Film

In the documentary film Navalny, Christo Grosev, chief investigator with the Bellingcat group of independent journalists, details how he followed the data trail to identify the FSB (Russian secret service) kill team who shadowed Alexei Navalny (leader of the opposition movement) to Siberia in August 2020 and poisoned him with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. The attack left Navalny in a coma, teetering between life and death in a Russian hospital, the doctors apparently complicit in the attempts to cover up the source of his illness.

It’s easy to forget that it has only been only six years since Jordan Peele’s directorial début. Get Out (2017) was both a strikingly confident addition to the horror genre and a remarkably influential step-forward for black representation on film, instantly making Peele a household name. Now, his third and latest picture, Nope, is backed by a $60 million budget. This makes it his biggest project yet, costing more than three times as much as his previous film, Us (2019). Unsurprisingly, he delivers a spectacle that would make even Steven Spielberg proud.

Michel Franco’s Sundown opens with a close-up of fish slowly suffocating on a boat deck, the first of many enigmatic interjections that punctuate the film. We begin with a family vacation in Acapulco. The Bennetts, an apparently typical nuclear family, swim, sip margaritas, and joke around on the terrace of their luxury resort suite.  They attend a cliff-diving contest at the iconic La Quebrada and dine at an exclusive outdoor restaurant. The atmosphere is one of relaxation, with a hint of uneasiness ...

Crafting a biopic is a near-impossible act of curation; of the hundreds of thousands of hours that make up a person’s life, which two and a half will accurately sum up their entire existence? Some recent attempts, like the excellent Steve Jobs (2015) or the Judy Garland biopic Judy (2019), limit their slice of life to a handful of defining moments and allow the viewer to extrapolate from there ...

The films of Alex Garland (The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Ex Machina, Annihilation) all share a distinct feeling of descent – an almost gravitational pull towards madness, towards decay, towards a loss of self. His new film, the ingeniously titled but only half-realised Men, continues this tradition.

It stars Jessie Buckley (devastatingly good in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, and equally committed here) as Harper ...

Xavier Giannoli calls Lost Illusions less an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s three-volume novel (1837–43) than a transfiguration, comparing it in form to Max Richter’s celebrated reworking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Richter’s ‘Spring’ appears in the film, and a famous quote from Oscar Wilde finds its way into the dialogue, signalling Giannoli’s intention to remake the novel in a way that expresses its ‘spirit and modernity’ without betraying the original. 

Some directors leave their fingerprints on a finished product through a trademark visual style, a particular musical taste, or a recurring ensemble of actors. Others embody the notion that when something’s truly well made, the handiwork is invisible. Such is the case with Asghar Farhadi, two-time Oscar-winning writer and director of A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016), who continues to ride the crest of the Iranian New Wave with A Hero – meticulously studied, profoundly insightful, and expertly executed right through to its impeccable final frame.

Will this biopic be the film that reintroduces German author and filmmaker Thomas Brasch to the world? Perhaps. Something is indeed afoot. Brasch and his family – his three siblings are also notable figures in literature and film – have been the subject of three films in the last decade. Besides Dear Thomas (Lieber Thomas, 2021), currently screening the German Film Festival, we have The Brasch Family (Familie Brasch, 2018) and ...

A Stasi Comedy bundles its explorations of truth, desire, morality, and freedom into an exuberant coming-of-age story. In Melbourne, the Palace Cinema Como was humming in anticipation at the opening night of the German Film Festival. Christoph Mücher, director of the Goethe Institut, invited us to celebrate the joy of a shared film experience; we raised our glasses and toasted our fellow-cinemagoers – a nice touch.

When a father asks his daughter to help end his life, is it out of love or perversity? In Everything Went Fine, it is both. François Ozon’s films typically belong to the French tradition of intimiste cinema, melodramas centred on the bourgeois patriarchal family. Everything Went Fine (Tout c’est bien passé, 2021), Ozon’s twentieth feature film, is no exception. This preference for melodrama means that his films predominantly focus on familial relations and French social mores. This does not mean they ignore broader social or political issues ...