Neil Young

Oct 11, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Kate Stables |Jessica Kiang |Samuel Thomas Davies |Neil Young

Death becomes Alice Lowe. Strictly in creative terms, of course. Whether co-creating caravanning serial-killers in 2012’s Sightseers, or starring in her directorial debut, the antenatal comedy-slasher Prevenge (2016), Lowe’s work has always been gleefully gruesome. Here, she’s dying for love as writer-director-star of a dreamily macabre comedy, in which the obsessive Agnes finds herself locked in a time-skipping doomed love story, set to repeat through the ages.

Oct 8, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Festivals |Jessica Kiang |Samuel Thomas Davies |Neil Young

It comes in with the breath and never comes out, the dread that lives in your chest from the first, uncanny scene of Déa Kulumbegashvili’s severe and brilliant April, incredibly only her second film after her debut masterpiece Beginning (2020). The dread is like a toxin polluting the damp fields and changeable skies of the Georgian countryside in spring – not that summer will bring relief.

Oct 1, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Neil Young Festivals |Neil Young |Jessica Kiang

Reviewed from the 2024 San Sebastian Film Festival. Red is the warmest colour in Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de soledad), an impressionistic and intimate documentary featuring Peruvian wunderkind torero Andrés Roca Rey which is effectively A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bullfighter. The subtly modulated hues which distinguished Serra’s Tahiti-set drama Pacifiction (2022) – a symphony in deliquescent pastels – are again here in evidence.

Sep 26, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Neil Young Festivals |Neil Young |Sophia Satchell-Baeza |Lillian Crawford

Reviewed from the 2024 San Sebastian Film Festival. Faithfully adapting Robert Harris’s 2016 page-turner about a fictional papal election, director Edward Berger and screenwriter Peter Straughan have constructed a sturdy frame within which their outstanding ensemble of actors can excel. Conclave is an engrossing ecclesiastical hoot which elegantly compresses a prestige-miniseries’ worth of meaty intrigue and lively incident into two brisk hours.

Sep 24, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman |Samuel Thomas Davies |Neil Young |Jessica Kiang

Every horror movie needs a gimmick: Oddity has enough for an entire mini-series. The pleasure of Irish-writer-director Damian McCarthy’s film lies in its brazen stockpiling of images and ideas borrowed from other genre efforts, to the point that it feels like a kind of cabinet of curiosities – i.e. exactly the sort of thing that its heroine, Darcy (Carolyn Bracken) would sell in her eerie little small-town antique store.