The Delinquents (2023) (Los delincuentes)
★★★★☆
strong>The Delinquents directed by Rodrigo Morena is an enthralling, misleading Argentinian film – original but also reminiscent of Spike Jonze or a reversal of The Shawshank Redemption.
features
BFI Flare 2024: Riley (2023)
★★★☆☆
High school football star Dakota Riley is winning on the playing field but secretly is grappling with his burgeoning sexuality which threatens to derail his life in writer-director Benjamin Howard’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama Riley.
Monster (2023) (Kaibutsu)
★★★★☆
Rumours, lies, cover-ups and maybe the truth – all are layers of the onion in the compelling Monster, directed by award-winning Hirokazu Koreeda, written by Yûji Sakamoto, with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Oscars Awards 2024
★★★★☆
Oscars 2024 Awards
Four Daughters (2023) (Les Filles d’Olfa)
★★★★★
Four Daughters is a powerful and emotionally compelling mixture of documentary and drama directed by Kaouther Ben Hania that examines the roots of fundamentalism and how women pass on self-imposed repression through the generations.
Perfect Days (2023)
★★★★☆
Perfect Days is acclaimed director Wim Wenders’ Tokyo-set film for which Koji Yakusho won a well-deserved Best Actor award.
The Letter Writer (2024)
★★★☆☆
The Letter Writer by Layla Kaylif is about the painful coming of age, emotionally and politically, for a boy and a country.
The Taste of Things (2023) (The Pot-au-Feu) (La Passion de Dodin Bouffant)
★★★★☆
The Taste of Things, directed by Tran Anh Hung is so, so French. It’s beautiful and it’s a 19th-century love story that is also food and beauty obsessed.
The Settlers (2023) (Los Colonos)
★★★☆☆
The Settlers is an angry, violent Western-type version of the brutal colonial birth of Chile by first-time filmmaker Felipe Gálvez.
The Holdovers (2023)
★★★★☆
December 1970, a grumpy teacher forced to stay on campus over the holidays gradually bonds with a volatile teenager in Alexander Payne’s latest comedy drama The Holdovers.
Raging Grace (2023)
★★★★☆
Raging Grace is an unusual contemporary social-comment-psychological-horror feature debut by British/Filipino Paris Zarcilla, an exciting new filmmaking voice.
The Lost Boys (2023) (Le Paradis)
★★★☆☆
Two teenage boys in a juvenile detention centre develop a passionate bond which is tested when one of them approaches his release in director and co-writer Zeno Graton’s The Lost Boys.
Traces (2022) (Tragovi)
★★★☆☆
Traces (Tragovi) is a sensitive portrayal by first-time feature director Dubravka Turic of a Zagreb academic’s journey through grief to identity. It is Croatia’s entry for the 2024 Oscars.
Fallen Leaves (2023) (Kuolleet lehdet)
★★★★☆
Fallen Leaves is Aki Kaurismäki’s drily touching film of a kind of love story amid the grinding reality of life.