Drive My Car (2021) is a bewitching study of resentment, guilt and frustration that quickly establishes a peculiar rhythm. It takes inspiration from an acclaimed Haruki Murakami short story and retains a literary quality in scenes that feature characters reciting anecdotes from their past. Writer-director…

Jacques Audiard’s sexy, atmospheric new film Paris, 13th District, has been met with a tepid response from the cinephiles who revere the director for experimenting with the conventions of genre cinema. For those who adored Read My Lips (2001) and The Beat That My Heart…

The Unknown Man of Shandigor is a kooky homage to the mid-1960s espionage thrillers turned out by French New Wave filmmakers, and it is wholly committed to being utterly insane. The plot is completely incoherent, the characters are thinly drawn, and Jean-Louis Roy happily jumps…

It’s almost impossible to actively dislike a film like Petite Solange. It’s a well-meaning project that extends sympathy to children who have their lives negatively impacted by divorce, and it was clearly crafted with a considerable amount of care. All of those factors cause you…

Jean-Luc Godard once described the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor vehicle The Sandpiper (1965) as “A couple of bakers filming each other on Sundays.” The same description could be applied to Christophe Honoré’s Guermantes (2021), which documents the experiences that the members of the Comédie-Française theatre troupe…

In 1999, while promoting Humanity, Bruno Dumont wrote that “Jean-Pierre Melville used to say that the cop genre was a good vehicle. A police investigation is a sound movement…a dialectic: the quest for truth in a concrete and common expression, where it is innocently at…

Like so many other horror films, The Last Thing Mary Saw isn’t really about gruesome murders or villainous young women with magical powers. It features plenty of violence and a healthy smattering of blood and guts but it’s ambitious enough to offer up more than…

The Heiresses (1980) is best understood as Márta Mészáros’s take on a Henry James novel. She shifts the action from late nineteenth-century Italy to mid-1930s Hungary and removes the callow, American heroine that typically stood at the centre of one of James’s stories, but she…

Pioneering director Márta Mészáros’s worldview was profoundly shaped by the tragic events that occurred during her early childhood. She was born to politically liberal artists in Budapest, Hungary in 1931 and spent periods of her childhood in Stalinist Russia. Her mother died while giving birth…

In analysing a Vittorio De Sica film, particularly Miracle In Milan, one has to take his political views into account. He was a pioneer of the Italian neo-realist movement, which ostensibly sought to deal with social issues in realistic terms. De Sica was noted for…