“A tense, icy-hot boardroom psychodrama in which power is sex — or at least, in the increasingly fraught relationship between two Wall Street analysts climbing the ladder at different paces, it begins to determine it rather coldly.”

“The actors are the fabric of this film, and by the time an explosive town hall meeting rolls around and unfolds in real time, I was completely under their collective spell.”

“Past Lives has stuck these past few months: when I think of it, I’m hit with the same soft, lapping wave of sadness that got me the first time, the same pang of attachment to a life, and a self, that hasn’t deserted me exactly, but now seems distant and strange.”

“Ira Sachs’ exquisite Passages feels like the Sunday Bloody Sunday of its era, albeit with the older film’s buttoned-up Englishness replaced with a shimmying Parisian fluidity.”

“Any creative types may find themselves watching this otherwise gentle, ambling film in something close to a cold sweat, as we recall the times we've lied to loved ones and colleagues about their work, or doubted their praise of ours.”

“Like really good fast food, fast cinema should feel throwaway, yet totally delicious.”

“I don’t say this lightly, as I’m a huge fan of the 1999 Devon Sawa slacker horror Idle Hands, but for providing decent jumps and scares within a compelling character-driven context, Talk To Me is a serious new contender for best ever evil-hand-themed horror movie.”

“The other thing that this reminded me of was the Proustian free-association of memory, where one memory can lead directly to the next, but at other times, the associations are looser or deeper or less intuitive, and the effect is of a river of time ebbing and flowing and circling back on itself.”

“Boulifa worked inventively with the spare, tight tropes of British kitchen-sink realism in his excellent debut, but under warmer Moroccan skies, he permits himself a more sensuous, bejewelled cinematic language.”

“Constructed entirely from archive, some of it previously unseen, and laser-focused on the brief period that the band was active, a good part of its pleasure is to be found simply in lolling around in the early ‘80s, enjoying the hair, the outfits, the music.”

“Shô Miyake’s lovely, bittersweet portrait of a deaf woman boxer is playing its own game, or fighting its own fight, and its rewards aren’t euphoric, but they’re substantial nonetheless.”

“I appreciate the clash of tones and textures in No Hard Feelings, its smuggling of human sadness into sunny popcorn fodder, and the way it allows its megawatt star to play hot and cold, big and small, high and low, smart and dumb.”

“Chemistry is tricksier and slipperier — it lives in the body as well as the mind, and exists largely in the subjective eye of the beholder. Chemistry will creep up and have its way with you; it is porous and sinuous and extends beyond the performances of the actors in a film, seeping into their surroundings.”

“There’s an unassuming poetry and humility to Riley Keough and Gina Gammell’s film that doesn’t assume intimate knowledge of the lives under scrutiny.”

“What ensues isn’t the taut, driving procedural you’d expect from her story, but something more eerie and discursive, its investigative momentum continually disrupted by deceptive conversational banalities — reality, even. ”

“This is the stuff of Kafka, of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, or of those recurring dreams you have where you simply can’t get to the corner shop because something always gets in the damn way — except filtered through an American comic sensibility equally indebted to Charlie Kaufman and Mel Brooks.”

“Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeesch’s slowly heart-crushing film tracks this friendship with a perceptive patience that defies many a screenwriting manual and holds us rapt anyway, across a hilly hike of a running time.”

“Being too keen to pin down and define a character, it’s easy for screenwriters to forget that real people’s characters shift over time, often quite dramatically, and that in any case, people act in ways that are supposedly out of character all the time.”

“Polite Society doesn’t trade in dull girlboss platitudes and empowerment binaries; there’s messy, compromised real life here, even when the comedy is at its most loudly heightened.”

“There’s this Book of the Dead, you see, and if you use it to summon the dead, the dead will be, you know, summoned, and guess what, they aren’t just any dead, they are… the evil dead.”