There are two sections:
- New in 2023 (new releases, festival films, etc)
- Older films discovered for the first time
Films are listed alphabetically within each section.
1. New in 2023 (new releases, festival films, etc)
20 Days in Mariupol [Mstyslav Chernov, 2023, Ukraine]
“20 Days in Mariupol” is one of the most painful films I have ever watched: it is also one of the most important. This stunning documentary not only gives a chilling firsthand view of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it captures actual war crimes. […]
A word of warning: once you see this film, you can never go back. There are things shown here that may haunt you forever. […] It’s disturbing to watch, but it also a crucial step in realizing the horrors and the true cost of war.
Chernov narrates the film with an appropriately somber tone, giving a first-hand look at what it was like during the early days of the conflict. His on-camera interviews with Ukranians will tear your heart apart, conveying the emotional harm that wartime brings. This first-person view takes audiences inside hospitals and into the emergency rooms alongside doctors, nurses, and their patients who are in need of critical care. He goes underground with locals into their makeshift basement bomb shelters, spending time with the citizens who are living the horror in real time. As Ukranians begin living without heat, electricity, internet, phones, and with hospitals beginning to run out of critical medicine, Chernov captures a sense of isolation as Mariupol’s residents are cut off from communication networks and much-needed aid. […]
Despite being extremely difficult to watch, “20 Days in Mariupol” is a film immeasurable value. It not only offers an astonishing record of events and serves as a time capsule of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it fosters a better understanding of how traumatic events affect our fellow human beings. This documentary is a powerful achievement in wartime reporting.
Louisa Moore, Screen Zealots
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed [Laura Poitras, 2022, US]
A groundbreaking artist who turned the lens on her own life, who documented the fabulous, fragile, nocturnal world of Boston’s drag queens, who gravitated towards the fringes of society, who rocked the art world when she curated a show about Aids, who supported her photography with a stint as a sex worker: Nan Goldin is a fascinating subject for a documentary even before she declared war on one of the most powerful families in the US. But what elevates this gripping, Oscar-nominated documentary by Laura Poitras (already an Oscar winner for the Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour) is the deft meshing together of Goldin’s biographical and creative history with details of her crusade against the Sackler family, art world philanthropists and the pharma billionaires behind OxyContin and, by extension, the opioid crisis.
Wendy Ide, The Observer
Anatomy of a Fall [Justine Triet, 2023, France]
The script, which Triet co-wrote with director, actor, and partner Arthur Harari, makes use of clever twists and turns in order to advance the plot in a nonconventional way. A lot of the dramaturgic power in this film is owed to the consistent withholding—and therefore, suspense—of crucial details, missing pieces, and, obviously, the role of blame. Anatomy of a Fall does start off as a procedural thriller, the visuals and concise editing techniques building up the possibility of a vile act alongside that of a intended suicide. There two sides of the case unspool in the film’s second and third act, when Sandra faces the court as a suspect, and the courtroom drama game is on. […]
The film offers food for thought on the topic of creative ownership and responsibility, and how fluid these categories can be when applied to a woman. Anatomy of a Fall uses the judicial system to expose inherently misogynistic prejudices under which such heavy—legal—decisions are being made every day, but also relies on a very complex reading of the marriage economy: who does what, when, and for what gain.
Savina Petkova, AwardsWatch
Baghdad on Fire [Karrar Al-Azzawi, 2023, Norway]
In 2019 massive protests erupted in Baghdad, led by young Iraqis demanding democracy and freedom from foreign influence. Having spent most of her life under the US occupation, Tiba joins the movment.
Mubi
Banel & Adama [Ramata-Toulaye Sy, 2023, France, Senegal, Mali, Qatar]
With its balletic choreography of performance and statuesque visual approach, Sy’s film is a work of remarkable composition. Through often static and poised imagery, closer to photographic work, the filmmaker and DoP Amine Berrada play with notions of structure to convey the restrictive traditions of Banel (Khady Mane) and Adama’s (Mamadou Diallo) home. Banel, reluctant to have children and eager to work in the fields with Adama, rebels against the norms of the village where the elders would rather she fulfil her supposed duties as a woman.
Adama struggles too, refusing to inherit the title of village chief that his lineage grants and his mother desires for him. Yet, where what Adama feels is closer to guilt — he fears the drought devastating their land is a holy punishment for his refusal — Banel is tormented by graver suffering. Losing Adama to the ways of the village would mean total destruction for a woman intent on breaking free. [..]
Every movement, every shot is deployed with such confidence and the filmmaker draws compelling performances from both Mane, graceful even in all of Banel’s distress, and Diallo, regal yet soft in equal measure. It’s all an impressive sign of Sy’s formal rigour and deft evocation of place, but the film works on simpler terms, too — at the heart of Banel & Adama is the cosmic love story of two people who are meant to be together, no matter what it takes.
Caitlin Quinlan, Little White Lies
Barbie [Greta Gerwig, 2023, US, UK]
Barbie is one of the most inventive, immaculately crafted and surprising mainstream films in recent memory – a testament to what can be achieved within even the deepest bowels of capitalism. It’s timely, too, arriving a week after the creative forces behind these stories began striking for their right to a living wage and the ability to work without the threat of being replaced by an AI. It’s a pink-splattered manifesto to the power of irreplaceable creative labour and imagination.
While it’s impossible for any studio film to be truly subversive, especially when consumer culture has caught on to the idea that self-awareness is good for business (there’s nothing that companies love more these days than to feel like they’re in on the joke), Barbie gets away with far more than you’d think was possible. It’s a project that writer-director Greta Gerwig, co-writer (plus real-life partner and frequent collaborator) Noah Baumbach, and producer-star Margot Robbie were free to work on in relative privacy, holed up during the pandemic away from the meddlesome impulses of Warner Bros and Mattel executives. […]
Barbie is joyous from minute to minute to minute. But it’s where the film ends up that really cements the near-miraculousness of Gerwig’s achievement. Very late in the movie, a conversation is had that neatly sums up one of the great illusions of capitalism – that creations exist independently from those that created them. It’s why films and television shows get turned into “content”, and why writers and actors end up exploited and demeaned. Barbie, in its own sly, silly way, gets to the very heart of why these current strikes are so necessary.
Clarisse Loughrey, Independent
Fallen Leaves [Aki Kaurismäki, 2023, Finland, Germany]
Can a film be both bleak and lovely at the same time? Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki (The Other Side of Hope, Drifting Clouds) takes a good stab at it with this black comic, repeatedly-stalled love story in which Helsinki again serves as a convincing shabby crucible of broken dreams. It’s a low-key treat with moments of real bliss. […]
Kaurismäki is the king of pared-down deadpan melancholy, and with Fallen Leaves he gifts his loyal subjects a familiar tale in look and spirit. Present and correct is his usual shadowy noir lighting and a jukebox soundtrack of Finnish and other ballads. It builds on his other stories of Finnish working-class woe and wears its film-loving heart on its sleeve with wry nods to other directors throughout.Particular to Fallen Leaves is a deep, amused sigh at the limitations of men and alcohol, especially when paired. But it’s not judgy, just jaded, at least until the clouds finally start to part. It finds genuine humour in its characters’ almost down-and-out lot, but it’s fully on their side – the side of those trampled on by modern times.
Dave Calhoun, Time Out
Fledglings (Pisklaki) [Lidia Duda, 2022, Poland]
A specialist boarding school in Poland explores how blind and visually impaired the children gain strength and confidence from supporting each other in Lidia Duda’s surprisingly stylish first feature that serves as a warm tribute to both staff and patients. […]
These children are forced to grow up early – and relying on verbal communication has made them advanced for their age where speech is concerned in a world that will remain a mystery to them forever, in many ways. As a result their role-plays become very complex and mature. With sensitive black-and-white images from DoPs Wojciech Staron and Zuzanna Zachara, Fledgings is endearing but never sentimental in showing that the struggle for a non-visual identity is tough but enormously satisfying. An impressive first feature and a special achievement in every way.
Meredith Taylor, FilmUforia
Godland [Hlynur Pálmason, 2022, Denmark, Iceland, France, Sweden]
A 19th century man of God is tested to his limits and ultimately broken by the cruel beauty of Iceland’s interior in this striking […] saga by Hlynur Pálmason. Danish missionary Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), powered by religious fervour and moral certainties, travels from Denmark to the furthest reaches of Iceland to build a church for an isolated community, and to photograph the land and its people.
This is the third feature from Pálmason […]. It’s an accomplished, ambitious work which has a Herzogian fascination with vast, unforgiving landscapes, hubris and madness.
Wendy Ide, Screen Daily
Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures [Marco Martins, 2022, Portugal, France, UK]
It often takes an outsider vision to capture specific aspects of British culture and politics in a truly revealing cinema image. […] Now Portugal’s Marco Martins offers a migrant workers’ perspective on Brexit-era Britain, and Great Yarmouth – Provisional Figures (the title features a statistical term denoting immigrants of undefined status) must rank among cinema’s most unforgiving portraits of the UK.
Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily
A chilling essay in hard social realism, but with a nightmarish expressionistic spin, the film is uncompromisingly bleak and boldly executed, and features a memorable anti-heroine superbly portrayed by Beatriz Batarda […]
The portrayal of subsistence-level living is bleak indeed. Adherents of Loach’s political humanism might even consider Great Yarmouth a libel on British working-class culture, but it’s truer to say that the film is an indictment of contemporary global capitalism and its dehumanising effects. […]
Great Yarmouth isn’t always subtle, but it is deeply unsettling and certainly timely given that the UK now faces a new Conservative regime that is unlikely to make social compassion a priority. British fiction film is yet to produce its own analysis of the state of the post-Brexit nation: it’s appropriate that it has taken an European auteur to do that. The effect is sobering to say the least.
Jill, Uncredited *short film* [Anthony Ing, 2022, UK, Canada]
Constellating fragments from decades of film and television, newcomer Anthony Ing creates a playful, yet profound portrait of a woman who has toiled in the margins of our screens. Forget about stars: this hypnotic short is entranced with the nameless people who form the wondrous texture of life.
Mubi
Killers of the Flower Moon [Martin Scorsese, 2023, US]
From the crime and gangster infested “Goodfellas,” to “The Wolf of Wall Street” centered on vampiric stock market thieves, master director Martin Scorsese’s filmography has often concerned itself with American sins driven by infinite greed.
So it is perhaps no surprise that Scorsese would be the one to cinematically adapt David Grann’s searing true-crime book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” for the big screen, uncompromisingly illustrating a forgotten chapter of one of America’s original sins: white people’s coldhearted killing of Native American tribes.
In that regard, his “Killers of the Flower Moon” is vast and vital in its scale, purpose and emotional scope, a Western-thriller and ensemble piece that is every bit a Scorsese crime picture as one can dare to imagine.
Tomris Laffly, The Wrap
Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power [Álvaro Gago, 2023, Spain]
Even after passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965, one Alabama county had 80 percent Black residents but zero Black voters. That’s the focus of this insightful and appropriately infuriating documentary that serves as a captivating history lesson with contemporary relevance. Mixing archival footage with interviews with locals, the film illustrates how “Bloody Lowndes,” as it was known at the time, became a focal point for voter suppression plus representation, and the rise of nonviolent protest groups. Connecting past and present, the film powerfully casts a new light on the civil rights struggle while saluting the power of grassroots activism in creating change.
Todd Jorgenson, Cinemalogue
Matria [Álvaro Gago, 2023, Spain]
There were a few movies at this year’s Berlinale about middle-aged women figuring out who they are separate to their familial responsibilities, of which “Matria” was both the angriest and the most fun. There are unappreciated Ramonas in every village in the world, running the vacuum cleaner and peeling the potatoes and hosing the vomit off the steps. Figuring out how to soothe their resentments would make the world a brighter, if slightly dirtier, place. But watching how Ramona decides to prioritize herself, almost for the first time in her adult life, is an absolutely wonderful thing, and this scrappy little movie is a joy.
Sarah Manvel, Critic’s Notebook
Mother and Son (Un petit frère) [Léonor Serraille, 2022, France]
In 1989, Rose (Annabelle Lengronne) moves from the Ivory Coast to France with two sons in tow, searching for more opportunities for them. But life takes many twists and turns. In Un Petit Frère, we watch as decades of their lives unfold, with Rose and, eventually, her children realizing that nothing in life is simple. And ultimately, the choices of mothers and older brothers shape the destiny of the youngest. Writer and director Leonor Serraille crafts a beautifully tender portrait of a family, a gentle meditation on the meanings of memories and how our pasts mold our presents and futures.
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox
Much Ado About Dying [Simon Chambers, 2022, UK, Ireland]
In Much Ado About Dying, David takes centre stage in the countdown to his demise. He is a born showman, which makes his nephew’s documentary highly entertaining. It is also deadly serious. Considering how we address elderly care as a society. Much Ado About Dying is the best kind of documentary. It will make you laugh and cry. It will also make you pause for thought.
Rob Aldam, Backseat Mafia
Negative Space *short film* [An Jeonghui, 2023, South Korea]
Jiwon, a 29-year-old job seeker, who has spent over three years looking for a job since graduating from college while dealing with two kinds of negative space; a gap in her resume and a personal gap in her life. On the day of a job interview she is getting more and more anxious.
Film website
One Fine Morning [Mia Hansen-Løve, 2022, France, UK, Germany]
Halfway through Mia Hansen-Løve’s eighth feature, one character pokes at another referring to life and its “complex things you wouldn’t understand.” One way or another, this gap of knowledge always becomes a powerful instrument in the hands of the French filmmaker together with the autobiographical undertones populating her body of work. In One Fine Morning, her finely tuned poeticism reaches new depths with Léa Seydoux as the lead character, loosely based on the director’s own experiences of trauma and grief.
Savina Petkova, AwardsWatch
Oppenheimer [Christopher Nolan, 2023, US, UK]
Oppenheimer is a dense and intricate period piece, playing out in a tangle of timelines. It weaves together courtroom drama, romantic liaisons, laboratory epiphanies and lecture hall personality cults. But perhaps more than all of this, Oppenheimer is the ultimate monster movie. Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is an atomic-age Frankenstein, a man captivated by the boundless possibilities of science, realising too late that his creation has a limitless capacity for destruction. Ultimately, however, the monster in this story is not Oppenheimer’s invention but the appetite for annihilation that it unleashes in mankind. It’s a realisation that plays out, inexorably, in Oppenheimer’s hollow, haunted face as the film unfolds. Murphy’s far-seeing ice-chip eyes have never been put to better use. […]
Time in Oppenheimer doesn’t feel entirely linear – there are moments, in particular a pivotal encounter with Albert Einstein, that seem unmoored from the rest of the film. Nolan’s films frequently require a couple of viewings to unravel fully, and while it lacks the baffle-factor of Tenet, Oppenheimer is no exception.
There are other problems: the cursory treatment of the female characters is one. Florence Pugh, as Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock, gets short shrift. And Emily Blunt, as J Robert’s wife Kitty Oppenheimer, spends much of the first two hours mutinously clutching a martini on the edge of the frame. She does, however, claim a couple of terrific moments later on: a skin-flaying interrogation scene; a wordless glare that conveys the full nuclear winter of her animosity towards a disloyal colleague.
But, for the most part, the film is a towering achievement.
Wendy Ide, The Guardian
Past Lives [Celine Song, 2023, US, South Korea]
It’s so rare to see a movie like Past Lives, one in which every detail is so perfectly defined by writer/director Celine Song. From the film’s loving depiction of what it was like trying to get Skype working in the first decade of the 2000s, to who pours who a glass of water in an intimate scene between two married people, every element seen on screen feels exactly right, deliberately chosen to enhance the story being told. […]
Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
And that’s hugely important in considering a film where the scope of the drama might seem small at first, but comes to expand out to encompass so much about love, modern relationships, and cultural identity. It all happens within the microcosm of a few days of time, with these three people doing their best to figure out what it means, when the past comes crashing into her present.
Pianoforte [Jakub Piatek, 2023, Germany, Poland]
From the moment that we see Marcin Wieczorek prevent his cat from stealing his pizza perched on top of the piano by striking the keys, I was hooked. The delightful film trails the musicians and their various training methods, and it’s fun to see how each varies but also works holistically for the individual pianists. Pianoforte builds a crescendo to the unveiling of the eventual winner. The documentary does an excellent job showing why this competition is the pride of Poland, where 120,000 tuned in online to hear the announced winner in the middle of the night.
Do yourself a favor and look for Pianoforte when it’s available. It’s a gem.
Veronica Elizabeth Bruno, Culturess
Plastic Fantastic [Isabella Willinger, 2023, Germany]
The most illuminating aspect of Plastic Fantastic is its look into the fight for the narrative around plastics. A lucrative industry under the corrupting influence of money seeks to shore up its power by feeding the human reliance on plastic in daily life, convincing the public the material is helping us to live better through the most up-to-date technologies and innovation rather than destroying the planet and life as we know it.
Carmen Gray, Modern Times Review
Queendom [Agniia Galdanova, 2023, US, France]
Protest takes many forms. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, some brave souls took to the streets of Moscow to voice their horror at the war, and were met with batons and police brutality. Radical queer performance artist Gena Marvin took a different approach. Wearing platform boots, body paint and wrapped in barbed wire, she walked the streets of Moscow in a stark, silent statement against the war. To call Gena a drag artist fails to capture just how subversive and courageous are her public “performances”. Her otherworldly costumes, created from junk and tape, show the influence of Leigh Bowery; her fearlessness evokes the punk provocation of Pussy Riot. But ultimately, as Agniia Galdanova’s remarkable observational documentary shows, Gena is her own extraordinary creation.
Wendy Ide, The Guardian
Quest [Antonina Obrador, 2023, Spain]
After his wife’s suicide, Lluc (Enric Auquer) travels to the uninhabited island of Quest where his wife died, to classify its flora. After some days of solitary work, his sister mysteriously appears and some difficult memories from their past are brought back in their conversations. This is a beautiful and mesmerising film with very subtle elements of the supernatural and 19th century German romanticism. It deals with grief and guilt, and the exorcism of our own ghosts in a profoundly moving way. This is Antonina Obrador’s first film and it echoes filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Bergman or Dreyer with exquisite framing in 4:3.
Cambridge Film Festival 2023 brochure (pdf)
Reality [Tina Satter, 2023, US]
It’s just one small story in an ongoing deluge of Trump-era corruption, yet Reality Winner is proof alone that even the most dedicated and patriotic of Americans were sick to the back teeth with the hallucinogenic blare of endless Fox News twaddle. Considering her increasing helplessness and anger at the government’s cover-ups and her insider’s view on where the truth truly lay, it’s easy to see how she finally snapped, undoing years of careful work to maintain top-secret security clearance.
And while this may be the most brutally harsh example of the old adage “snitches get stitches” (Winner was sentenced to five years and three months in prison), Satter carefully exposes the mounting tension and mania behind the whole debacle with a fresh point of view: not a mere gimmick, but a unique, pint-sized take on the saturated canon of rifling-through-the-cabinet whistleblower thrillers.
Steph Green, IndieWire
R.M.N. [Cristian Mungiu, 2022, Romania, France, Belgium, Sweden]
RMN is the Romanian acronym for “nuclear magnetic resonance” and, sure enough, modern master Cristian Mungiu’s urgent, fiercely intelligent migration drama doubles as a laser-enhanced dissection of European hypocrisies and contradictions.
Based on the real-life 2020 Ditrău xenophobic incident, Mungiu’s sixth feature follows Matthias (Marin Grigore), a Transylvanian migrant of Roma lineage returning to his hometown for Christmas.
Tara Brady, The Irish Times
Saint Omer [Alice Diop, 2022, France]
The French-language courtroom drama Saint Omer is as intriguing as it is intellectually rigorous. Inspired by Diop’s own experience of attending the trial of a woman accused of murdering her baby, it’s a meditative exploration of a complicated connection between the woman in the dock and the one who bears witness. […]
Diop deftly depicts the two women as distorted mirror images of each other: Rama recognises something in Laurence even as she abhors her crime.
Wendy Ide, The Observer
Songs of Earth [Margreth Olin, 2023, Norway]
A soaring documentary portrait, Songs of Earth is ambitious work from Margreth Olin, who ties cosmic themes of love, grace, time, and memory together through the much smaller tale of her aging parents’ extraordinary love for one another. Cycling through the four seasons with the majestic landscape of Norway as backdrop, Olin explores how the slow movement of time changes landscapes, whether it’s the crags in her father’s forehead or a glacier moving slowly across a landscape over decades. A remarkable, poetic meditation, Songs of Earth weaves the smallness of human lifespan into the grandness of the earth’s history, and does it all with unspeakable beauty.
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox
Still [Davis Guggenheim, 2023, US]
This both is and is not a film about Parkinson’s. Fox was diagnosed at the height of his fame, coming off the Back to the Future trilogy, in 1991, but the story he wants to tell, he says early on, is not a simple one of a career cut short in its prime. Fox was already disillusioned with Hollywood, and Still is a nuanced meditation on the price of success. Whether that is meant to include Parkinson’s is left unsaid: the disease is still incompletely understood, but what the film shows is a young Brat Pack-adjacent star working and (more euphemistically) partying too hard.
Henry K Miller, Sight and Sound
The Eternal Memory [Maite Alberdi, 2023, Chile]
Alberdi is able to draw on rich archive resources not only to show Augusto in his younger days, at work interviewing Chileans about their own lives, but also as a private individual who liked to make home movies about himself, his two kids from a previous marriage and Pauli. You can tell just by the way he frames and films Pauli, and the way she vamps lovingly back, that the two were madly in love from the start. That love is also visible in every frame of Alberdi’s footage, and augmented by the obvious affection and respect felt for the couple by the film-maker, surviving even the darkest of times.
Towards the end, we see Augusto’s usually warm, sensual personality become fractured by anger, disorientation and despair as his memory fails him and he grows increasingly confused, unable even to recognise himself in the mirror. The devasting, unforgivable irony is that after the fall of Pinochet, he wrote so movingly about the need for the nation to remember collectively what happened. Sometimes God is just too on the nose when he makes his creations suffer; but at least Alberdi’s humane, profoundly empathic film-making offers some balm.
Leslie Felperin, The Guardian
The Future Tense [Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy, 2022, Ireland]
It’s a remarkably far-reaching picture, this latest essay film from the Irish artistic partnership of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor. Particularly so, given that the filmmakers, who are also the narrators and two of the many subjects of the picture, spend much of it desk-bound, speaking to camera, in a home office in their London house. But the ideas take flight: Brexit, dental quirks, the Irish famine, Lawlor’s mother’s struggles with mental health, the tricky relationship that the Irish have with their language, and the story of Rose Dugdale, a wealthy British debutante-turned-radical Irish republican. It’s a fascinating, intellectually agile work that manages to be both intensely personal while also relevant to anyone who has ever questioned whether they really know their home country. […]
There are so many ideas on this whistle-stop tour of personal and national identity that to summarise them all would be a thankless task, and would fail to convey just how satisfying this looping, questioning journey is. […] Throughout it all is the idea that places can take on traits and personalities – the writer Kevin Barry speaks of a favourite road in Co Sligo which has a “mischievous, madcap air”. This blend of psycho-geography and anthropomorphisation of landscape is a rich seam, which Molloy and Lawlor mine to profound and poetic effect.
Wendy Ide, Screen International
The Holdovers [Alexander Payne, 2023, US]
There is something so relatable, so deeply human about [the characters’] pain and their circumstances — there’s a startling honesty in the kaleidoscope of emotions they all are experiencing at any given time. Life is messy, and The Holdovers never loses sight of that truth. But the film never becomes self-indulgent either. Payne is a satirist, but the movie leans more into physical comedy and witty dialogue than spearing social mores. The rapidity with which the film transitions from a slapstick chase sequence to a hilarious physical accident to a moving hospital visit, while maintaining its tone throughout, is emblematic of how fine-tuned the proceedings are. If previous Payne films have possessed the more acidic mark of a Billy Wilder influence, this film feels pure Capra.
Maureen Lee Lenker, Entertainment Weekly
The Key (Açar) *short film* [Elshad Elsever, 2022, Azerbaijan]
The film Key tells the story of a man who lost the keys to a house located in the Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenians. These keys were his last hope and symbol of his home
Laman Ismayilova, Azernews
Tish [Paul Sng, 2023, UK]
Paul Sng’s documentary Tish is one of the best British films of 2023 – both a heartfelt tribute to the life and work of the late photographer Tish (born Patricia) Murtha and a timely reminder of the war waged on the nation’s industrial working-class by the Thatcher government and its successors. Murtha’s death in 2013 was not unrelated to that war.
Her black and white documentary photos, as touching as they were trenchant, represented the politically and socially disenfranchised families of north-eastern England during the Seventies and Eighties as photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans represented the tenant farmer casualties of Dust Bowl America during the Great Depression […]
It would do Murtha’s photos a disservice to describe them here – their raw poetry is such that they need to be seen, their effect felt first-hand, without commentary. The film is a good place to start. It follows Ella Murtha, the keeper of her mother’s flame, as she traces her arduous personal and professional journey through interviews with surviving siblings, friends, colleagues, and advisors. […]
Had Murtha lived, she would have seen her photos exhibited at Tate Britain – which brought comfort and pride to Ella – and her legacy growing in the Brexit years of food banks and increasing class polarisation. A major artist, perhaps the most gifted and compassionate chronicler of inequality and oppression in British photography of the last half-century, she isn’t going away.
Graham Fuller, The Arts Desk
Whiteboy *short film* [Matty Crawford, 2022, UK]
Thematically, the narrative of Whiteboy will resonate with most people of mixed ethnicities. As a child, trying to fit in with social situations is difficult enough despite the additional struggles of being identified as ‘different’. In Whiteboy, these issues are exacerbated when the main character is whisked away by Mum back home to the Philippines, leaving Dad behind without explanation and placed into the care of Grandma. Peer pressured into karaoke, our eponymous protagonist (excellently portrayed by Thomas Bilsland) is tagged as “Americano” (whiteboy) for trying to sing along to a language he is expected to know, then cut off before any valid attempt of participating can be made. No matter how hard you try to assimilate to a new culture it never feels enough, with the accompanying emotions of anger and sadness shown vividly through tantrums and shots of yearning loneliness. Directed by Matty Crawford, Whiteboy embodies the life of an outcast alongside the heartbreaking sacrifices parents have to make for their children’s wellbeing, whilst also giving the audience an insight into Filipino spirituality. Underlined by a haunting score, this nuanced and complex journey filled with heart taps into a group of people not featured frequently enough in cinema.
Nathan Hardie, Encounters Film Festival
Wonka [Paul King, 2023, US, UK, Canada]
In the hands of Brit-cinema’s new kings of comedy, writer Simon Farnaby and writer-director Paul King (who have already worked their magic on Paddington), this pre-Wonka is an absolute Christmas treat; it’s spectacular, imaginative, sweet-natured and funny.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
2. Older films discovered for the first time
Apples [Christos Nikou, 2020, Greece, Poland, Australia, Slovenia]
One of the most original, if understated, movies of the year, Nikou’s directorial debut relies upon the potency of the image above ponderous dialogue or showy close-ups. […]
Apples’s delicious strangeness might earn Nikou comparisons to Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, whose Dogtooth wowed and disturbed in 2009 long before star-studded hits such as 2018’s The Favorite. But if Lanthimos’s dark sense of humor comes with the cost of occasional cruelty, Nikou’s is suffused with almost shocking kindness. Through Aris’s patient eyes, we piece together his life prior to amnesia, which proves just as devastating as his memory’s abrupt disappearance. By the end of its taut ninety minutes, Apples takes on an elegiac tone that reminds us of the incredible gift — and burden — of having a past to begin with.
Eileen G’Sell, Metro Times
Die Hard [John McTiernan, 1988, US]
The granddaddy of a whole genre of action films still remains sharp, tough, and exciting. “Die Hard” spawned its own franchise and influenced other action movies, providing reviewers with easy catch phrases like, “Die Hard on a boat… plane… mountain” and more. […]
“Die Hard” is more layered than your average action movie. The bickering newscasters, the friendly patrol cop whose career is slipping by, the chauffeur driver who remains oblivious to the calamity around him. These are all nicely crafted characters that lend a little depth and warmth to a violent film.
Willis proves an excellent casting choice as a sardonic action hero. Director John McTiernan keeps the pace up around him, and ensures maximum suspense from the many well-executed set pieces.
Almar Haflidason, BBC
Decision To Leave [Park Chan-wook, 2022, South Korea]
Where to start with the haunting, maddening thriller Decision To Leave, South Korea’s Official Oscar Selection for International Feature Film, from Park Chan-Wook? It’s a brainteaser and an eloquent reimagining of the way people can be represented on-screen, a genius formula heightened by inventive cinematography and editing. It’s a big, revolutionary experience, yet it has a whiff of the past in touches of Hitchcock’s playful suspense and owes a debt to the noirest of noir. […] Park Chan-Wook’s elaborate, masterful story tricks us and stays just out of our grip, teasing us into helpless submission.
Anne Brodie, What She Said
Invisible Demons [Rahul Jain, 2021, Finland, Germany]
Early in Invisible Demons, a bull – a beast of burden – heaves its load down a busy street, breathing heavily and with difficulty – a telling metaphor for an entire city and its people. Bovines appear in the film several times thereafter – in one scene, we see a herd of cows on a garbage dump, a couple of the four-legged creatures feeding on polythene bags.
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That feels like a freeze-frame that lays bare the sorry state of a city groaning under its own weight, a cumulation of all the upshots of unplanned growth. Clogged streets represent only one. There is much worse: the rampancy of respiratory diseases for instance.Invisible Demons, which presents a comprehensive and yet precise picture, pulls no punches and hits home with great force.
Saibal Chatterjee, NDTV
Mr. Bachmann and His Class [Maria Speth, 2021, Germany]
A marathon documentary about a veteran schoolteacher and his multicultural class of 12- to 14-year-olds in Stadtallendorf, central Germany, this extraordinary film, which won last year’s Silver Bear jury prize at the Berlin film festival, follows the tradition of observational humanism popularised by such film-makers as Frederick Wiseman and Michael Apted. It’s an investment in time, certainly, but this profound and hopeful picture justifies every second of its three hours and 38 minute running time.
Wendy Ide, The Observer
Nazanin [Darius Bazargan, 2022, UK]
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the case will be aware that Zaghari-Ratcliffe did eventually make it home and that after a deal for the UK to pay what it owed to Iran she, and another British-Iranian detainee Anoosheh Ashoori, were released and reunited with their loved ones on British soil. But the documentary offers little respite in these moments. The injustice this family suffered is overwhelming, and the inaction of those who could have helped sooner is horrific and they must be held to account. As a call to arms to fight for those who are still being held hostage around the world, this film is a reminder that love is an incredible motivator, but anger may prove just as potent.
Leila Latif, The Guardian
The Gleaners and I [Agnès Varda, 2000, France]
At 82 minutes, “The Gleaners and I” covers a lot of territory. Not only does it provoke thoughts about waste in general, it engages us with an impish senior still breaking new ground in the art of filmmaking. As Varda cuts from a shot of her own wrinkled hand to a Rembrandt, she reflects ‘It’s always the same, a self portrait.’
Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews
The Storm Chaser *short film* [Jack Pirie, 2022, UK]
Pirie’s labour-of-love short follows on thematically from his previous film The Superman which garnered a much coveted Vimeo Staff Pick and followed the mysterious depths of the underwater environment of a fearless freediver. Whilst The Superman was a gentle reverie into another world The Storm Chaser is an adrenaline fuelled assault on the senses, immersing you in the intense and unforgiving power of mother nature. Pirie and his team worked in extremely pressured conditions to capture the docudrama’s remarkable footage where they found themselves subject to the will of the weather guided only by the intuition of their storm-chasing subject, athlete Thomas Traversa.
Sarah Smith, Directors Notebook
tick, tick…BOOM! [Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2021, US]
Tick, tick…BOOM! is a glorious tribute to a genius life cut tragically short, without question, but, in Miranda’s hands, it becomes much more of a tribute to theatre, and the art of creating in general. Anyone who has ever been tortured by a piece of canvas or a block of clay or a flashing cursor on blank screen will find themselves in this film, but it is the lover of theatre, especially musicals, who will find in this film a true home. There are countless moments that musical theatre lovers will feel are just for them, one scene in particular that is nothing more than pandering theatre nerd catnip, but don’t be discouraged if you don’t know Chita Rivera from Geraldo Rivera— tick, tick…BOOM! is a thorough delight for everyone, an accessible, relatable, charming and magnificently delivered ode to the creative process, and to music, art and love itself. That may seem like a lot, but this film is a lot, and all of it is completely wonderful.
Catherine Springer, AwardsWatch
Twilight (Szürkület) [György Fehér, 1990, Hungary]
Though based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 crime novella The Pledge (which was also the source for Sean Penn’s 2001 film of the same name), György Fehér’s Twilight plays more like an existential horror film than a noir or police procedural. Indeed, the ins and outs of the investigation into the mysterious murder of a child are of little concern to Fehér, who crafts a mood piece that’s keyed to the aura of dread and despair that grips a community in the wake of this and other similar murders. […]
The lack of any propulsive narrative highlights the stasis that’s of a piece with both the murder investigation at the center of the story and Twilight’s own slow-cinema style, which bears the clear influence of Béla Tarr (who served as consultant on the film). […]
In one of the film’s most haunting shots, the camera gradually tracks left from within the police station where detectives discuss the case and lands on a group of citizens standing outside, motionless and unblinking, like ghosts stuck in a liminal space seemingly brought on by the horrific murders of the town’s children. At its most arresting, Twilight gives a grueling, almost paradoxical significance to a force of evil that’s as inexplicable as it is unimaginable.
Derek Smith, Slant
We (Nous) [Alice Diop, 2021, France]
The public, the private and the deeply personal run on parallel tracks in French director Alice Diop‘s documentary “We,” a series of vignettes of life along the RER B, a railway line running through the suburbs and exurbs of Paris out to the surrounding countryside. But as it gains momentum, this deceptively cunning documentary — which out of a lineup full of showier titles won the top prize in Berlin’s Encounters section — sees those parallel tracks converge and criss-cross unexpectedly, throwing off fascinating intellectual sparks of insight at the switching points.
Jessica Kiang, Variety
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? [Aleksandre Koberidze, 2021, Georgia, Germany]
The question is not so much, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? but what exactly we see when we look at Alexandre Koberidze’s joyously elusive flight of fancy from Georgia. On one level, this is a fairy tale about lovers afflicted by a mysterious curse; on another, a leisurely, meandering evocation of life in a Georgian city; and on yet another, a self-reflexive disquisition on narrative, reality and the power of the image to transform the everyday. Whichever way you cut it, this second feature from the director of Let The Summer Never Come Again (2017) is a slyly inventive, free-ranging adventure in cinematic possibility. While it may well rankle with viewers allergic even to trace elements of magical realism, Koberidze’s combination of romantic lyricism and cerebral irony will chime with anyone who loves to see cinema revel in the pleasures of formal play. […]
But while Koberidze is playing intellectual games with the relationship of story and image, it should be said that his approach is very humorous, both in his offhand take on the central premise and in individual sight gags and visual non-sequiturs.
In a sign-off nodding to the Russian literary great Nikolai Gogol, the narrator ruefully questions the point of a film like this, which seems of no practical benefit to the world. But in the sheer exuberance of its exploratory spirit, Koberidze’s film is very much of benefit to cinema – and any who feared that the art form was running out of new ways to find poetry in the real.
Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily
when curiosity threatens 