Movies

Alexander Murphy’s Tin Castle follows the O’Reilly family living in Tipperary, Ireland – the ​“tin castle” in question is their detached mobile home that lies on an illegal halting site. The O’Reillys – Pa and Lisa and their 10 children – are Irish travellers, and we get an insight into their life and how incongruous it can…

If, as is suggested early in Ron Howard’s documentary “Avedon,” the genius of an archetypal Richard Avedon photograph lies in how it strips away everything extraneous—so that nothing remains but the audience, the subject, and a white background—then making a film about Avedon might be counterproductive. Additional context is irrelevant; the art is the thing….

You could imagine the high priest of bureaucratic cynicism himself, Franz Kafka, watching this film about a Christian-Conservative couple being passed through the meat-grinder of the Norwegian Child Services system and saying, ​“No, sorry lads, it’s too much.” The usually very reliable Romanian New Wave lynchpin Cristian Mungiu returns with a big, beautiful bomb in the form…

Japanese auteur Koji Fukada is something of a chameleon. Renowned for psychological thrillers such as Harmonium (Cannes Un Certain Regard 2016) and A Girl Missing (2019), he’s equally adept at crafting gentle character dramas, for example the Rohmerian Au revoir l’été (2013), Venice competition title Love Life (2022), and the engrossing – but fairly internationally inaccessible – idol drama Love on Trial, which premiered…

The ​“not too distant future” of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in the Box closely resembles our present, with a few notable advancements. Delivery drones litter the sky, robots help kids cross the street, and reliance on AI has progressed far enough that tech companies are marketing it as a salve for grief.  Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) are a married…

Many have previously said French auteur Quentin Dupieux is an acquired taste, and he has never taken that notion as literally as he does in the riotous Full Phil. Turning his chaotic lens onto the Hollywood sheen, Dupieux enlists Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart to play the titular Phil and his daughter Madeleine, who travelled…

Featuring an ensemble cast of French heavyweights, Parallel Tales is Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi’s fifth time selected in competition and the first since his Grand Prix-winning social drama A Hero, which premiered at the festival in 2021. Unfortunately there’s little in the way of compelling revelations or narrative payoff in this 140-minute long slog about suburban intrigue….

Like its leading male character, The Beloved is a mercurial and frustrating beast. At times, it is an absorbing exploration of a fraught father-daughter/director-actress relationship embodied by two impressively textured performances. At others, it is an ostentatious display of shifting formal techniques that draws attention to its own contrivances and erodes its dramatic substance. The mighty Javier…

If you are creatively inclined in any capacity, chances are you have met a struggling actor somewhere along your path. Not the type who is destined to become a megastar one day (à la Mia in La La Land), but rather the ones who will spend their entire lives doing odd jobs until the next gig comes…