In Limonov: A Ballad, his rambunctious indictment of the Russian poet, provocateur and political dissident Eduard Limonov, Russian auteur Kirill Serebrennikov unleashes a withering, fabulist whirlwind of a character study, one with as much if not more to say about the self-contradicting social conditions of a post-Soviet Russia as the deeply troubled contrarian at its centre. Born in the Soviet Union as Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko, only to later derive his pen name Limonov from limonka, the Soviet nickname for an F1 hand grenade, Limonov lived many lives as he careened across Moscow, New Yor ..read more

Earnest ethnographic documentary, steamy backlot melodrama and the existential travelogues of Joseph Conrad coalesce in another cinematic UFO from Portuguese filmmaker, Miguel Gomes, a quixotic and occasionally-exasperating treatise on how the west distorts and romanticises its cultural depictions of the east. Its high-profile premiere in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival made for an interesting bluff for anyone who thought the pathfinding director had embraced the mainstream, as Grand Tour is quite possibly his most experimental and emotionally opaque feature to date. Very much a ..read more

Oliver Stone’s latest documentary is about two men: the titular Lula, and Oliver Stone. It is 2022 and the American filmmaker reunites with the Brazilian politician for the first time since 2009’s South of the Border, Stone’s attempt to chronicle the Pink Tide that saw South America lean into left-wing governments and more socially and economically progressive leaders. In the fifteen years since that last meeting, much has changed in Brazil (and South America). With Lula, Stone sets out to better understand how the country he left many years ago, one that venerated the man at its helm, could ..read more

Every work of art begins with a question. With Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino asks: What if a woman was hot? In Neapolitan lore, Parthenope — derived from the Greek “Parthenos” meaning “virgin” — is a mermaid or siren whose passions resulted in the founding of Naples. In this film, Parthenope is another legendary beauty (played by Celeste Dalla Porta), born in a water birth, in the Bay of Naples. She is the city itself, and the film moves through the decades of her life in a series of mythic vignettes which illustrate ideas about the ache of beauty and the fleetingness of youth; of the insatiab ..read more

Sean Baker returns to familiar preoccupations with Anora – sex work, grifters and the promise of a big break that isn’t what it seems. Following in the footsteps of an antihero as well-rounded as Mikey Saber, Red Rocket’s washed-up porn star, Anora’s eponymous exotic dancer lands as sketched in a more superficial mode, through no fault of a spirited and captivating performance from Mikey Madison. Anora (preferred name ‘Ani’) dances at Headquarters, hustling against rival dancers like Diamond, for drinks and private dances. One night. Ivan “Vanya” (Mark Eydelshteyn) shows up and requests a Rus ..read more

Did you know Donald Trump is in Paris Is Burning? No, really: in Jennie Livingston’s seismic documentary on New York’s queer ballroom scene, an independent film about people at the margins, there’s an insert shot of a Forbes magazine cover: “What I Learned in the 80s” is the cover feature, and right underneath it, back row center in an illustration of various one-percenters luminaries, there he is, in between check-ins with Willi Ninja and Venus Xtravaganza. When Trump was elected President of the United States in 2016, so much of American culture became retrospectively seeded with Easter egg ..read more

The phrase “drastic departure” doesn’t even begin to do justice to the gear-shift undertaken by Matthew Rankin from his debut feature The Twentieth Century — a screwloose alternative history lesson about Canada’s most masturbation-obsessed Prime Minister — to his unexpected sophomore effort, Universal Language. Mounted on soundstage labyrinths of surrealistic geometric design, the former may well have come to us from a distant planet; as a studious homage to Iranian New Wave form-breakers that uses sparser elements of style to collapse the distance between Winnipeg and Tehran, the latter’s or ..read more

Mark Dindal’s The Garfield Movie opens on some stealth advertising for an invented junk food delivery service. Its dramatic climax includes a major callback to said service, making a gag out of the fact that soon we’ll probably have drones delivering our greasy vittles. Hopefully young, easily-influenced children and their more discerning parents will be able to see through the film’s out-and-proud sales-oriented supertext, but you’d be right to have generational health concerns when witnessing a scene focused on cheese string art. But maybe when we’re talking about the famously slovenly, sn ..read more

It’s become a cliché to say that David Cronenberg’s The Fly remains one of the most heartbreaking films of the 1980s, a film which culminates in an investigative journalist having to put down her scientist boyfriend for being too overzealous with his toys. With his ruminative latest, The Shrouds, Cronenberg once more makes a play for the heartstrings in what must be of the most nakedly moving and revelatory films within his canon. There is, of course, a lot of ironic levity too, as seen in an opening sequence where melancholy widowed tech magnate, Karsh (Vincent Cassell, made up to look exact ..read more

Having premiered at Sundance and played the Berlinale at the top of the year, India Donaldson’s Good One is the only title at this year’s edition of Cannes, across all competitions and sidebars, to have played at another festival. Her ultra-naturalistic feature debut finds 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) collating her essential gear for a three-day camping trip with her father Chris (James Le Gros), his recently divorced best friend Matt (Danny McCarthy), and his teenage son Dylan, who backs out of the trip just as they intend to depart. The generational divide is discernable from the get-go ..read more