Vox Lux (2018)
★★☆☆☆
Vox Lux, Brady Corbet’s second film, is the imagined biography of a fictional pop star played uncomfortably by Natalie Portman.
festivals
Woman at War (2018)
★★★★☆
Woman at War ((Kona fer í stríð) by Benedikt Erlingsson is an environmental drama and a whimsical mid-life-crisis comedy.
Ash is Purest White (2018)
★★★★★
The exquisite Ash Is Purest White by Jia Zhang Ke, starring Tao Zhao in an extraordinary performance, follows the lives of its characters against the background of a rapidly transforming China.
Eighth Grade (2018)
★★★★★
The pressures and anxieties of a 14-year-old girl navigating eighth grade in the social media age are put under the microscope in writer/director Bo Burnham’s achingly observant little gem Eighth Grade.
Wild Rose (2018)
★★★★☆
Jessie Buckley is superb as an aspiring country singer determined to break from her past and get to Nashville in director Tom Harper’s Glasgow-set Wild Rose.
Mid90s (2018)
★★★☆☆
Jonah Hill’s Mid90s is an affectionate, coming-of-age time capsule of skateboards, street life, hip-hop, pop culture moments and stoners.
Donbass (2018)
★★★★★
In Donbass Sergei Loznitsa’s anger at the war in eastern Ukraine pours out like red-hot lava in 13 episodes of a vicious cycle of dark comedy, absurdity, brutality and horror.
STYX (2018)
★★★★☆
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Happy as Lazzaro (2018) (Lazzaro felice)
★★★★☆
Happy as Lazzaro by Alice Rohrwacher is a magical-realist fable that features types of exploitation.
Dragged Across Concrete (2018)
★★★☆☆
Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughan are cops going brutally rogue in Dragged Across Concrete, S. Craig Zahler’s third film after Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99.
3 Faces (2018)
★★★★☆
3 Faces is Jafar Panahi’s fourth film since receiving a 30-year ban on filmmaking (or leaving Iran). It’s an involving, compelling, deeply ingrained criticism of the society it quietly observes.
Eaten by Lions (2018)
★★★★☆
Eaten by Lions by Jason Wingard is a crisp and surreally comic film, starring an array of British comedy talent. It’s a more raffish and comedic East Is East for our times.
The Kindergarten Teacher (2018)
★★★★☆
The pursuit of artistic desire goes too far in writer/director Sara Colangelo’s slow burning drama The Kindergarten Teacher based on the 2014 Israeli film and showcasing a tremendous performance from Maggie Gyllenhaal.
BBC Arabic Film Festival 2019
Arab film is receiving international attention following Nadine Labaki’s Foreign Lnaguage Oscar nomination for Capernaum. This year’s BBC Arabic Festival programme of 18 films includes four feature…
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