Exceptional, noteworthy and entertaining new films — and where to watch them. Every week.
One Fine Morning
“That the time allotted to said tragedy must still compete with other pressures in the busy, ongoing tapestry of life as it lived gives the film some semblance of the gentle brutality of reality, rather than the sometimes artificial feel of fiction dealing with this kind of subject matter.”
Please Baby Please
“Amanda Kramer’s film isn’t just a cheesily retro grab-bag of reference points, as it fuses an assortment of musical theatre and underground cinema languages for a bracingly contemporary expression of awakened queer desire and expanded gender identity.“
Other People's Children
“Rachel is played with typical precision and empathy by the gifted actor Virginie Efira (who you may remember from previous Films of the Week – Benedetta, Madeline Collins or Sibyl).”
The Age of Innocence
“Martin Scorsese’s visually stunning adaptation, one of the greatest of all page-to-screen adaptations, breathes a lovely, resonant life into Wharton’s precise characterisation.“
The Red Shoes
“The Red Shoes isn’t a children’s film at all: it’s that rare, now barely-existent hybrid that presents adult desires and conflicts with such an ebullient spirit of fantasy and ecstasy — saturated in colours that feel, in the moment, previously unseen on screen — that they become urgent and understandable to anyone.”
Saint Omer
“It discomfits and provokes by bending and breaking the courtroom drama’s structural rules, in turn inviting its audience to consider who the judicial system is designed to benefit and protect.“
Corsage
“Apt to dismiss any handmaiden who doesn’t cinch her corset quite tightly enough in the morning, Sissi demands equally punishing rigour in all aspects of life — fastidiously strategising her diet, exercise regime and even her sex life — while simultaneously railing against a courtly, patriarchal lifestyle in which she feels she can’t breathe.”
It’s A Wonderful Life
“The little town of Bedford Falls is so brilliantly realised, so hermetically sealed in its own perfect universe, populated so effectively with such a plausible gallery of humanity, that it enables me to believe that I too live there, for a little while.”
Sharp Stick
“A spiky, exhilarating coming-of-age portrait that distils everything people find (delete as appropriate) exciting/aggravating/amusing/alienating/relatable/chaotic about Lena Dunham’s millennial feminist worldview.”
Bones And All
“Disguised as a dreamy teen romance, [this film] conceals something more monstrous, braiding flashes of nightmarish violence into a rather lovely and elemental expression of the desire to lose yourself.”
Armageddon Time
“It’s a piercing examination of privilege, dense with political nuance and question — yet it never feels like a screed, since its portrayal of family life is so honest and inhabited, with Anthony Hopkins’ lovely, careworn performance a little hearth of warmth at its centre.”
The Wonder
“Lelio has constructed a taut thriller of philosophy, granting urgent stakes and an itchy ticking clock to its ideological conflicts.”
Neptune Frost
“It’s a film that feels conscious of being part of an Afrofuturist tradition, without being starry-eyed or sentimental about what has come before. It’s not about trying to get to the top of the economic ladder, but about dismantling the ladder entirely.”