★★★★☆
US festival favourite I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) is a touching, positive indie movie, female written and directed, made during Los Angeles’ lockdown (see the mask use) focusing on the struggles to be independent of a widowed mother who happens to be homeless, black and female – and beautiful.
★★★☆☆
Berlinale presents San Sebastián award winner El Castillo (The Castle) a strangely moving mixture of documentary and fiction by Martin Benchimol.
★★★☆☆
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.
★★★☆☆
Neptune Frost, a visionary collaboration between poet/artist Saul Williams and actress and playwright Anisia Uzeyman, is a unique Afro-futurist political musical filmed in Rwanda.
★★★☆☆
Sally Hawkins stars as an amateur historian in search of the grave of King Richard III in director Stephen Frears’ uplifting true-story drama The Lost King.
★★★☆☆
Screen legend Charlotte Rampling is magnificently ferocious as a reluctant invalid, estranged bad grandma Ruth in Matthew J Saville’s debut Juniper.
★★★☆☆
Sparks fly when Mark meets Warren at the rugby club and soon the pair are embroiled in an illicit affair facing consequences on and off pitch in director Matt Carter’s In From The Side.
★★★☆☆
The unexpected consequences and repercussions of a terrible accident in the Moroccan desert are explored in The Forgiven, John Michael McDonagh’s adaptation of Lawrence Osbourne’s 2012 novel, starring Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain.
★★★☆☆
Black Mail, written and directed by Obi Emelonye, is a slick, London-set plot-driven thriller with an appealing central character played by Nigerian star OC Ukeje.
★★★☆☆
Listen, Ana Rocha de Sousa’s powerful first film about forced adoption, is heart-rending and almost unbearable to watch at times.
★★★☆☆
Atabai by Iranian director Niki Karimi makes the most of stupendous landscapes and reveals its stories gradually.
★★★★☆
In Casablanca Beats, director Nabil Ayouch blurs the line between fiction and documentary in the exhilarating story of a charismatic group of young would-be rappers in Morocco.
★★★★☆
In Cicada by Matt Fifer and Kieran Mulcare, a twenty-something in New York finds love but his life is clouded by the memories of childhood abuse and the pain of not knowing how to deal with it.
★★★☆☆
The Collini Case by Marco Kreuzpaintner is a slickly made German legal drama that hinges on postwar European history.
