In 1902, England’s King Edward VII was crowned. Two months earlier, Georges Méliès made a film about it in his French studio to be released at the coronation date. Reportedly, the king said, “What a fantastic machine!” and his exclamation gave directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck an idea: a decade-long research process of examining the possibilities of the cinematic apparatus and the responsibilities that come with its evolution. Fantastic Machine uses the form of a video essay to track historical and ideological highlights in the evolution of the camera, a man-made machine t ..read more

“Everything is sex / except sex / which is power,” sang renaissance woman Janelle Monáe is her ridiculously catchy 2018 banger ‘Screwed’. It’s a sentiment echoed across the filmography of Italian provocateur Luca Guadagnino, who’s no slouch when it comes to a bit of titillation – ever since Tilda Swinton put on that little red dress in I Am Love, it’s been written in the stars. He is drawn to stories about fucking and fucking up, and Justin Kuritzkes’ script for Challengers offers something to satisfy both those appetites, pitting two tennis players against each other in a match that’s as mu ..read more

The choice to pack up your family and leave your home country for what you hope to be more hospitable climes is never an easy one. Nor does it negate any other traumas or anxieties you’re experiencing in life. Milad Alami’s second feature, Opponent, explores the idea of an Iranian man wrestling with his conscience as well as quite literally wrestling other men in the hope that his participation in a national team sport would help his application for asylum in Sweden. Payman Maadi, an actor many will likely recognise as one of the leads from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, delivers a towering p ..read more

War never changes – at least according to the prologue of Bethesda’s Fallout video game series, set in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse in an alternate version of the United States. The wildly successful franchise has spawned five console games and – as of this month – a glossy Amazon drama series, exploring a reality where warring factions eke out a fraught existence across the background of almost total annihilation. This approach is what we have come to expect from imagined depictions of Western warfare, and the series’ three-word tagline implies that despite Fallout’s more fantastic ..read more

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… the day where two older people sat behind a little table on a stage and serve up the delectable morsels of world cinema that we’re all set to enjoy in the coming months. Film festivals have so far this year not exactly bathed themselves in glory, with issues of censorship and political suppression present at both Sundance and Berlin. But can Cannes take up the mantle and offer up a truly open and free festival, where filmmakers are able to present their work without fear of violent rebuttal? We already know that George Miller’s new addition to his Mad ..read more

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. The Foul King (Banchikwang), dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2000 “Welcome to the real world,” a bank’s assistant manager (Song Young-chang) tells his employee Im Dae-ho (Song Kang-ho), having just held him in, and then released him from, a vicious headlock. “If you’re weak, you die.” Dae-ho is a loser who wants nothing more than to impress his disappointed father (Shin Goo), and to break free of his boss’s humiliating hold over him. One day he spots ..read more

“This probably shouldn’t be a film,” notes the opening of Zia Anger’s debut feature, decisively titled My First Film. The courage to begin with such abnegation speaks volumes about the ambivalent relationship between creator and creation, where vulnerability is at stake. At the same time, the assurance which causes those words to appear on a desktop screen teases a contradiction: My First Film is a meta-history of first times, but it is not really a debut. It has been 15 years since the director shot a feature about a young woman searching for her mother – Always All Ways, Anne Marie – which ..read more

Since Bohemian Rhapsody took home four Academy Awards in 2019, it feels as if music biopics have been coming down the slop chute thick and fast, with debates around their ethics, impersonations and omissions becoming ever more tedious. Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black, might just be the defining stench emanating from the pail. Industry alum Marisa Abela has the mammoth task of playing Amy, an idol still fresh in the memory of the movie-going population. However, due to the vapid and cruel script by Matthew Greenhalgh (Nowhere Boy, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool), A ..read more

It has been 31 years since we last saw a feature film by the Spanish maestro Victor Erice, and that film was the transcendent documentary the ephemeral nature of art, The Quince Tree Sun. He remains most well know for his 1973 debut, The Spirit of the Beehive, about a young girl’s transformative encounter with cinema, and he followed it up in 1983 with a melancholy study of an emotionally estranged father and daughter in The South. Close Your Eyes is a scintillating and unspeakably powerful addition to this small but perfectly formed corpus of films, telling of a filmmaker attempting to find ..read more

The very idea that there now exists in the world a new feature film by the long-absent Spanish director Victor Erice is a cause for celebration in and of itself. That the feature, named Close Your Eyes, also happens to stand shoulder to shoulder with the works upon which he made his name, supremely-lyrical stories that explore the profound intersections between landscape, history and art, such as Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur and The Quince Tree Sun, is nothing short of a miracle. The yarn at the centre of Close Your Eyes is one that is unfurled with utmost precision and no great haste. Migu ..read more