★★★★☆
Written by, directed by and starring Billie Piper, Rare Beasts, a self-styled ‘anti-romcom’, is a manic Munch-like scream about what it’s like to be a modern, thirty-something woman trying to have it all while there’s a crisis all around.
★★★★☆
The Human Voice is a gripping half-hour monologue of madness and melancholy that brings director Pedro Almodóvar and other-worldly actress Tilda Swinton together in an artistic marriage made in heaven.
★★★☆☆
Undergods, Chino Moya’s disturbing first feature set in a dystopian future, has its world premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival and is released now.
★★★★☆
Apples, Christos Nikou’s assured debut as a director, is a disturbing, opaque fable about the relationship between memory, identity, grief and the selfie culture, set in Athens during an allegorical pandemic.
★★★ώ☆
A creatively frustrated film director’s tumultuous visit to a young couple’s lake house may reignite her creative vision in writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear.
★★★★☆
Promising Young Woman stars Carey Mulligan in a witty, much-talked-about and multi-award-nominated writer/director debut by actor Emerald Fennell.
★★★★☆
An Australian teen’s obsession with an anonymous sex app ventures into dangerous territory when he is invited into the Blue Room in Samuel Van Grinsven’s stylish gay thriller Sequin in a Blue Room.
★★☆☆☆
At an Estonian air base in the Cold War a junior officer falls for a new lieutenant, leading to a forbidden romance which affects a number of lives in director Peeter Rebane’s romantic drama Firebird.
★★★☆☆
Following a break-up, a struggling drag queen visits his ailing grandmother in the country and finds himself staying as the pair support each other in various ways in writer/director Phil Connell’s Jump, Darling.
★★★☆☆
In writer/director Anna Kerrigan’s Cowboys a father and his transgender son journey through the Montana mountain ranges escaping the boy’s mother, who is unable to accept his gender dysphoria.
★★★☆☆
In Eytan Fox’s Sublet a middle-aged American travel writer visiting Tel Aviv forms an unexpected connection with his young Israeli landlord and in the process learns new things about himself.
★★★☆☆
After meeting high in a Berlin nightclub, Johannes and Harry casually drift around the city coming down and getting to know each other in Daniel Sanchez Lopez’s Boy Meets Boy
★★★★☆
In My First Summer by Katie Found, in rural Australia a sheltered teenage girl suffers a devastating loss but is unexpectedly brought to life by a sudden special connection with a fellow teen.
★★★★☆
Mogul Mowgli is a passionate, sincere, deeply felt snapshot of conflicting identity in contemporary Britain, starring Riz Ahmed, a strikingly compelling actor, directed by Bassam Tariq.