Fans regularly make film biopics about famous musicians successful, but they also love to nitpick the results. Or to misquote Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division and the subject of a rather good musical biopic (Control), love will tear apart any work of fan service if it screws …

Scoop is a dramatized feature about the BBC’s Newsnight team scoring a sensationally revealing 2019 interview with Prince Andrew about his relationship with millionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. For a film about a journalistic exclusive, it has the most generic title possible. There are already at least four other movies …

Esteemed cinematographer Benoît Delhomme’s credits have included a conspicuous number of thoughtful, visually sumptuous period pieces, such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Theory of Everything and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as a few films made to promote fashion brands like Balmain, Dior and Chanel. In a way, that …

To note that Gloria!, the directing debut of Italian actor-singer-songwriter Margherita Vicario, is vapid, pseudo-feminist, sentimental piffle would be entirely accurate. And yet, one must also admit that it is at least mildly entertaining piffle, absorbing in the same way that pop videos with lots of dancing and catchy tunes …

French writer Christine Angot has written many books, but Incest (1999) is arguably the one she is most famous for. Variously defined by Angot and others as a novel but also a work of autobiographical non-fiction (some call it “autofiction”), it features a protagonist also named Christine who, just like …

Unabashedly sporting the most inauspicious of titles, a three-hour running time and a logline that features terminally ill elders and self-destructive descendants, German feature Dying (Sterben) looks like a hard sell on paper. And yet writer-director Matthias Glasner’s crisscrossing family drama manages to be exceedingly funny, often in some of …

Set in 1991, not long after it suddenly became much easier for Holocaust survivors and their descendants to visit sites like Auschwitz-Birkenau, German-French co-production Treasure follows a father and daughter (played by Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham) making exactly this kind of voyage of remembrance. It’s adapted from the comic-tragic …

Like taxis on a rainy night, you wait for ages for a great, bittersweet film about love in late middle age with a side helping of gastronomic lusciousness — and then two come along at once. Tehran-set but internationally-produced comedy-drama My Favourite Cake premiered at the Berlin Film Festival a …

When British producer-director Matthew Vaughn’s latest had its red-carpet premiere in London in mid-January 2024, the film made local headlines for reasons probably not intended by the filmmakers and their distributor, Universal. Alongside the usual PR-driven fluff about the sparkly frocks stars Dua Lipa and Bryce Dallas Howard were wearing, …

Although Coup! has a small cast and unfolds mostly in a secluded mansion during the 1918 influenza pandemic, it packs a lot of flavor, suspense and droll comedy into its slim 97-minute running time, making it fun enough to deserve an exclamation point in its title. Peter Sarsgaard offers a …

It sometimes seems as if prolific British director Michael Winterbottom has had a go at just about every major type of film apart from light opera, shark attack stories and steampunk animé. That said, one of his most consistent, go-to genres — apart from comedy-dramas starring Steve Coogan — has …

Richard Linklater’s features since his masterwork Boyhood (2014) — Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Last Flag Flying, and Everybody Wants Some!! — have been a decidedly mixed bag, but Hit Man finds him having a blast with a sexy black comedy boasting a sly …