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...
Since playing a toothpaste superhero in an advertisement, down-on-his-luck actor Phillip Vanderploeg (Brendan Fraser) has been living in Tokyo for several years and further opportunities have been thin on the ground. Accepting a day-long gig as “Sad American” at a funeral, where the...
This is a film about the constant sense of being slightly out of step with where you are standing, rendered with remarkable restraint. State of Statelessness is an anthology comprising four tales by the Drung Collective, a group of filmmakers working within the Tibetan...
It’s nearing a quarter-century since the retirement of “Prince” Naseem Hamed, Sheffield’s world champion boxer of Yemeni heritage. For a while, in the run-up to the new millennium, he was everywhere: transcending the sports section to provide primetime entertainment and front-page news,...
The career ascent of writer/director Chloé Zhao has been immense, taking in intimate indie dramas (Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider), sprawling sagas that cleaned up at the Oscars (Nomadland) and the more thoughtful side of the Marvel Cinematic...
In 2016, David Bowie’s death shook the world like a supernova – a deliberately-staged explosion that collapsed a lifetime of personas into a single, blinding point of closure. Ten years later, with a glut of posthumous Bowie films in tow, the question is no longer what...
I first became acquainted with Freida McFadden’s New York Times bestselling thriller ‘The Housemaid’ earlier in 2025, when I stumbled across a YouTube video entitled “Is this the worst book ever written?”. Intrigued by the title I clicked – the reviewer gave a detailed...
Emily MaskellFive personal favourite films of 2025Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)April (Dea Kulumbegashvili)Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)On Falling (Laura Carreira)Cinematographer of the year Darius Khondji (Mickey 17)Below the lineLéo Silly-Pélissier (Animation director, Flow)Old guardStellan SkarsgårdNew schoolChase InfinitiIt’s f***kin’ trash but I loved itBridget Jones: Mad...
From Star Wars canon expansion to the conclusion of a university-set sitcom and Vince Gilligan's highly anticipated return to the small screen, here are our TV highlights from this year. Given how rare event television is in the streaming era, watercooler...
Crafting a complex portrait of a fraught father-daughter relationship set against a grand dragestil family home in Oslo, Joachim Trier turns to family, ancestral traumas and art to convey all that can’t be articulated through language.LWLies: The house doesn’t feel like home anymore,...
