The first shot of I Saw The TV Glow is quite the opening salvo. The camera creeps along a suburban street just after dusk, passing over tangled veiny chalk art, the world covered in a blue so deep it seems to spill off the screen. The image precedes a film no less vibrant or eerie; its brash, attractive color palette pulls you under, and only when you’re fully submerged does it start to feel like you’re drowning. Director Jane Schoenbrun, whose debut film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was shot almost entirely through webcams, announces themself as a vital new cinematic talent. In ..read more

Like a patient naturalist with his digital camera pre-primed, Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan is adept at spotting dyed-in-the-wool male misanthropes out there wandering the snowswept Anatolian plains. About Dry Grasses, his thrilling, engrossing epic of no-hold-barred parochial intellectualism might be seen as the last chapter of a trilogy, following 2013’s Winter Sleep and 2018 The Wild Pear Tree, about entrenched male malaise and the stifling social edicts of life in a small village. Deniz Celiloglu’s Samet is a primary school teacher who clearly believes he’s wasting his potential in ..read more

I’d like to see a new cut of this film excised of all the footage of Deadpool and anything Deadpool adjacent. It’s just Hugh Jackman’s sadsack Wolverine given space to tumble into a booze-soaked existential freefall without Groucho Snarx yammering away about BJs and bean-flicking in the background. All of which is to say, Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is a mixed (ball) bag indeed, definitely not unendurable, and even boasting a couple of nuggets of misty-eyed nostalgia that aren’t instantly undercut by playground irony, but for the most part it does boast the hit-and-miss qualities o ..read more

At the end of Paul Brickman’s Risky Business, Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodsen turns the tables on Rebecca De Mornay’s Lana, the sex worker he’s fallen in love with despite – or because of – the fact that she’s just conned him into turning his affluent parents’ home into a brothel. Where once Lana had asked Joel to pay her, he now insists she pay him. They joke about pricing as Joel’s voiceover plays us out. “My name is Joel Goodsen,” he reminds, stressing the ‘good son’ pun. “I deal in human fulfilment. I grossed over eight thousand dollars in one night. Time of your life, huh, kid?” Bolstered by ..read more

We hear Glen Powell before we see him in Richard Linklater’s 2016 breezy, sun-soaked college hangout movie Everybody Wants Some!!, and over the years that cocky Texan inflection has become immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with the onscreen persona he’s cultivated since. In his first major role, Powell thrums with unrestrained energy as college upperclassman Walt Finnegan, talking a mile a minute, infusing otherwise mundane lines with the theatricality of a British accent at random, loose-limbed on the dancefloor. Assured and smooth-talking, he doesn’t take himself too seriously, b ..read more

Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari was a marvel – a moving, effortlessly graceful portrait of a Korean family searching for the American dream in rural Arkansas based on his own childhood. The director was on the verge of giving up on his dreams of filmmaking when his soaring autobiographical fourth feature took off, racking up critical acclaim, six Oscar nominations and even a Little White Lies cover. In the grand tradition of Hollywood, Chung was then handed the keys to a blockbuster property – a planned sequel to 1996’s Twister, which starred Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as starcrossed tornado-chasin ..read more

With To the End, Blur have now released well over double the minutes of documentary film about their sporadic post-2009 reunion (296) than they have new studio music (113, rounded up). 2010’s No Distance Left to Run chronicled their pre-break-up history, reconciliation, and journey towards two momentous headline shows at Glastonbury and Hyde Park. 2015’s New World Towers documented the spontaneous creation of their first reunion album, The Magic Whip, and its accompanying tour. To the End splits the difference by covering both the unplanned creation of their second reunion album, The Ballad ..read more

The last promise that Lia (Mzia Arabuli) made to her sister before her death was that she would reunite with her niece, Tekla, after many years of estrangement. After gleaning from an old student that Tekla has left Georgia for neighbouring Turkey, Lia makes plans for a long journey to Istanbul. Sensing an opportunity to get away from his bullying half-brother and forge his path in a new country, cheeky chappie Achi (Lucas Kankava) begs Lia to let him come along for the ride, claiming he knows where her niece might be staying. A reluctant Lia permits Achi to accompany her, and together they ..read more

At the tail end of 2023, the untimely death of South Korean star Lee Sun-kyun shocked the world. Best known as one of the stars of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, Lee had been one of his generation’s most acclaimed actors, starring in local mainstream and arthouse films. Among the latter were several collaborations with director Hong Sang-soo, many of which paired him with actor Jung Yu-mi (Oki’s Movie, Our Sunhi). In what ended up being Lee’s final film to premiere while he was still alive, the two stars are reunited for a spooky tale that showcases both their respective talents. Sleep is the elec ..read more

One of the most horrifying, heart-in-mouth moments in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs comes when Clarice Starling is trapped in a pitch-black room with Buffalo Bill. We watch a terrified Starling through the green and white glow of his night vision goggles as she scrambles desperately through the darkness, as the killer slowly reaches towards her. It’s a classic “He’s behind you!” moment that owes much to the horror staples that preceded it, but when Demme kills the score and positions us as the killer, the sound of Starling’s panicked breathing ringing in our ears, it creates a brand ..read more