Phoenix (2014)
★★★★☆
In war-damaged Berlin a disfigured concentration camp survivor strives to rediscover her identity as she searches for the husband who may have betrayed her.
★★★★☆
In war-damaged Berlin a disfigured concentration camp survivor strives to rediscover her identity as she searches for the husband who may have betrayed her.
★★★☆☆
Picking up the TV series’ espionage story lines, the disgraced head of MI5 goes rogue, hunting a terrorist on the loose and a traitor in ‘the firm’.
★★☆☆☆
Unpicking class tension in the aftermath of the London riots, Simon Blake’s Still blends genres to create a strange yuppies-in-peril gangster-horror hybrid.
★★★☆☆
The closing film in Roy Andersson’s trilogy, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting On Existence offers a blackly humorous look at you, the living.
★★☆☆☆
As a wave of falling sickness takes over an all-girls school, Carol Morley’s The Falling plucks female empowerment from a maelstrom of teenage desire.
★★★☆☆
Building relationships across the class divide, Franco Lolli’s Gente de Bien turns into an unexpectedly moving portrait of father and son bonding.
★★☆☆☆
A Danish Western with the magnetic Mads Mikkelsen, Kristian Levring’s The Salvation is gorgeous to look at but as hollow as a Ten-gallon hat.
★★★☆☆
Telling the story of Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece, Simon Curtis’ Woman In Gold paints a portrait of Nazi-looted art and its journey back into the right hands.
★★★★☆
Exposing the domestic tensions of a family following a near-avalanche, Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure offers a captivating and wry look at male weakness.
★★★☆☆
With a transgender teen searching for her true self, Ester Martin Bergsmark’s Something Must Break lends a poetic look at the unbecoming state of becoming.
★★★☆☆
Diagnosing the internal conflict of high-ranking Nazi and family man Heinrich Himmler, Vanessa Lapa’s The Decent One exposes the indecency of the “decent”.
★★★☆☆
Chris Bouchard’s Hackney’s Finest is a darkly comic caper with much more violence, hard drug taking and serious swearing than you’d expect.
★★☆☆☆
Ron Mann’sAltman is a stoic by-the-numbers documentary celebrating the films of the great director, but offering little insight into the man behind the lens.
★★★☆☆
A self-referential odyssey of filmmaking and its ethics, Michael Winterbottom’s The Face Of An Angel loses its way in a labyrinth of satire and horror.