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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Annabel Jackson |Anton Bitel |Rachel Pronger |Leigh Singer
The South African photographer Ernest Cole documented apartheid with a radical directness; but in even the most candid pictures of the photographer himself there is a feeling of reserve – of some critical fact being withheld. Furtive and austere, or half obscured by the subjects he hoped to catch, such photos of Cole register his tactful mode of observation, and finally the toll of a life spent laying bare political ills.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel Festivals |Anton Bitel |Rachel Pronger |Leigh Singer
Reviewed from the 2025 Glasgow Film FestivalA middle-aged woman, visibly upset, gets into her car at night, turns on some classical music, drives into secluded woodland, and grabs a shovel to dig a grave. The opening sequence of Jed Hart’s Restless in fact comes near the film’s chronological end, announcing to viewers from the outset that what might otherwise seem a British kitchen-sink drama is headed somewhere darkly different.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Rachel Pronger |Leigh Singer |Nicolas Rapold |David Katz
I first watched On Falling, Laura Carreira’s quietly devastating study of late-stage capitalism in action, on Black Friday. That serendipitous timing is the kind of poetic flourish this careful filmmaker would never go for; but to encounter the film for the first time surrounded by algorithmically targeted banner ads and flickering digital billboards provided a sobering counterpoint.
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2 months ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Ren Scateni |Nicolas Rapold |Jason Anderson |Leigh Singer
Yamada Naoko has always been fascinated by music, and since the K-On! franchise – an anime series (2009-10) and film (2011) following the lives of four members of a high school’s light music club – it has remained central to her storytelling.
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2 months ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Nicolas Rapold Festivals |Nicolas Rapold |Jason Anderson |Leigh Singer
Reviewed from the 2025 Sundance Film FestivalIt’s been a full 17 years since Mary Bronstein’s crackling debut feature, and the long wait has filtered into the simmering anxieties and ambient aggression of her full-on follow-up. Piercingly funny and far from ingratiating, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You enters the subjective orbit of a Montauk therapist, Linda (Rose Byrne), as she takes care of her sick daughter in a woeful motel while her boat-captain husband is away.
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2 months ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Jason Anderson |Leigh Singer |Guy Lodge |Anton Bitel
Kazik Radwanski’s wry Canadian romance follows Mara, a disillusioned creative writing professor, as she reconnects with a man from her past who’s now a successful author. 31 January 2025The protagonist in Kazik Radwanski’s fourth feature belongs to a particular subset of the stymied creatives we so often meet in movies: the writer who doesn’t write any more. Instead, Mara (Deragh Campbell) teaches it, albeit with a listless air that’s largely impervious to the enthusiasm of her keenest students.
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2 months ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Leigh Singer |Guy Lodge |Anton Bitel
The singular consistency of Mike Leigh’s 50-year-plus career making films for both big and small screen could be expressed simply by their titles. From the instructive moniker of his 1971 debut Bleak Moments onwards, year after another year, Leigh’s intensive explorations of everyday people strips them naked emotionally, revealing their high hopes and dreams, their secrets and lies. The ties, familial and otherwise, that can either offer a lifeline or a noose; all or nothing.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Leigh Singer |Catherine Wheatley |Jessica Kiang |Arjun Sajip
As this new biopic of Bob Dylan reaches its climax at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan, clad in a leather jacket, armed with a Fender Stratocaster and backed by a full band, controversially plays “electric” for a crowd for the very first time, infuriating festival organisers, including longtime supporters like his affable mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and an audience of folk purists alike.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Blake Simons |Leigh Singer |Josephine Botting |Jez Stewart
Amazon Prime’s new crime series Like a Dragon: Yakuza is a live-action adaptation of Sega’s cult video game franchise, which itself took some moves from the yakuza movies of Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike and more. 1 November 2024A man in a grey suit stands beneath the glowing red archway of a bustling street lined with stores, clubs, places to be. The man is stoic yakuza-of-the-people Kiryu Kazuma and the street is red light district Kamurochō, modelled on real-life Kabukichō, Tokyo.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Sophia Satchell-Baeza |Kelli Weston |Richard G. Combs |Leigh Singer
Divisive? ¡Claro que sí! In Jacques Audiard’s latest, the veteran director of blistering dramas such as A Prophet (2009) and Rust and Bone (2012) channels the improbable dream logic of a hepped-up telenovela into a riotous trans musical about crime and redemption. Ruling with terror over the streets of Mexico, the snarling crime kingpin Manitas del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) kidnaps a talented but under-achieving lawyer called Rita (Zoe Saldaña) and makes her an offer she can’t refuse.
