-
3 weeks ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Nick Davis |Adam Nayman |Jonathan Romney |Kate Stables
Director Darren Thornton’s charming Irish remake of Italian comedy Mid-August Lunch (2008) follows the misadventures of Edward, a people-pleasing debut novelist who is left to entertain his friends’ elderly mothers while they jet off to Maspalomas Pride. 3 April 2025Edward (James McArdle), a gay Irish novelist, has a hit on his hands – or he might, if he can f ind snappier words to sell it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
-
Nov 14, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Guy Lodge |Kambole Campbell |Kate Stables |Roger Luckhurst
For a sequel so long in the works and so highly anticipated, there’s something surprisingly utilitarian about its title: Gladiator II, minus any prestigious-sounding subtitles, as if merely churned out onto a rather slow-moving factory conveyor belt. Ridley Scott continues to favour an unusual combination of colossal scale and minimal fuss.
-
Nov 12, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kambole Campbell |Kate Stables |Roger Luckhurst |Kambole Campbell Festivals
An 11-year-old girl embarks on an emotional journey with an immortal ghost cat in Yamashita Nobuhiro and Kuno Yoko’s frenetic, style-switching animation. 12 November 2024Reviewed from the 2024 Tokyo International Film FestivalIt feels easy and perhaps reductive to draw a line between the countryside fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki and Ghost Cat Anzu.
-
Nov 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Nick Bradshaw |Kate Stables |Roger Luckhurst |Philip Strick
It’s a tale as old as the hills, the kind that international law says should have long been buried in them: ordinary people menaced on their land by raiding parties, invaders and occupiers waving weapons and new rules or expulsion orders.
-
Nov 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Roger Luckhurst |Kate Stables |Philip Strick |Tony Rayns
The Pittsburgh Cycle of ten plays set in ten decades, by the African American playwright August Wilson (1945-2005), is a towering artistic record of the Black experience across the 20th century. In 2015 Denzel Washington announced that he would direct a film adaptation of Fences (1985), and co-produce films of the other nine. Fences came out in 2016, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (staged in 1984) in 2020.
-
Nov 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kate Stables |Philip Strick |Tony Rayns |Guy Lodge
We’re going on a bear hunt. After two fine London-based Paddington films, this sweet but increasingly generic furry franchise has taken the predictable lure of an exotic location, and since we can’t go around it, we have to go through it. Paddington, now proud possessor of a blue British passport (his Chaplinesque photo-booth chaos the film’s only memorable slapstick) has been summoned to Peru with the Browns to comfort his Aunt Lucy in the Home for Aged Bears.
