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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Sophie Monks Kaufman |Nicolas Rapold |Henry Miller |Mark Asch
Most cinephiles are prone to the fantasy that if you make – or watch – the right film, life-changing consequences will arise. In Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, his follow-up to the widely beloved The Worst Person in the World (2022), the director explores the relationship between a disappointing dad and his two daughters.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Nicolas Rapold Festivals |Nicolas Rapold |Henry Miller |Mark Asch
The American director goes behind the scenes of Breathless’ historic production for a film that embraces Jean-Luc Godard’s cinephile passion and formal imagination. 23 May 2025Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival“The best way to criticise a film is to make one,” runs the famous Godard axiom, and perhaps the same goes for loving one, where the criticism takes the form of a thoroughgoing attention to all the finer points.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Christina Newland |Henry Miller |Mark Asch |Jonathan Romney
Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film FestivalLong live Spike Lee and long live Denzel Washington. The filmmaker and the towering star of some of his greatest films – not least Malcolm X – are together again for Lee’s latest joint, Highest 2 Lowest, a corporate drama and crime thriller combined into one that’s all about power, money, and self-interest in the world of modern Black capitalism and the music biz.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Henry Miller |Mark Asch |Jonathan Romney |Giovanni Marchini Camia |Henry Miller
In what is probably his final outing as Ethan Hunt, Tom Cruise squares up against AI in a series of spectacular set-pieces in the sky and sea. 23 May 2025Ethan Hunt’s adversary in the eighth and final (?) Mission: Impossible is AI, but his nemesis, all along, has been gravity. The first he will gladly destroy, taking the internet with it, but the other he has kept coming back to, most memorably in the ‘black vault’ at Langley in the first film and the Burj Khalifa sequence in the fourth.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Giovanni Marchini Camia |Mark Asch |Jonathan Romney |John Bleasdale
Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film FestivalHaving already proved himself a virtuoso of scene-setting openers with Aquarius (2016) and Bacurau (2019), Kleber Mendonça Filho pulls off a hattrick with The Secret Agent. A vivid yellow VW Beetle drives into a rural petrol station while titles inform us that we’re in Brazil in 1977, “a time of great mischief”. Not far from the pumps, a dead body lies under a sheet of cardboard and a swarm of flies.
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1 month ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Jonathan Romney |Mark Asch |Giovanni Marchini Camia |John Bleasdale
The Icelandic drama When the Light Breaks – the original, more succinct title is Ljósbrot, ‘refraction’ – is built around a simple question. How can a person deal with the loss of a loved one when circumstances demand that they hide the extent of their emotion? The quandary is especially painful when it affects someone of college age, still beginning to grapple with life’s harsher emotional challenges, even while presenting themselves as mature and unbreakably robust.
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Mar 20, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Bedatri D. Choudhury |David West |Mark Asch |Arjun Sajip
Sandhya Suri’s ambitious debut tells the story of a young Hindu widow who takes on her late husband’s constable job and is thrown into the violent world of Indian law enforcement. 19 March 2025Midway through Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, the eponymous protagonist, a police officer (Shahana Goswami), sits in a restaurant in a central-northern Indian town, eating a plate of red bean curry with fried bread. As the only woman, she feels the sting of male eyes on her.
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Mar 20, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | David WestReviews |David West |Mark Asch |Arjun Sajip
A mega-hit in China, the sequel to 2019’s NE ZHA demolished box office records to become the highest grossing animated feature film ever made. However, it presents a potentially challenging prospect for audiences not versed in Chinese mythology or anyone who hasn’t seen the opening instalment. Director Jiao Zi, aka Yu Yang, picks up where the first movie left off as pint-sized demon-child hero Ne Zha and his pal, dragon prince Ao Bing, are resurrected by Ne Zha’s master, the portly Taoist Taiyi.
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Mar 14, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Mark AschReviews |Mark Asch |Arjun Sajip |Anton Bitel
“One of the greatest compliments I ever got (well, it seemed like a compliment to me, anyway) was when Mr. Spielberg told me I’d missed my era as a screenwriter – that I would have had a ball in the 40s,” David Koepp once told the film scholar David Bordwell. He’s found the next best thing writing scripts directed by modern workflow gurus like David Fincher, and now the one-man studio Steven Soderbergh.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
mubi.com | Mark Asch
The closeted right-wing operative has become a tragic character in the American repertory. The Apprentice (2024), released to theaters just in time to herald Donald Trump’s reelection to the American presidency, emerges from the same impulse that has motivated much national news coverage of Trump since the 2016 presidential campaign.
