Green directs with such a sure hand that the film slides by easily – making it easy to miss its nuances if you’re not paying attention.
A 70-year-old widower travels to Paris to visit a childhood friend. He stays with his daughter and discovers that her marriage is falling apart. He decides to help. In the process, he finds out that he and his daughter share both dreams and desires of which they had been previously unaware.
This is, on the surface of it a consideration of what it means to be an "exile"...More fundamentally, however, this is a study of working-class loneliness.
Documentary about a man torn between living in the UK and Algeria.
Carl Woods’ documentary begins by seeming to embrace the conventional narrative and ends by turning it on its head.
A physically disabled man treks to Everest Base Camp on horseback, yet when the mountain puts his life on the line, he's forced to question how far he's willing to go, just to fit in.
What Belmont does brilliantly, and largely through pacing and style, is to convey all this in a way which, for much of the running time, feels light and easily relatable.
A family's journey to reconciliation after facing the trauma of the Holocaust.
While many other films feel as though they are really staking out a deliberate political stance against the Iranian regime or coming at it from deep within metaphor, My Favourite Cake is casually, but almost constantly, rebellious in small ways.
A 70-year-old decides to break her solitary routine and revitalise her love life.
This is a special effects bonanza on the lines of The Mask, with Lloyd hamming it outrageously and Daniels blundering about like a walrus in a tea shop.
At its best, My First Film feels very disjointed in its apparent lack of any formal rigour, and it seems that Anger is using exactly that with the intention to sell it as an indisputable truth.
A filmmaker tells the story of her cursed film in a work of autofiction.
Guzmán doesn’t need to hunt for symbolism as the protesters are often supplying their own.
Protests that exploded onto the streets of Chile's capital of Santiago in 2019 as the population demanded more democracy and social equality around education, healthcare and job opportunities.
Dealing with feelings of innocence, love and abandonment, this magical film is often very funny, but above all profoundly moving without ever falling into sentimentality.
A 10-year-old Swedish boy is evacuated into the country with his dog.
Chuat and Reymond’s début feature is grounded in a deep reality.
Lisa has bid goodbye to her ambitions as a playwright and the Berlin arts scene and now lives in Switzerland with her husband, who runs an international school. When her twin brother – star of the Schaubühne theatre’s ensemble – falls ill, she returns to Berlin.
If there’s a single word to describe the latest film from Signe Baumane, it’s vibrancy.
Some people spend their lives wondering why a marriage didn’t last. Signe Baumane set out to get some answers. The result is this animated film, which combines ancient mythology and contemporary neuroscience.
In casting its net My Mother's Wedding has just a few too many gaps.
Three sisters return to their home for the third wedding of their twice-widowed mother. The mother and daughters are forced to revisit the past and confront the future, with help from a colourful group of unexpected wedding guests.
This is very much a film about filmmaking – not the production, not the actors and associated gossip, but the experience of constructing a film on storyboard and set, building it up shot by shot until it becomes more than it first appeared to be on the page.
An imaginary Alfred Hitchcock rewatches his own films and makes observations on how they fit into today's world.
Cohen and West draw on the rich archive of Murray's own work further illustrating it with archive footage and photographs of the periods the film refers to in order to paint a picture of quiet but firm activism.
The focus on one painting after another can get a bit samey, but it’s interwoven with the story of the gallery’s origins and development over time, which is consistently intriguing.
The story of the National Gallery of London and what it means to its staff, visitors and the country at large.
Both actors are masters of his kind of material and give the film a good deal more depth and nuance than is present in the script alone.
A lonely and grumpy Holocaust survivor convinces himself that his new neighbour is none other than Adolf Hitler. Not being taken seriously, he commences an independent investigation in an effort to prove his claim.
My Neighbour Totoro is a true family film, both about, and for, families and while it is wholly concerned with good, decent, likeable people (as well as endearing rustic entities), it somehow avoids saccharine sentiments or a pat resolution.
Magical film about two girls who have adventures with the forest spirits they encounter. Twenty-fifth anniversary re-release.
The film has been very well edited to construct a coherent narrative which mixes wonder, drama and action.
A filmmaker forges an unusual friendship with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest, learning as the animal shares the mysteries of her world.
Park captures the web of life tensions that don’t just stop when we’re teenagers, particularly the pull of the new versus the attraction of nostalgia.
The summer before college, bright-yet-irreverent Elliott comes face-to-face with her older self during a mushroom trip. The encounter spurs a funny and heartfelt journey of self-discovery and first love as Elliott prepares to leave her childhood home.
McLeod teases out the tale as we see how much of this has exited the realm of fact and entered the realm of collective myth and storytelling in the years that have passed.
The astonishing true story of Scotland's most notorious imposter. It's 1993 and 16-year-old Brandon is the new kid in school. Soon he’s top of the class, acing exams and even taking the lead in the school musical. He’s the model pupil, until he's unmasked.
Arashi is a model with Middle Eastern roots, making her screen début, which is difficult to belief given the quality of her performance in this complex, multifaceted role.
A Kurdish girl in Japan finds her life turned upside down when her family loses its refugee status.
The Italian filmmaker employs a minimalist approach that embraces the languorous nature of summer.
Italy 1997. When 17-year-old Clara and Irene meet they are nothing alike but get on marvelously. They run away together to an island in Sicily to live their summer freely, and to hide from a reality they want to forget.
Hairabedian patiently captures all this with an intimacy that stems from trust, with Vrej viewing her and the camera increasingly as a confidante as time passes.
For 11-year-old Vrej, life in his homeland Artsakh is like a paradise, but when war starts again, can he carry a nation’s hopes on his young shoulders?
Though it might be accused of falling into cliché with its tragic trans character, Rodrigo Sepúlveda's film captures the distinctive qualities of these two individuals so well that it feels fresh regardless.
A passionate relationship flourishes between a lonely transvestite and a young guerrilla during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, putting both of them in danger.
Subtle observations about the racism that underpins this superficially idyllic society pepper a film which repeatedly forces its hero to question his assumptions.
A young literature teacher lives a peaceful life in Oslo until his estranged uncle from the Iranian part of Kurdistan unexpectedly arrives for a visit.
