Reviews by Amber Wilkinson

Order by: Date, A–Z

• 
  The Gullspång Miracle (2023)

  Review preview for The Gullspång Miracle

  Although the structure is offbeat, and the muscular scoring from Jonas Colstrup (The Square) emphasises the emotional rollercoaster, Fredriksson’s film remains empathetic to all concerned.

  A pair of sisters' encounter with a woman who looks like their dead sibling proves to be just the start of a whale of a tale.
• 
  Rule Of Two Walls (2023)

  Review preview for Rule Of Two Walls

  As the film progresses, and these artists and filmmakers articulate their response to the conflict both verbally and through their work, Gutnik also interrogates the importance of culture when it comes to establishing and preserving nationhood.

  Explores the war in Ukraine through the lens of artists living and creating in the midst of unprecedented conflict.
• 
  Medusa Deluxe (2022)

  Review preview for Medusa Deluxe

  While the choreography of all this is audacious, Hardiman is equally interested in dialogue. He loves an intricately worked sentence as much as a finely coiffed barnet.

  A murder mystery set in a competitive hairdressing competition.
• 
  My Imaginary Country (2022)

  Review preview for My Imaginary Country

  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.
• 
  Hanging Gardens (2022)

  Review preview for Hanging Gardens

  Al Daradji has a way of making the usual meanings of things slip from their moorings.

  When a young Iraqi rubbish picker rescues an American sex doll from the Baghdad dumps, he crosses into a perilous red zone, where friends become enemies and nothing is certain.
• 
  Chicken For Linda! (2023)

  Review preview for Chicken For Linda!

  The vibrancy of childhood skips from the screen.

  When a mum makes a promise to her daughter after unfairly punishing her, she finds herself having to go the extra mile to make it come true.
• 
  Inshallah A Boy (2023)

  Review preview for Inshallah A Boy

  A sort of soft-faced tyrany abounds.

  A mother fights for her rights in a partriachal system after her husband's death.
• 
  Hours Of Ours (2023)

  Review preview for Hours Of Ours

  If the film is a bit baggy in places it serves to underline the boredom that can come with living in limbo.

  A filmmaker who has founded a bond with a refugee Sudanese family documents their wait in Thailand for a move to Canada.
• 
  After Work (2023)

  Review preview for After Work

  There is a lot going on here, but Gandini offers a breezy and thought-provoking ride

  A consideration of the changing landscape of work and our attitudes towards it.
• 
  Pamfir (2022)

  Review preview for Pamfir

  There’s an increasing sense of the unnatural impinging on the natural.

  Pamfir wants to be a decent family man but challenged by the circumstances he is forced to give up honest breadwinning to help his family.
• 
  Grasshopper Republic (2023)

  Review preview for Grasshopper Republic

  Beyond its individual enjoyable moments, McCabe’s film is well-structured so that it builds to the magnificent spectacle of a successful trapping night and its aftermath.

  Documentary about the business of grasshopper trapping in Uganda.
• 
  Landshaft (2023)

  Review preview for Landshaft

  Kötter’s film generates a sense of war not just as a destructive influence but as something that leads to both stoicism and inaction.

  A road trip documentary exploring the aftermath of war in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region of Armenia.
• 
  Knit's Island (2023)

  Review preview for Knit's Island

  The filmmakers are to be commended on their dedication. Creating a rapport with subjects for a documentary is never an easy task but gaining trust in a virtual space is surely doubly difficult.

  Somewhere on the Internet, there is a space of 250 square kilometers in which individuals gather in community to simulate a survivalist fiction. This documentary explores it.
• 
  Pure Unknown (2023)

  Review preview for Pure Unknown

  The film brings home the enormity of the challenge that Cattaneo is up against, not just in terms of money for identification but regarding a general lack of political interest and will in seeing systems better connected.

  One forensic pathologist's fight for the rights to identity of the nameless victims she works with.
• 
  To Catch A Killer (2023)

  Review preview for To Catch A Killer

  The characters need a personality infusion and the killer’s motivation is on life support.

  A cop becomes an FBI go-between in a bid to snare a sniper.
• 
  The Dam (2022)

  Review preview for The Dam

  Built on strong imagery rather than substantive narrative.

  Sudan, near the Merowe dam. Maher works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he secretly builds a mysterious construction made of mud.
• 
  My Love Affair With Marriage (2022)

  Review preview for My Love Affair With Marriage

  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.
• 
  Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022)

  Review preview for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

  The sense of flow extends to the narrative, which weaves together a series of stories, connected not so much by plot intersection as by existential questions of purpose and loss.

  A giant talkative frog, a lost cat, and a tsunami help a bank employee, his wife and a schizophrenic accountant to save Tokyo from an earthquake and find a meaning to their lives.
• 
  5 Seasons Of Revolution (2023)

  Review preview for 5 Seasons Of Revolution

  Lina’s filmmaking has a raw emotional quality.

  An aspiring video journalist in her 20s finds herself already facing self-reckoning. Born in Damascus, Syria, Lina starts to report on the events around her until she is compelled to become a war reporter and, later, the unexpected narrator of her own destiny.
• 
  1991 (1991)

  Review preview for 1991

  Žiūra captures the strange mix of boredom and alertness that haunts these places.

  Drama unfolds at a Lithuanian guard post.
• 
  The Night Of The 12th (2022)

  Review preview for The Night Of The 12th

  While a specific killer may not be unmasked, toxic masculinity and its co-conspirator the patriarchal society stand in the dock - and the case against them is damning.

  It is said that every investigator has a crime that haunts them, a case that hurts him more than the others, without him necessarily knowing why. For Yohan that case is the murder of Clara.
• 
  Lynx Man (2023)

  Review preview for Lynx Man

  Loner Rantala is the perfect subject for a documentary, distinctive both in look and deed.

  Documentary about one man's obsession with the lynx who live in the forests around him.
• 
  The Teachers' Lounge (2023)

  Review preview for The Teachers' Lounge

  Thrums from start to almost finish with the sweaty tension of a looming maths test.

  When one of her students is suspected of theft, teacher Carla Nowak decides to get to the bottom of the matter. Caught between her ideals and the school system, the consequences of her actions threaten to break her.
• 
  Motherland (2023)

  Review preview for Motherland

  In the motherland of Belarus, it’s the “grandfathers” who are the problem.

  In 2020, Belarus’s military practice of violent bullying conscripts as a means of control becomes a flash point for a growingly dissatisfied populace.
• 
  Seven Winters In Tehran (2023)

  Review preview for Seven Winters In Tehran

  This is a sombre and thorough film.

  In 2007, Reyhaneh Jabbari, 19, is sentenced to death in Iran for the murder of a man who tried to rape her. The efforts her family and supporters undertake open a window into the mass oppression and silencing of women in the country and the risks it takes to support them.
• 
  Fantastic Machine (2023)

  Review preview for Fantastic Machine

  It is highly satisfying that this feature film about the history and cultural impact of photography - and, by extension, film and television - should be such a lovely example of the Reithian principles to “inform, educate and entertain”.

  From the first camera to 45 billion cameras worldwide today, the visual sociologist filmmakers widen their lens to expose both humanity’s unique obsession with the camera’s image and the social consequences that lay ahead.
• 
  Delikado (2022)

  Review preview for Delikado

  After we see the extent of the problem, the documentarian begins to illustrate that the illegal logging is not just one or two rogue operators but intricately connected with a political chain.

  Bobby, Tata and Nieves – a charismatic lawyer, a former illegal logger and a fearless politician – are three magnetic leaders fighting to stop corporations and governments seeking to plunder increasingly valuable natural resources from the island of Palawan.
• 
  Le Pupille (2022)

  Review preview for Le Pupille

  There's a majestic "English pudding" at the centre of this Oscar-nominated short - but really this latest from Alice Rohrwacher is an enjoyable trifle.

  Christmas rebellion brews at an all-girls Catholic boarding school.
• 
  Blue Bag Life (2022)

  Review preview for Blue Bag Life

  There's a poignant sense of poetry underlying some of her interactions, while at other times she simply conveys pure rawness of feeling.

  Documentary portrait of a life touched by addiction.
• 
  Lunana: A Yak In The Classroom (2019)

  Review preview for Lunana: A Yak In The Classroom

  The sort of film that the word "charmer" was made for.

  A young teacher is sent to the most remote school in the world, where he finds himself undergoing a transformation.
• 
  Women Behind The Wheel (2022)

  Review preview for Women Behind The Wheel

  Television schedules seem to be crammed with middle-aged men taking train journeys or motorcycle rides, so the first thing that’s notable about Women Behind The Wheel is that it brings with it the freshness of a much younger demographic in addition to its female perspective.

  The directors become the first women to drive the entirety of Central Asia’s Pamir Highway.
• 
  Joyland (2022)

  Review preview for Joyland

  It is not so much individual people who cause the problems but rather the constricting cultural circumstances that dictate everyone must play their allocated role.

  As the Ranas, a happily patriarchal joint family, yearn for the birth of a baby boy to continue the family line, their youngest son secretly joins an erotic dance theater and falls for an ambitious trans starlet. Their impossible love story illuminates the entire family's desire for a sexual rebellion.
• 
  Sea Sparkle (2023)

  Review preview for Sea Sparkle

  The emotional arc Lena experiences is moving without being cloying.

  After her dad's death at sea, a teenage girl becomes convinced his boat was capsized by a sea monster.
• 
  Love To Love You, Donna Summer (2023)

  Review preview for Love To Love You, Donna Summer

  Love To Love You, Donna Summer, has perhaps the best prism of all to observe the life of the Queen of Disco through - that of her family.

  Documentary about the Disco star.
• 
  Tótem (2023)

  Review preview for Tótem

  The idea of different things being in and out of focus for the various generations runs through a film that has sweetly comic moments and poignancy in equal measure.

  In a large house, friends and family meet for a dual ritual: it is the birthday of young father and painter Tona, but also a farewell ceremony.
• 
  Beyond Utopia (2023)

  Review preview for Beyond Utopia

  Beyond being nailbiting - a feeling driven by Hyun Seok Kim’s ‘heartbeat’ score that quickens our own - Gavin’s film is also an eye-opener.

  Charting the journey and experiences of North Korean defectors.
• 
  Polite Society (2023)

  Review preview for Polite Society

  Manzoor operates a controlled chaos that blends the colour and splendour of Bollywood with sly British satire reminiscent of early Edgar Wright.

  Aspiring martial artist Ria Khan believes she must save her older sister, Lena, from her impending marriage. With the help of her friends, Ria attempts to pull off the most ambitious of all wedding heists in the name of independence and sisterhood.
• 
  Still: A Michael J Fox Movie (2023)

  Review preview for Still: A Michael J Fox Movie

  There’s an enviable mix of the playful and the poignant.

  The improbable tale of a short kid from a Canadian army base who became the darling of 1980s Hollywood — only to find the course of his life altered by a stunning diagnosis. What happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease?
• 
  The Eternal Memory (2023)

  Review preview for The Eternal Memory

  Striking in its intimacy.

  Augusto and Paulina have been together for 25 years. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Both fear the day he no longer recognises her.
• 
  The Whale (2022)

  Review preview for The Whale

  A film that often lacks subtlety in its execution despite the performances and impressive make-up craft.

  A reclusive English teacher living with severe obesity attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption.
• 
  Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (2023)

  Review preview for Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

  This is a place of cleansing, not just of the body but so much more as this non-intrusive but immersive film gradually reveals.

  In the darkness of a smoke sauna, women share their innermost secrets and intimate experiences, washing off the shame trapped in their bodies and regaining their strength through a sense of communion.
• 
  Cat Person (2023)

  Review preview for Cat Person

  The central portion of the film is delciously discomfiting.

  College student Margot meets 33-year-old Robert at the cinema where she works. After a casual flirtation at the concession stand, they carry on conversations through texts. As their perceptions of each other collide, events spiral out of control. Based on The New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian.
• 
  Girl (2023)

  Review preview for Girl

  Although the issues of trauma and recovery being dealt with here are not exactly easy watching, Onashile shoots the film with a fluidity and grace.

  Eleven-year-old Ama and her mother, Grace, take solace in the gentle but isolated world they obsessively create. Ama’s growing up threatens the boundaries of their tenderness and forces Grace to reckon with a past she struggles to forget.
• 
  Iron Butterflies (2023)

  Review preview for Iron Butterflies

  Liubyi’s film succeeds in bringing home not just the enormity of the crash itself but of the scale of what was lost aboard.

  In summer 2014, sunflower fields and coal mines in eastern Ukraine turned into a 12 square kilometer crime scene. A multi-layered investigation into the downing of flight MH17, in which a butterfly-shaped shrapnel was found in the pilot's body, implicated the state responsible for a war crime that remains unpunished.
• 
  Kim's Video (2023)

  Review preview for Kim's Video

  Unashamedly quirky but burtsting with the love of film, this is the sort of one-off doc that’s as much about the engaging playfulness of its construction as it is the content.

  Playing with the forms and tropes of various cinema genres, the filmmaker sets off on a quest to find a legendary lost video collection of 55,000 movies in Sicily.
• 
  Talk to Me (2023)

  Review preview for Talk to Me

  The reason the film works so well is in its well-established teenage relationships - with the Philippous showing the attraction of being in with the cool kids and that the dangers this presents are particularly acute for those, like Mia, who are already emotionally vulnerable or, like Riley, desperate to be included in an older peer group.

  When a group of friends discover how to conjure spirits using an ancient embalmed hand, they become hooked on the new thrill. Until one of them goes too far and opens the door to the spirit world.
• 
  Against The Tide (2023)

  Review preview for Against The Tide

  Although this is a melancholic film there is hopefulness in friendship and tradition.

  The threats facing India's Koli fishing community are explored through the story of two friends with very different approaches to their tradition.
• 
  Radical (2023)

  Review preview for Radical

  There’s a reason why formulas work and this one is marked: Caution, may make you cry.

  In a Mexican border town plagued by neglect, corruption, and violence, a frustrated teacher tries a radical new method to break through his students’ apathy and unlock their curiosity, their potential… and maybe even their genius. Based on a true story.
• 
  The Wastetown (2022)

  Review preview for The Wastetown

  The tension is built upon a looping repetition, from the graceful repeated camera moves from Masud Amini Tirani and Bahrami's plotting to Foad Gharemani’s baleful score.

  Bemani has spent ten years in jail for killing her husband. Her child was taken away in prison and allegedly given to her husband’s family. Temporarily released, she immediately starts looking for her son.
• 
  Haulout (2022)

  Review preview for Haulout

  The documentarians choose their shots wisely, with judicious drone footage bringing home the enormity of the issue.

  Documenting a marine biologist as he observes walruses in Siberia.