New Directors/New Films

Latest reviews

• 
  Those Who Are Fine

  Review preview for Those Who Are Fine

  Taut, tense, perhaps less constructed than engineered.

  A call centre worker begins to work a scam on the elderly.
• 
  An Elephant Sitting Still

  Review preview for An Elephant Sitting Still

  Despite its grey, flat light and general melancholy punctured by menace, An Elephant Sitting Still is, by the end considerably more optimistic than it first appears about humanity.

  The lives of four people cross over the course of a day in China.
• 
  Hale County This Morning, This Evening

  Review preview for Hale County This Morning, This Evening

  By looking at what would lie outside of the traditional framework of most documentaries, Ross builds a much more absorbing picture of people fully embedded within an environment.

  An exploration of coming-of-age in the Black Belt of the American South.
• 
  The Guilty

  Review preview for The Guilty

  Well-written dialogue, strong acting all round and unobtrusive but taut direction give it real strength.

  After he takes a call from a woman in a desperate situation, an emergency operator feels unable to let go.
• 
  Ava

  Review preview for Ava

  Beautifully observed, Sadaf Foroughi's feature début explores the way that, even in societies explicitly controlled by men, it's often women who enforce social rules and seek to control one another's behaviour.

  A youngster in Iran begins to rebel.
• 
  Milla

  Review preview for Milla

  Jonckeere is ebullient in the lead yet there's a subtlety to her performance that communicates Milla's gradual passage from a life driven by instinct to one where she must take responsibility not only for herself but for her son.

  Meditation on young motherhood and the vagaries of growing up.
• 
  Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.

  Review preview for Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.

  Whatever else she may be, Maya clearly has no tolerance for bullshit - she seems constitutionally incapable of playing the game.

  Drawn from a never before seen cache of personal footage spanning decades, this is an intimate portrait of the Sri Lankan artist and musician who continues to shatter conventions.
• 
  Winter Brothers

  Review preview for Winter Brothers

  Palmason accentuates the tedium by holding almost every shot far longer than necessary or shooting scenes in pitch black mines or against stark landscapes white with lime dust.

  Two brothers embark on a violent feud with another family.
• 
  Until The Birds Return

  Review preview for Until The Birds Return

  Like so many anthology films, it suffers from the fact that the sections are uneven, with the middle segment soaring high above the two bookend stories.

  Algeria today. Past and present collide in the lives of a newly wealthy property developer, a young woman torn between the path of reason and sentiment and a neurologist whose past catches up with him.
• 
  3/4

  Review preview for 3/4

  Scenes don't run fully to their end or don't quite start at the beginning, the drama often whisked somewhere else as we're about to reach what more mainstream films would consider the small moments of climax.

  The lives of a father and his two children.

A–Z of New Directors/New Films 2018 reviews →

Features

• The myth and the dream
  RaMell Ross on Hale County This Morning, This Evening and the influence of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
• Creating Closeness
  Director Kantemir Balagov on framing and reality in his Russian drama