Cannes Film Festival 2021: the 74th
★★★★☆
Cannes Film Festival 2021: Official Selection
After Love (2020)
★★★★☆
After Love, Aleem Khan’s deeply involving feature debut, starring Joanna Scanlan, is a quietly moving study of devastating grief and unexpected love.
Rare Beasts (2019)
★★★★☆
Written by, directed by and starring Billie Piper, Rare Beasts, a self-styled ‘anti-romcom’, is a manic Munch-like scream about what it’s like to be a modern, thirty-something woman trying to have it all while there’s a crisis all around.
The Human Voice (2020)
★★★★☆
The Human Voice is a gripping half-hour monologue of madness and melancholy that brings director Pedro Almodóvar and other-worldly actress Tilda Swinton together in an artistic marriage made in heaven.
Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman streams all his films for free
★★★★☆
Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman to stream all his films for free from 21 to 30 May.
Frankie (2019)
★★★☆☆
In Frankie, written and directed by Ira Sachs, Isabelle Huppert stars in an ensemble piece that illuminates a terminally ill actress’s final attempts to control the tangled relationships of her extended family.
Sound of Metal (2019)
★★★★☆
Sound of Metal by Darius Marder, starring Riz Ahmed, is the sensitively told and brilliantly acted story of every musician’s worst nightmare – going deaf.
The Mauritanian (2021) – on digital
★★★★☆
The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin MacDonald, brings a legal drama to devastating life on screen from the New York Times acclaimed best-selling memoir Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was tortured and detained without charge in Guantánamo for 14 years.
Undergods (2020)
★★★☆☆
Undergods, Chino Moya’s disturbing first feature set in a dystopian future, has its world premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival and is released now.
Apples (2020) – on demand
★★★★☆
Apples, Christos Nikou’s assured debut as a director, is a disturbing, opaque fable about the relationship between memory, identity, grief and the selfie culture, set in Athens during an allegorical pandemic.
Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation (2020) – on demand
★★★★☆
Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation is a fascinating documentary by Lisa Immordino Vreeland about two groundbreaking giants of contemporary literature and the creative process.
Oscar Winners 2021
★★★★★
Oscar Winners 2021 – 93rd Academy Awards.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) – on demand
★★★★☆
The Trial of the Chicago 7‘s all-star cast enlivens and sharpens the points of Aaron Sorkin‘s docudrama of a historic court case intended to destroy the ’60s counterculture.
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) – on demand – Oscar winner
★★★★☆
Oscar-winning Judas and the Black Messiah directed by Shaka King, a tragic true story of a brutal state assassination in the US starring LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya, is gripping, heart-wrenching and sadly still topical.