I discovered the work of the American documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman through sheer pot lock. I used to work for the film section of Time Out London magazine, and my job involved writing capsule reviews for repertory and festival screenings that...
The Looney Tunes have admittedly fallen on hard times in recent years. As far as animation was concerned, David Zaslav’s feckless régime at Warner Brothers saw the medium as a whole as an easy cut, leaving a historic library in limbo until...
Few birthday celebrations can ever match the surreal spectacle that the Iraqi state would enforce each year that Saddam Hussein would complete a lap around the sun. Since he took power in 1979, every corner of the country would be enveloped...
“Now that sex is available to us in hardcore porno films, death remains the one last taboo in cinema,” wrote the film critic Amos Vogel in 1980. Sex and death, Vogel believed, were the two facets of life hidden behind closed...
Markiplier is far from the only YouTuber to see success lately in theatrical cinema – Talk to Me filmmakers the Philippou Brothers and Skinamarink visionary Kyle Edward Ball spring to mind. “It’s novel until it’s not – and then it’s expected,” offers Fischbach. “That’s...
The transformative power of water lies at the heart of American writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, informed by her adolescent dreams of swimming being her escape from an abusive childhood home. The Chronology of Water tracks the tides of her life...
Every year at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the programming team makes an effort to champion emerging talent that challenges preconceived notions of what Japanese cinema is or can be. Through their Women’s Empowerment and Nippon Cinema Now strands, the...
It is ironic that Richard Linklater has chosen to homage a film carved out of spontaneous new techniques with one so mired in contrivances that it is impossible for it to breathe. To be fair, Breathless is the name of the...
If anyone was going to try to adapt Silent Hill 2, one of video gaming’s most spectacular artistic achievements, you could do worse than French stylist Christophe Gans, who directed 2006’s Silent Hill – a loose adaptation of the first game in the...
61. Queen at Sea (Lance Hamer)February 2026 (Berlinale Première)Back in 2008, Lance Hamer was a name on everyone’s lips due to his massively impressive indie feature, Ballast. Then… crickets. The guy went off somewhere, did some other things evidently. But now he’s...
