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I n the UK, LGBTQ+ hate crimes have been steadily rising over the past five years. Incidents against trans people have increased to 186% and 112% on the basis of sexual orientation. These alarming figures can feel hard to grasp but the humanity of this data is condensed into directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s startling film – a feature-length adaptation of the directors’ BAFTA-nominated 2021 short film – that boldly tackles the fallout of homophobic violence. Femme’s central characters meet in a violent altercation that provides real-life grounding to hate crime statistics. Following a drag lipsync performance to Cleo by Shygirl, the glamorous Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is grabbing cigarettes at a corner shop when a group of lads begin spouting threats. Jules chirps back at taunting ringleader Preston (George MacKay), a hot-tempered man with dark tattoos that crawl up his pale neck. Anxiety rises as the handheld camera pursues Jules’ attempted escape. One minute a reg...

C hristmastime is often filled with grand expectations and fraught with unrealised desires which makes it the perfect setting for a film about inescapable, twisted family relationships. Based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel of the same name, which she adapts with husband and writer Luke Goebel, this is a sinister and darkly funny exploration of repression where every character is imprisoned by secrets and circumstance. Collaborating with director William Oldroyd, the pair have crafted a 1960s-set boozy psychological thriller spiked with menacing horror notes and Hitchcockian suspense. Thomasin McKenzie stars as Eileen Dunlop, a young woman who works in a male correctional facility in Boston. She’s longing for reprieve from a depressing home life where she takes care of her alcoholic, ex-cop father (Shea Whigham). She’s also desperately yearning for affection and adventure. When sophisticated blonde counsellor Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) starts working at the prison Eileen thinks she’s...

M y first encounter with the work of Aki Kaurismäki was on an awkward date. Which, if you’ve seen any of the filmmaker’s work, is very on brand. It was a press screening of his typically doleful 2006 comic feature, Lights in the Dusk, in which a hangdog night watchman with no friends hooks up with a gang of criminals in a bar purely for the company. The film’s gracefully lethargic plot, deader-than-deadpan humour, its strident critique of capitalism and the sudden bursts of classic rock’n’roll music made me feel like I was in the company of an old hand – someone more-than-worthy of further exploration. I’ll admit, we both were a tad bemused at the fact we were dropped so suddenly into Kaurismäki’s singular world without a road map, so for those planning to head out to see his scintillating, award-winning new work, Fallen Leaves , here are some bits and bobs to look out for. It’s immediately apparent from seeing his brilliant new film, Fallen Leaves, that there’s no-one in the world ...

W hen you see guys with droopy jaws, immaculate greased side-partings, slightly ill-fitting leather jackets, and a flask of unidentified hooch in their breast pocket, there’s only one place you could be: the wonderful world of Aki Kaurismäki. The Finnish legend returns, his deadpan instincts enhanced more than undimmed, with a(nother) sweeping, Hollywood-inspired romance set among the disenchanted and the destitute, where the possibility of love becomes the only respite from an arduous day sweeping up metal filings from the factory floor. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is a diligent supermarket worker who is fired for daring to take home items of spoiled food – Kaurismäki’s first of many micro-critiques of a morally corrupt employer class who treat workers like dirt on their heel. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) is an affable alcoholic who holds down a job in a scrap yard, and is let go not for the many bottles of liquor he has hidden around the workspace, but when he’s injured as the result of faulty ...

U sually when you’re watching a film by the Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante, you’re constantly asking the question: “I wonder when this character is going to die, and how horribly?” His latest film Lost in the Night is a more sedate affair and sees him take a soft pivot towards a less disreputable, more genre-driven type of work that ends up dialling back the trademark nauseating violence and sexual humiliation. Yet there’s still a measure of brutality in this tale of a young Mexican labourer who goes undercover in a bid to discover the fate of his missing activist mother. Yet, were there no title card at the front of the film, few would guess that it was product of a man who once filmed a scene of a young solder having his penis set on fire, then presented it in the Cannes Film Festival (the film is 2013’s Heli by the way). A local cop lies on his deathbed, using his final moments to confess his many crooked deeds. Emiliano (Juan Daniel García Treviño) uses the cover of his recen...

T he Eternal Daughter opens on a shot of mist drifting across a wooded section of road. A white taxi cab, fog lights on, glides like a ghost out of the mist towards us. The taxi is conveying two Tilda Swintons, but they aren’t doppelgängers: one is middle-aged, the other older. Swinton is no stranger to exploring left-field casting ideas, but this is the first time she has played her own mother. Joanna Hogg, the British director noted for her shrewd studies of middle class anxieties, borrows techniques and motifs from ghost stories for this uncanny portrait of a mother-daughter relationship, told exclusively through time spent at an out of the way hotel. This hotel is well-chosen. A sprawling old country pile, it is seemingly almost deserted and appears to be miles from anywhere. The wind whistles through the trees. A shadow looms in the corridor. A pale face appears at a window. Everything creaks. Memories stalk both mother and daughter. Lest this all sound relentlessly gothic, th...

N ot far into Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Scott Pilgrim, well, takes off. In this new, looser adaptation, created and written by Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski, the title character is de-centred, leaving his supporting cast to get their own coming-of-age moments in his absence – we see their growth from their perspective and not Scott’s blinkered one. Because of this, Takes Off is less a revisitation than another reinvention of O’Malley’s popular comic book series, in conversation with both the books and the movie within its energetic, winding new story. The showrunners refuse to simply play the hits, maintaining the same slacker vibes and reference-packed rom-com-meets-battle-shonen hybrid, but in a different key this time. Its setup as a series, the art style’s direct lift from the comics, the fact that the English dub of the anime series features the entire returning cast of Edgar Wright’s movie – this all points towards a sort of do-over that’s “more faithful” to the co...

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.   Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1998 Fiercely indebted to low-ranking mafioso Louie (John Tormey) who once saved him from being killed, “Ghost Dog” (Forest Whitaker) carries out professional gangland hits for his ‘master’ – until internecine plotting drives him to have to take out the entire mob, and face his own death with an honour that most of them lack. Where the none-too-bright mafiosi endlessly watch TV cartoons, Ghost Dog himself has broader interests, rigorously adhering to an Ancient Japanese warrior code (whose precepts regularly punctuate the film), listening to RZA’s hip-hop in stolen cars, communicating only by carrier pigeon, befriending a francophone man (Isaach de Bankolé) whom he cannot understand, and exchanging with a girl (Camille Winbush) a range of books as eclectic as writer...

T he International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is one of the largest events of its kind, bringing together filmmakers, industry experts, journalists and film lovers from around the world to celebrate and reflect on the art of documentary filmmaking. As an art form suited to political discussion, protest and dissent, it stands to reason that IDFA would welcome filmmakers challenging injustice and the limitation of freedom. However, this year’s edition takes place during the ongoing conflict in Palestine, and on 8 November, at the opening night screening, protesters carrying a banner with the popular slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ took to the stage. The phrase has been interpreted as anti-Semitic by some members of the Jewish community, and an open letter was issued by key figures of the Israeli film community condemning IDFA, particularly the festival’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, for applauding the protesters. IDFA was quick to issue ...

“O f course I loved Felix,” Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) admits readily, staring down the camera lens. “But was I  in love  with him?” He scoffs and shakes his head. The thing is, who wouldn’t be  in love  with Felix Catton – the feline, otherworldly It Boy of Oxford University’s Class of 2006? Played by Jacob Elordi with an aloof regal air that evokes Kirsten Dunst as Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides, Felix is everything Oliver is not: beautiful, beloved, and filthy rich. Their paths first cross in their first term at Oxford, but it isn’t until Oliver comes to Felix’s rescue when he’s stuck with a flat bike tyre that they come into each others’ orbit. The Liverpudlian (sort of – Keoghan doesn’t seem entirely committed to his own accent choice) divulges to Felix that he comes from a troubled background with addicts for parents, and scraped into the upper echelons of the British education system by working his arse off. Felix, a bleeding heart, is smitten. He take...

W hen the first trailer for Ridley Scott’s long-awaited Napoleon biopic dropped in July, various historians had a lot to say about how Sir Rid seemed to be portraying the legendary Frenchman. “Napoleon Bonaparte was a TERRIBLE PERSON.” Tweeted Professor David Andress. “He was a TYRANT. He betrayed every ideal he ever claimed to stand for. He was a shameless pathological liar who killed millions of people for his own insatiable vanity. He is literally one of the worst people in history.” Meanwhile, Dan Snow took to TikTok to break down the historical inaccuracies in the trailer, including the fact Marie Antoinette’s head would have been shaved before her execution. How did Ridley Scott respond to this criticism? “ Get a life .” It seems there’s no hard feelings with Snow – the pair later sat down to record a podcast on their shared interest in Napoleon’s life – and to Andress’s point, he might have jumped the gun a bit. Scott’s film ends with a title card that sets out the death t...

G ood filmmaking is all about knowing when to stop. Yes, there are cool camera moves and killer line readings and blissful moments of high drama, but if at the end of the day, a film outstays its welcome, then all of those little wins count for nothing. Francis Lawrence’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes outstays its welcome big time – a serviceable B-movie which replays the series’ inherently-quite-exciting fight-to-the-death storyline, but then inelegantly bolts on an extra hour of vapid soul searching and lore expansion that made this viewer wand to bludgeon himself with his own keep cup. For those following, this new film, which arrives some eight years after Katniss Everdeen wrapped things up in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 , is a Phantom Menace-esque prequel which tells the origin story of young, lovely, kindly, studious, poverty-stricken Coreolanus Snow, played Tom Blythe, and how he grows up to become the markedly more charismatic evildoer, Do...

T he lights go down and the audience succumbs to the auditorium’s quiet. Activity settles in anticipation as the familiar title card ‘Our Feature Presentation’ appears onscreen. I am used to nestling back in my centre-middle seat but on this occasion, I am standing at the front of the cinema, stage right of the screen beside an upright piano which is gutted to reveal its insides. I lift my viola, touching the bow down on the strings as the film begins. For the last year, I have been improvising scores for silent films on viola at London’s Prince Charles Cinema. My first performance took place in Oxford on Halloween 2022. I had not seen F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu for over ten years and was astonished to discover in this intense viewing scenario how vividly I remembered the composition of every frame, the way in which each sequence unravels towards the film’s tragic resolution. Murnau’s virtuosity as a filmmaker might be more apparent in later works such as Der Letzte Mann, Faust or Su...