similar experiences of politician, activist and author Clémentine Autain.

4 weeks ago | variety.com | Jessica Kiang

For a long time in the popular cinematic imagination, the French countryside was a golden place, of haybales, wildflowers and uncannily beautiful goatherdesses. More recently, mainly thanks to the darker sensibilities of Bruno Dumont and Alain Guiraudie, it has become the dank breeding ground for peculiar stories of rural spite and small-town perversity.