Elaha (2024)
★★★★☆
Elaha, directed by Milena Aboyan, is a powerful contemporary story about the conflict between tradition and modernity in the life of a young girl from an immigrant family in Germany.
★★★★☆
Elaha, directed by Milena Aboyan, is a powerful contemporary story about the conflict between tradition and modernity in the life of a young girl from an immigrant family in Germany.
★★★☆☆
Omen is multidisciplinary artist Baloji’s magical realist award-winning first feature.
★★★★★
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.
★★★★☆
Reas is an extraordinary documentary and musical by Lola Arias set in a women’s prison in Argentina, unlike anything you have seen before.
★★★★☆
Perfect Days is acclaimed director Wim Wenders’ Tokyo-set film for which Koji Yakusho won a well-deserved Best Actor award.
★★★☆☆
The Settlers is an angry, violent Western-type version of the brutal colonial birth of Chile by first-time filmmaker Felipe Gálvez.
★★★★☆
Abel Ferrara’s Padre Pio links religious fervour, the growth of fascism and socialism, and the Ukraine invasion, and is based on true events culminating on 14 October 1920.
★★★★☆
Fallen Leaves is Aki Kaurismäki’s drily touching film of a kind of love story amid the grinding reality of life.
★★★★☆
Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet’s Palme d’or winner, stars Sandra Hüller in a gripping, ambiguous puzzle of a courtroom drama.
★★★★☆
Passages is Ira Sachs’ toxic European love triangle set in Paris, starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos.
★★★★☆
Isabelle Huppert stars in Jean-Paul Salomé’s thriller and nuclear-industry investigation La Syndicaliste, based on the recent true story of French union official Maureen Kearney.
★★★★☆
Pacifiction, a hypnotically paced, dark political thriller set in French Tahiti directed by Catalan Albert Serra, enjoys the Polynesian island’s beauty, but also its inherent vulnerability to threats.
★★★★☆
Holy Spider, angrily written and directed by Ali Abbasi (Border), is a grisly, reality-based story of violence against women in a patriarchal, theocratic society.
★★★☆☆
Peter von Kant is a gender-flipped re-imagining by François Ozon of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 classic power play of sexual obsession The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.