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2 days ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Tara Judah |Adam Nayman |Francesca Steele |Nicolas Rapold
The Encampments uses the natural momentum of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University in New York as its structural spine. What began with 50 students pitching tents in the campus’s designated protest zone soon became a national and international movement of students occupying campus lawns, demanding university administrations divest from Israel and weapons manufacturing.
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2 days ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman |Tara Judah |Francesca Steele |Nicolas Rapold
“Fight like a girl,” the heroine of Ballerina is instructed. Apparently, taken to its logical conclusion (to the extent that any movie set in the John Wick universe can be said to have a logical conclusion) this imperative means duelling with flamethrowers and using ice skates like bayonets, impressively inventive bits of carnage in a movie whose body count is in triple digits before the end of the first act.
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2 months ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel |Nick Davis |Adam Nayman |Tara Judah
Jared Hess’s A Minecraft Movie is a big (and not just in budget), brash and brazen family film – so don’t by fooled by the apparent modesty of its title’s indefinite article. It is the middle word that does the heavy lifting in the first feature film to be based on Mojang Studios’ Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time.
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Feb 17, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Rachel Pronger |Tara Judah |Leslie Felperin
A rage monster president is beholden to a big-brain misfit, bringing America to the brink of war with an ally over an island rich in (un)natural resources. Heroes who’ve assumed the role of Captain America before and after Golden Boy Steve Rogers struggle as a new administration abandons values they’ve fought for.
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Feb 13, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Nicolas Rapold Festivals |Nicolas Rapold |Rachel Pronger |Tara Judah
Reviewed from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival In 1983, Elizabeth Bouvia, a 26-year-old American with cerebral palsy, entered a hospital for the purpose of ending her life, but her attempt was rebuffed in the courts. In Life After, Reid Davenport revisits the case and embarks on an insightful consideration that braids together philosophical, personal, and political implications, to create a film essay on disabled experience.
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Feb 13, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Leslie Felperin |Rachel Pronger |Tara Judah
When Renée Zellweger first appeared on UK screens as Bridget Jones, critic Leslie Felperin was impressed by her fine comic timing in a film that ‘slips down as easily as Chardonnay’. 12 February 2025Bridget Jones’s Diary begins with its heroine (Renée Zellweger) casually dropping coins in a homeless couple’s cup on her way to work.
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Feb 13, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Tara Judah |Nick Bradshaw |Jason Anderson |Katie McCabe
Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown opens with a quotation from Edward Said: “In a way, it’s sort of the fate of Palestinians, not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.” Said’s words set a foreboding, fatalistic tone. The film is all about home, safety and humanity, and yet it is their absence that is most felt in this uncomfortable thriller.
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Feb 7, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jason Anderson |Katie McCabe |Savina Petkova |Tara Judah
Peter Hastings’s movie incarnation of the popular graphic novel series presents a cheerful whirlwind of goofball gags, silly puns and moments of real poignancy in an endearing, unpolished package. 7 February 2025It’s a sign of the Hollywood screen comedy’s sorry state that connoisseurs of goofball non-sequiturs, absurdist slapstick and anarchic humour can mainly find what they seek in animated films for kids.
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Feb 7, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Katie McCabeReviews |Katie McCabe |Savina Petkova |Tara Judah
The burden a parent places on a child, and the question of how much they can be blamed for the damage caused by its weight, runs like a compressed nerve through director Christopher Andrews’s brutal Irish pulp pastoral Bring Them Down. At one point, Michael O’Shea (Christopher Abbott) actually carries his cantankerous, ailing father Ray (Colm Meaney) on his back to show him damage inflicted on their sheep in a mafia-style attack by the neighbouring Keeley family.
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Feb 4, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | John Wrathall |Tara Judah |Nicolas Rapold |Jason Anderson
Like Whit Stillman’s Barcelona, Before Sunrise was backed by Castle Rock, and the two films also share their basic premise: young Americans broaden their minds through encounters with European women in European Cities. In fact, the preppy American overheard in Before Sunrise complaining about the decadence of European’ culture as exemplified by poor service in cafes could have strayed in from a Stillman film.
