BFI LFF 2021: Brother’s Keeper (2021) (Okul tirasi)
★★★☆☆
Brother’s Keeper: Ferit Karaha’s tragic tale of boarding school brutality to Kurdish boys in snowy eastern Turkey.
Drama
Shayda (2023)
★★★★☆
Shayda, the heartfelt first feature directed by Noora Niasari, is a compelling story of an Iranian woman fleeing domestic abuse to seek cultural freedom.
Bleeding Love (2023)
★★☆☆☆
An estranged father and daughter gradually reconnect during a cross-country journey following her overdose in director Emma Westenberg’s feature debut Bleeding Love.
The Trouble With Jessica (2023)
★★★☆☆
The Trouble with Jessica directed by Matt Winn is a north London-set black comedy.
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.
Cannes Film Festival 2023: Day 3: 18 May 2023
★★★★☆
Cannes Film Festival 2023: Day 3: 18 May 2023
Holy Spider (Ankabut-e moqaddas) (2022)
★★★★☆
Holy Spider, angrily written and directed by Ali Abbasi (Border), is a grisly, reality-based story of violence against women in a patriarchal, theocratic society.
Listen (2020)
★★★☆☆
Listen, Ana Rocha de Sousa’s powerful first film about forced adoption, is heart-rending and almost unbearable to watch at times.
Flee (2021)
★★★★★
Flee, by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, a documentary made with a blend of animation and archive footage tells an immensely powerful true story of a gay Afghan refugee in Denmark.
A Cop Movie (2021) (Una Película de Policías)
★★★★☆
Award-winning Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacio with A Cop Movie has made a brilliant, intriguing and innovative – and startlingly genre-unclassifiable – film, starring Mónica Del Carmen and Raúl Briones.
FÁTIMA (2020)
★★★☆☆
Fátima is a fascinating glimpse of Catholic faith, respectfully translated to the screen by Marco Pontecorvo.
Hope Gap (2019) – Streaming
★★★☆☆
William Nicholson’s Hope Gap benefits from a starry cast in the stagey story of the death of love in a middle-aged, middle-class marriage on the South Coast.
Border (2018)
★★★★★
Ali Abbassi’s Border (Gräns) is startlingly original, a magical fantasy (or is it?) that blends the real world with Nordic myth and folklore.
After the Wedding (2019)
★★★☆☆
In After the Wedding Bart Freundlich piles unlikely event on unlikely event on Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams in a weepie melodrama that reaches emotional overload.