James Slaymaker

“Is this the end of the world? Is this the death of light?” ponders a character roughly an hour in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, encapsulating an apocalyptic tone which…

Terrence Malick’s majestic A Hidden Life is orchestrated around dialectical clashes — the physical vs the metaphysical, inner integrity vs external honour, and individual rights vs civic duty. The inspiration…

Robert Eggers delivers on the promise of his acclaimed 2015 slow-burn horror The Witch and then some in The Lighthouse, an altogether more playful, experimental, and assured work. Set during…

Just as he accomplished in his outstanding 2014 breakout hit Black Coal, Thin Ice, Diao Yinan uses neo-noir tropes to explore the socio-economic conditions of modern China in The Wild…

It’s almost criminal how aggressively Jessica Hausner’s English-language debut, Little Joe, works to drain the fun out of a juicy exploitation premise. Hausner has crafted a fine body of work…

Whereas Arnaud Desplechin found his unique artistic vision smothered by the conventions of the police procedural in his middling Oh Mercy!, Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu uses the genre format to…

Following a trajectory introduced in 2009’s Honour of the Knights and continuing though to the great The Death of Louis XIV, Albert Serra pushes his cinema ever closer towards a…

Quebecois director Xavier Dolan returns to Cannes It’s been a full decade since Xavier Dolan’s first feature, I Killed My Mother, premiered at Cannes when the director was merely nineteen…

Illustrator Lorenzo Mattotti makes his feature directorial debut with The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, a well-mounted, perfectly diverting adaptation of the cult 1945 children’s book of the same name.…

Willem Dafoe Stars in Abel Ferrara’s moving character study “That film made me a Buddhist. I got so Catholic I became a Buddhist.” – Abel Ferrara, in a conversation about…

A black-comic thriller from South Korean director of Memories of Murder and Snowpiercer Parasite combines the broad satire of Bong Joon-Ho’s recent output with the fascination with power structures of…

The latest from French auteur regular Arnaud Desplechin For a while, it seemed that Arnaud Desplechin was the closest filmmaker we had to a modern-day Truffaut. A leading member of…

Dardenne Brothers Deliver a Coming-of-Age Tale of a Young Terrorist “A true Muslim doesn’t shake a woman’s hand,” says the title character in the first scene of the Dardennes Brothers’…

Gaspar Noé’s pint-sized Lux Æterna is an exercise in self-aggrandizement disguised as a feminist deconstruction of the injustices of the film industry. Running a brisk fifty-two minutes, it is roughly…

French actor-writer-director Mati Diop returns to Cannes with the first feature competition entry ever directed by a black woman. In combining seductive sensuality, sophisticated genre play, and unflinching topicality, Mati…

Longtime collaborator Antonio Banderas stars in Pedro Almodóvar’s semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory It’s not difficult to detect the autobiographical details in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, the story of a…

Too Old to Die Young brings the genre provocateur Nicholas Winding Refn to Amazon for a 13-hour miniseries. Maintaining a distinct authorial presence is one thing; becoming so repetitive that…

The Climb is a Brilliant Reinvention of the Buddy Comedy. In the opening moments of Michael Covino’s The Climb, which follows a peaceful biking trip between two 30-something friends, wannabe…

Kantemir Balagov follows Closeness, his accomplished-but-slight debut feature, with the significantly more ambitious Beanpole, an exploration of the interconnection between national and personal trauma. Loosely adapted from the 1985 book…

At first glance, Sorry We Missed You may appear to be merely a re-tread of Loach’s 2016 Palme d’Or winner; both films focus on the steady downfall of a struggling…