The Shepherd (El Pastor) (2016)
★★★★☆
In The Shepherd (El Pastor) Jonathan Cenzual Burley captures the heart of rural Spain in a beautifully observed and moving David and Goliath battle.
Europe
Michelangelo: Love and Death (2017)
★★★★☆
To coincide with a major show at London’s National Gallery, Michelangelo: Love and Death, the latest offering from Exhibition on Screen, retraces the genius of the Florentine master.
Cannes review: Bright Sunshine In (2017)
★★★★☆
Juliette Binoche stars in a rom-com departure for Claire Denis in Bright Sunshine In (Un Beau Soleil Interior).
Cannes review: Rodin (2017)
★★★★☆
Rodin is a ploddingly, inexplicably uninteresting biopic of the revolutionary sculptor by Jacques Doillon.
The Other Side of Hope (2016)
★★★★☆
Aki Kaurismäki is in top droll, compassionate form dealing with the refugee crisis in The Other Side of Hope.
Interlude in Prague (2017)
★★★★☆
John Stephenson OBE’s take on Mozart’s making of Don Giovanni is a romantic farrago of beautiful costumes and music in Interlude in Prague.
Cannes review: Happy End (2017)
★★★★☆
Michael Haneke’s Happy End deconstructs a wealthy bourgeois family living a life oblivious to the human beings around them with chilling results.
Cannes review: Loveless (2017)
★★★★☆
Shown through a couple’s reactions to the disappearance of their son, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless (Nelyubov) is a crushing comment on a loveless society and its people.
Cannes review: How to talk to girls at parties (2017)
★★★★☆
John Cameron Mitchell’s How To Talk To Girls At Parties is a weird mixture of punk and aliens in the British suburbs – and it works.
Cannes review: The Square (2017)
★★★★☆
Ruben Östlund’s The Square is a chilly satire on the pretensions of art and Sweden’s comfortable society.
Cannes review: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
★★★★☆
In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Yorgos Lanthimos creates a disturbingly strange and brutal dilemma.
Cannes review: 120 BPM (120 beats per minute) (2017)
★★★★★☆
In BPM director Robin Campillo turns his naturalistic documentary-style technique from The Class on a group of AIDS activists in the epidemic of the 1990s in a sober, moving, tender and compassionate film.
Cannes review: Jupiter’s Moon (2017)
★★★★☆
In Jupiter’s Moon Kornél Mundruczó takes an intriguing and timely magical realist premise but leaves its resolution in mid air.
Cannes review: Ismaël’s Ghosts (2017)
★★★★☆
Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismaël’s Ghosts is an abstract, at times melodramatic interweaving of nightmare, filmmaking, fiction and reality.