Temporal Sensibilities: Queering timelines and nostalgia

In collaboration with the Queer East Film Festival, our second pair from the Emerging Critics cohort offer their thoughts on this year’s programme. This is the second of three pieces published in collaboration with Queer East Film Festival, whose Emerging Critics project brought together six writers for a programme of mentorship throughout the festival. Yuki Yoshikawa Dear … Read more

‘Rain Fell on the Nothing New’ Film Interview: Karlovy Vary 2025

“Arresting” seems an appropriate word to describe Hamburg writer-director Steffen Goldkamp’s feature film debut Rain Fell on the Nothing New (Regen fiel auf nichts Neues), starring Noah Sayenko in his first acting role. No pun intended! After all, the German movie, which world premieres in the Proxima Competition lineup of the 59th edition of the … Read more

F1 review – speed is king, subtlety is…

There’s no point in deny­ing it. No use pre­tend­ing oth­er­wise. By any rea­son­able met­ric or mea­sure, it remains a sim­ple and immutable truth: men are class. And yes, dudes do, in fact, rock. This is the most log­i­cal and self-evi­dent con­clu­sion to draw from F1: The Movie, a tur­bo-charged Dad Movie par excel­lence in which Brad Pitt’s star … Read more

The Decadent Splendour of The Great Beauty

This fea­ture is the sec­ond in our sum­mer series, La Dolce Vita: A Cel­e­bra­tion of Ital­ian Screen Style, in part­ner­ship with Disaronno. Not once dur­ing Pao­lo Sorrentino’s sprawl­ing urban sym­pho­ny, The Great Beau­ty, does Jep Gam­bardel­la (Toni Servil­lo) ever hop in a car. Walk­ing is the man’s only means of trav­el – an occu­pa­tion and a spir­i­tu­al imper­a­tive. … Read more

How Film Music Comes to Life: Inside Abbey Road

Stu­dio One’s recent ren­o­va­tions have added major tech­ni­cal inno­va­tions in the con­trol room. A 20-year old 72-chan­nel Neve record­ing con­sole has been replaced with an 84-chan­nel upgrade. With each of the play­ers or instru­ments miked indi­vid­u­al­ly, engi­neers are grant­ed even greater flex­i­bil­i­ty dur­ing the final mix­ing process. Hav­ing access to stems of each instru­ment gives the … Read more

“Life, Liberty, and All the Rest of It”: Reading…

Where Kaye, her ​“prop­er” WASP-wife ana­logue, is a blonde, col­lege-edu­cat­ed school teacher who (at least at the out­set) loves Michael uncon­di­tion­al­ly, embody­ing both famil­ial inno­cence and a ​“New World” kind of fem­i­nine con­sumeris­tic con­tent­ment (she’s shown buy­ing Christ­mas presents, orga­niz­ing trips, going to the the­ater, get­ting ready to set­tle down with Michael), To Die For goes out of … Read more

28 Years Later review – Danny Boyle is finally…

Like a rabid zom­bie with a wan­ton desire to gorge mind­less­ly on its prey, film­mak­er Dan­ny Boyle has got a bloody sweet tooth for nos­tal­gia late­ly. From pub­licly despoil­ing a cop­per-bot­tomed cult clas­sic for cringey call-back kicks (Trainspot­ting 2), to appeas­ing the ​“gold” radio crowd (Yes­ter­day) and refram­ing the punk era as a dress­ing-up box far­ra­go (TV series Pis­tol), he’s drawn … Read more