Honey Boy (2019)
★★★★☆
Honey Boy by Shia LaBeouf is a searingly personal, self-immolating childhood memoir.
London Film Festival 2019
So Long, My Son (2019)
★★★★☆
So Long, My Son (Di jiu tian chang) by Wang Xiaoshuai is a deeply moving, generations-spanning drama exploring the long-term effect of China’s one-child policy on a small circle of friends.
Atlantics (2019)
★★★★☆
Atlantic (Atlantique) is Mati Diop’s dreamlike feature debut focusing on the women left behind when Senegalese migrant workers take to the seas.
La Belle Époque (2019)
★★★★☆
La Belle Époque by Nicolas Bedos has sublime performances from its central characters that combine with a clever, witty, seamless screenplay to create an unashamedly super-enjoyable film.
I Lost My Body (2019)
★★★★★
I Lost My Body by Jérémy Clapin is a dreamlike, beautiful, unbearably sad and tender animation.
Judy & Punch (2019)
★★★★☆
Judy & Punch by Mirrah Foulkes is a feminist reimagination and reversal of the traditional, violent seaside Punch and Judy puppet show that takes it back its 16th century origins.
Harriet (2019)
★★★★☆
Harriet, directed by Kasi Lemmons, is a conventionally made biopic of a supremely unconventional and inspirational woman, Harriet Tubman, taking her life story from slave to fearless abolitionist and conductor on the underground railroad to freedom.
The Report (2019)
★★★★☆
The Report by Scott Z Burns is a gripping dramatisation of lawyer Daniel Jones’ investigations into the government-sanctioned CIA torture during interrogation of terrorist suspects: the suppression of reports into government behaviour is now an incredibly timely subject.
Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019)
★★★★☆
Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound by Midge Costin is one of those fascinating documentaries that take you behind the scenes to explain how things happen that are so crucial but you had never previously noticed.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
★★★★☆
In The Last Black Man in San Francisco, writer/director Joe Talbot takes a true story and turns it into a poetic and haunting version of itself – a brightly lit, lyrical, stylised drama.
BFI LFF 2019: Harriet (2019)
★★★☆☆
Harriet, directed by Kasi Lemmons, is a conventionally made biopic of a supremely unconventional and inspirational woman, Harriet Tubman, taking her life story from slave to fearless abolitionist and conductor on the underground railroad to freedom.
BFI LFF 2019: The Four Ages of Woman
★★★★☆
Four films at the BFI London Film Festival paint a thought-provoking picture of British women not ‘having it all’ from teenage. coming of age, adulthood to middle age.
Monos (2019)
★★★★★
Monos by Alejandro Landes, set among volatile, trainee teenage guerillas in Latin America, is quite simply of this year’s best and most disturbing films.
By the Grace of God (2019)
★★★★☆
Based on recent real-life events, in By the Grace of God François Ozon empathetically opens up a French scandal of child abuse in the Catholic Church going back over 20 years.