
Black Swan (2010)
★★★★☆
With a mesmerising performance from Natalie Portman, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is entirely gripping in its pas de deux of black sensuality and white innocence.
★★★★☆
With a mesmerising performance from Natalie Portman, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is entirely gripping in its pas de deux of black sensuality and white innocence.
★★★★☆
A dazzling, thought-provoking reflection on love found and love lost, Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine puts marriage on trial.
★★★★☆
From bumbling hesitancy to majestic articulacy, Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech exuberantly charts the rise of the man who would be king.
★★★★☆
Audiences are bound to be divided over Danny Boyle’s flashy visuals, but James Franco goes all out on a limb to ground the supersonic 127 Hours with a bit of gravitas.
★★★★☆
A sublime look into the hearts and minds of tormented monks, Xavier Beauvois’ Of Gods And Men reveals the battle between humanity and divinity in all of us.
★★★★☆
Minimalism on a microbudget, Michael Rowe’s Camera d’Or winning Mexican debut Leap Year is a masochist’s delight. With an Australian fascination for light.
★★★★☆
A symbiosis of fixed landscapes and illuminating narration, Patrick Keiller’s Robinson In Ruins is a bracing journey through the Oxfordshire countryside.
★★★★☆
His first English language film, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth is a global story of haves and have nots intertwined with complex family relationships.
★★★★☆
With pitch-perfect performances by Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right is by no means playing it straight.
★★★★☆
Cuffed and bound, a changing Romania is put in the dock in Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective when a conscience-niggled policeman starts questioning the law.
★★★★☆
Pedro González-Rubio’s Alamar is a touching tale of paternal love afloat upon the drifting Mexican sea.
★★★★☆
A Rohmeresque ramble under the Tuscan sun, Kiarostami’s Certified Copy is a freewheeling battle of the sexes. And Juliette Binoche is in a bitter mood for love.
★★★★☆
Replacing a passive-agressive, quarrelsome maid isn’t easy, as Sebastián Silva’s comic gem La Nana shows. It’s class conflict gone the family way.
★★★★☆
With man-on-man love in a small Peruvian fishing village, Javier Fuentes-León’s Contracorriente has Latin American machismo swimming against a high tide.