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2 weeks 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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2 months ago | 
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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2 months ago | 
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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2 months ago | 
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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2 months ago | 
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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2 months ago | 
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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2 months ago | 
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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2 months ago | 
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.
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May 23, 2024 | 
sensesofcinema.com | Tara Judah
In her entertaining and thoroughly engaging whistle-stop tour through 20th century popular film and TV narratives, film critic and journalist Ellen E. Jones convincingly makes the case for the potential of film and TV to disseminate and influence the way we, as individuals and societies, understand and interact with race.
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May 13, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Tara Judah
According to cinema and television, women are constantly forming incredible female friendships. From Steel Magnolias to Bridesmaids, Sex and the City to The Golden Girls, these are the kind of friends you can rely on to get you through the hard times – you laugh, they laugh; you cry, they cry. The only thing you have to figure out is: are you a) the clever one, b) the sexy one or c) the funny one? And yet, for years I had been searching for my own tribe, to no avail.
