“Choices, choices…,” says the narrator, a young seamstress, in this strange and striking debut from Freddy Macdonald. A neo-noir in the early Coens tradition, Sew Torn also features a bold tri-part structure in which the heroine, Barbara (Eve Connolly) — like Lola before her in Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run …

Settling back into Denis Villeneuve’s exotic sci-fi world gets off to a tense start, with a sudden horns-of-Jericho blast from Hans Zimmer’s score, coupled with a stern warning onscreen: “Power over spice is power over all.” It seems a little unnecessary, since the pursuit of spice — a highly sought-after …

Somebody — or something — is speaking from inside a timber crate. “It’s so dark in here… a night so deep and opaque” read the subtitles; the voice is speaking in Fon, the local language of the West African country that was once called Dahomey and is now Benin. As …

There is a sense of a running gag in Hors du Temps (renamed Suspended Time for the English-language market). In his complex, autofictional 2022 TV series Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas cast as the director of a film called Irma Vep — a film he had, in fact, made in real …

For 15 minutes or so, Bob Marley: One Love promises to be an antidote to the usual cookie-cutter music biopic, the kind skewered by the 2007 spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Riffing back then on 2005’s Walk the Line, which starred Joaquin Phoenix as troubled country star Johnny …

At the height of their failure, every day was Altamont for the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the San Francisco outfit founded in 1990 by Anton Newcombe, the Klaus Kinski of psychedelic rock. Just in time for this 20th anniversary overhaul of Ondi Timoner’s breakthrough documentary, the BJM were back in the …

Reality Winner is probably better known in Europe than the US, thanks in part to Tina Satter’s extraordinary arthouse film Reality (2023), which dramatized the 25-year-old Texan translator’s arrest in 2017 using the verbatim transcripts of her interactions with the FBI. Winner, a funny and surprisingly powerful biopic directed and …

Sundance has a long history of screening films that tackle issues of race in the US from every possible angle; some are angry (Birth of a Nation, 2016), some satirical (Dear White People, 2014), and some quite gonzo (Sorry to Bother You, 2018). Kobi Libii’s feature debut has the distinction …

Anyone with more than a passing interest in the weird and wonderful will have seen, if not heard of, the Patterson-Gimlin footage, the cryptoozological equivalent of the Zapruder film. Shot in 1967 in the forests of Northern California, it purports to show a large, ape-like creature with an elongated forehead …

For some reason the films in the Midnight strand at this year’s Sundance Film Festival haven’t actually been screening at midnight. This is probably good news for Greg Jardin’s ingenious horror-thriller, which, while perfect for a late-night-crowd, has perhaps too much meat on it to digest past the witching hour. …

“I didn’t expect to get so old,” sighs 93-year-old Thelma Post (June Squibb) in Josh Margolin’s hilarious and unexpectedly poignant mash-up of Point Blank and The Straight Story. Squibb, so good in Nebraska, once again represents for the hip-op generation, bringing wisdom and truth — plus the best waspish comic …

Even by the HFPA’s eccentric standards, Todd Haynes’ May December is a wild card in the Best Musical or Comedy category. But it does feature elements of both, in a deceptively dark story that harks back to the days of Hollywood’s self-imposed censorship code, when ingenious directors found sensitive and …