The Trouble With Jessica (2023)
★★★☆☆
The Trouble with Jessica directed by Matt Winn is a north London-set black comedy.
film review
Io Capitano (2023)
★★★★☆
Io Capitano directed by Matteo Garrone is an empathetic, award-winning migrant story.
BFI Flare 2024: Our Son (2023)
★★★★☆
When Gabriel and Nicky’s marriage comes to a sudden end, they are soon locked in a tumultuous custody battle for their eight-year-old son Owen in director Bill Oliver’s moving divorce drama Our Son.
Evil Does Not Exist (2023) (Aku Wa Sonzai Shinai)
★★★★☆
Evil Does Not Exist by Palme-d’or-winning director Ryu Hamaguchi is a sensitive, mesmeric ecological fable.
The Sweet East (2023)
★★★☆☆
The Sweet East is cinematographer Sean Price Williams’ directorial debut, with a screenplay by film critic Nick Pinkerton. It stars Talia Ryder (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) as a contemporary Alice in Wonderland, a student on a dreamlike road trip, satirising US subcultures.
Baltimore (2023)
★★★☆☆
Baltimore (misleading title) is a biopic of the life of revolutionary class warrior Rose Dugdale in Ireland, written and directed by husband and wife team Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor.
BFI Flare 2024: Since The Last Time We Met (2023) (Desde la última vez que nos vimos)
★★★★☆
Fifteen years after the sudden end of their secret relationship, Victor and David meet unexpectedly and soon reignite their passionate affair with high emotional stakes for both in writer/director Matias De Leis Correa’s Since the Last Time We Met at BFI Flare 2024..
Priscilla (2023)
★★★☆☆
The relationship between Priscilla and Elvis Presley is told from Priscilla’s perspective in writer-director Sofia Coppola’s dreamily subdued Priscilla.
BFI Flare 2024: What a Feeling (2024)
★★★☆☆
What a feeling by Kat Rohrer is a romcom of two middle-aged women, a late ‘coming of age’.
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.
BFI Flare 2024: 13-24 March 2024
★★★★☆
BFI Flare 2024: 13-24 March 2024
Banel & Adama (2023)
★★★☆☆
Lusciously beautiful: the doomed romance in Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s poetic debut feature Banel & Adama takes place amid the severe effects of climate change in remote northeastern Senegal.
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World (2023) (Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii)
★★★★★
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World is a wide-ranging, vicious satire on the post-communist, rampantly privatised, chaotically capitalist economy in Romania and everything else in modern European life, by Radu Jude.
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.