★★★★☆
Marianne Faithfull is a much-misunderstood icon. Broken English, this documentary made to set the record straight made near the end of her life, by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, also features myriad stars of music and film.
★★★★☆
Sirat by Oliver Laxe is a desert survival story — and one of the year’s most gripping films
★★★★☆
BAFTA 2026 winners
★★★★☆
Despite her attempts to avoid it, a nine-year-old rural schoolgirl in Iraq wins the dubious prize of being the one chosen in her class to make a birthday cake to celebrate the dictator’s birthday in The President’s Cake, directed by Hasan Hadi.
★★★★☆
Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) and Citizen Kane are generally accepted to be the most influential films ever made: Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles, their directors. Breathless was on television recently: it is now part of film history.
★★★☆☆
Claire Foy plays an academic devastated by bereavement who finds solace in a connection with a goshawk in Philippa Lowthorpe’s true-story drama H is for Hawk.
★★★★☆
The Golden Globes awards are on 11 January 2026. WINNERS, Nominations, predictions and snu.bs
★★★★☆
It Was Just An Accident directed by Jafar Panahi is a moral examination of what happens when former political prisoners think they have seen a former torturer.
★★★★☆
Pillion is a sensational feature debut by Harry Lighton with graphic images of sub-dom gay sex.
★★★★☆
Dragonfly is a small film. Small in the sense it’s obviously low budget (location) and a two-hander. But it’s so well written (by director Paul Andrew Williams) and exquisitely acted that it seems bigger.
★★☆☆☆
The confusingly titled Odyssey is a violent thriller set in a gentrifying Britain, directed by Gerard Johnson.
★★★★☆
Mascha Schilinsky’s superb Sound of Falling is an immersive, fractured reflection on childhood, telling the story of four young girls from different eras.
★★★★☆
Souleymane’s Story, directed by Boris Lojkine, is a searingly realistic two days in the life of one of the invisible asylum seekers – a bicycle courier in Paris.