We slowly pan back through a bedroom into a bathroom where a young woman sits, on the floor, bawling her eyes out: yes, Deepfake (2026) starts with a relationship breakdown, and the distressed dumpee Jane (Jessica DiGiovanni) is soon doing everything she can to rehabilitate her self-image and social standing, even if that largely seems […]
Part mystery, part broad strokes eco- or folk horror, Broken Beak (aka The Burning of Broken Beak, 2026) is flawed in execution, but not without engaging thematic and visual ideas of its own. Moreover, it my be flawed, but it isn’t flippant. We start by hearing the last mating call of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird, […]
Films like Recluse (2026) come along so rarely: with meticulous handling and careful control of atmosphere, it weaves something quite extraordinary out of what, on paper, sounds recognisable. We begin with a painter, a renowned ‘tortured artist’ type, Lawrence Wyatt, working in his fracturing, but still comfortable family home. He is putting the finishing touches […]
We hear a link between music, chaos and quantum theory being suggested as Turn It Up! (2026) gets underway: someone is explaining to us, via a voiceover of sorts, that just the right kind of noise could, quite literally, open (interdimensional) doors. This is just before – in a fun, pace-setting title sequence – we […]
A vehicle races off through the Saudi desert, leaving a young woman dead in the dunes. That’s our opening to Unidentified (2025) – a film which is intriguing due to its background (directed by the first female Saudi filmmaker, Haifaa Al-Mansour), but also a nicely-paced and structured crime thriller, even if for some audiences it […]
If there’s one thing to take away from The Killing Moon (2025), it’s to wonder why some married couples are married couples – and the film leans into this immediately, as we meet key protagonists Elliot (Ryan Caraway) and Olivia (Victoria Diamond), lost on their way to a swanky mountain retreat somewhere in Colorado (discoverable […]
There’s a moment in Mark Jenkin’s new Cornish time-slip themed, 16mm folktale Rose of Nevada when the main character (Nick) finds a group of local fishermen in the newly invigorated fishing community he’s fallen through time into, all helping his crewmate to mend their vessel’s torn fishing net. As a traveller from a rather more […]
Did you order something? As she prepares a meal, a woman is disturbed by the arrival of a package. She collects it from the doorstep, and when she opens it, she immediately seems emotionally affected by what she finds inside. So much so, in fact, that she starts to asphyxiate herself with the bubble wrap […]
Whoa – don’t be fooled by that title. Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl (2026) may start out kitsch, with all the aesthetic trappings of vintage Americana – but it swiftly takes us somewhere far darker, and it’s all the more intriguing for it. We start in a kind of Happy Days diner, where a couple kills […]
Frida: The Making of an Icon, part of the Exhibition on Screen series, opens with a recording of Kahlo’s painting El Sueno (La cama) – or The Dream (The bed) – selling at the Exquisite Corpus auction of Surrealist art at Sotheby’s for a staggering $57.4 million. The painting depicts Frida sleeping on a wooden […]
Matador Bolero starts very calmly: there’s a young woman communing with nature against the backdrop of a rather beautiful, Super 8, retro-styled idyll. There’s no dialogue as of yet, and no music. She then finds a large, pastel-coloured egg, placing her hand on it – all the while being observed by a masked figure, hiding […]