Tender world première closes Dances With Films, 28 Jun 2026 Tender begins with a shot of an incinerator blazing, and with Billie Royce (Jess Weixler) declaring in voice-over, “Failure is something I generally avoid”, while describing the refusal of herself and her husband Mick (Jesse Garcia) to recognise the “bad spot” that they are in…
Sister Midnight first published by Little White Lies, 11 March 2025 “What do normal people do on a Sunday?”, asks Uma (Radhika Apte), some way into writer/director Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight. “We’re not normal people,” her husband Gopal (Ashok Pathak) replies. Gopal is not wrong. For even though the film opens with the couple travelling…
Tomb Watcher had its UK première at FrightFest, 1.15pm Sunday 24th August “Everyone says our love is impossible,” declares Cheev (Thanavate Siriwattanagul) in voiceover at the beginning of Vathanyu Ingkawiwa’s Tomb Watcher, as he is looking down from a low angle through a strange glass frame. Cheev goes on to describe the full extent of…
Honey Bunch had its world premiere in the Berlinale Special section of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on 18 February 2025 Homer’s Odyssey concerns a sea journey home, and a reunion between husband and wife. Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s Honey Bunch opens with a view of the sea and a husband carrying his…
Climates (İklimler) first published by Film4 In the Golden Prix-winning Uzak (2002), it was a full 11 minutes before a character spoke a single line, and even after that the dialogue was kept to a minimum, earning its writer/director Nuri Bilge Ceylan the reputation as a master of long takes and even longer silences. In his latest…
Crumb Catcher had its international première on 4th October at GrimmFest 2024 Remember how Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005) used a ‘friendly’ game of doubles tennis played between a mother, father and their two sons in its opening sequence to expose and encapsulate up front all the frictions in this family? For…
Drive Back had its UK première at FrightFest 2024, 23 August At the beginning of Cody Ashford’s feature debut Drive Back, the boy Reid (Zoltan Torok) sees a buck get shot only feet away from where he is doodling in a sketchbook on the woodland floor, and is then horrified when his father (Robert Lewis…
Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale Of A Writer Who Decided To Write About A Serial Killer had its world première at Tribeca, 8 June 2024 As text captions absurdly reveal, The Shallow Tale Of A Writer Who Decided To Write About A Serial Killer opens in 40,000 B.C., Slovenia, as though this were a bombastic,…
Wild Fire begins at dawn – a liminal time of change. There is an immaculate garden surrounded by trees and full of birdsong, and beyond it a beautiful modernist home. Upstairs in the bedroom, a glass and wine bottle sit on the floor, and a silk robe lies discarded on the end of the bed….
Although the chronology of Til Death Us Do Part is not quite as straightforward as it first seems, the film begins with two sequences of apparent marital bliss in the present that also offer glimpses of the future. In the first, as the Best Man (Cam Gigandet, in hilarious form), seated in a pew, struggles…
As its very title suggests, My Sister’s Wedding is concerned not just with the institution of marriage, but also with a protagonist who is simultaneously at the film’s centre and on its sidelines. When it comes to her family, Allison Valentine (Samantha Sayah) is always caught in between. She is the middle sister to older…