Author: The Reviews Hub - Film

Writers: Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer Director: Noah Baumbach What must it be like to be one of the most famous movie stars in the world? Does the world-wide adoration make up for the sacrifices you have to make to build and sustain a career; will there come a point where they ask, was any of it worth it? That question is at the heart of Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer’s new film Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney and many will search the film for clues that art is imitating life for one of America’s most beloved A-listers. Whatever hidden…

Writer and Director: Christian Petzold Christian Petzold presents an unusual doppelganger drama at this year’s BFI London Film Festival when a young woman becomes ensconced in a grieving family. A quiet study of the kindness of strangers, belonging and a need for meaningful relationships, Miroirs No 3 has a slow burn approach that hides its big themes among a restrained everyday domesticity in which no one says how they really feel but projects layers of expectation and hope onto people they hardly know. It cannot last, but Petzold make a compassionate case for understanding. Involved in a car accident during…

Writers: Mikhail Bushkov and Nastia Korkia Director: Nastia Korkia Nothing much happens in Nastia Korkia’s elegant portrait of a Russian childhood. However, the film’s long shots of summer life in a village are hypnotic, drawing the viewer into eight-year-old Katya’s holiday with her grandparents. While intentionally oblique, there’s still the sense that this will be Katya’s last summer of innocence. Set at the time of the outbreak of the Chechen War, the film begins with a car journey. Katya, sitting in the back, sticks a mirror out of the window, and she follows its reflection as it travels joltingly behind…

Writers: Ernesto Martínez Bucio and Karen Plata Director: Ernesto Martínez Bucio This Mexican drama is a little like an arthouse Home Alone. Five siblings must fend for themselves when their parents go missing. And after one of them steals a basketball jersey from the neighbour’s washing line, there’s a real fear that their house will be broken into during the night. Doors are locked, windows covered up with newspaper and piles of chairs act as barricades. The five children are not completely alone, as their grandmother lives with them too. However, she has mental health problems and believes that the…

Writer and Director: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit Those thinking of having children in the near future might want to steer well clear of Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s meditative study of a young woman approaching motherhood. Looking at the dot on the sonogram that resembles the foetus, Fren is undecided whether she wants to keep the baby. In Thailand, where abortion is legal up to 12 weeks, Fren still has time to come to a decision. So, when she gets home, instead of telling her husband the news, she hides the ultrasound photograph in a forgotten instruction manual in the cupboard. Ironically, the manual is…

Writer: Rowan Joffe Director: Edward Berger Addiction is haunting, a ghost that attaches itself to any individual who must try to exorcise it, certainly in Edward Berger’s new film written by Rowan Joffe, Ballad of a Small Player screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025. Set in Macau and giving a gorgeous vibrancy in Zoe Lee Tak-Nga’s art direction, the depiction of excessive luxury is immersively created as the central character, a gambling English lord, makes his way through casinos, hotels and the light and spectacle-laden streets of tourist Macau. Staged as a modern morality tale, Joff and Berger’s…

Director: Daniel Draper One of the most significant events in postwar history, the Miner’s Strike of 1984 has fundamentally shaped Britain today as the consequences of deindustrialisation and the failure to support regeneration projects in former mining areas has created an entrenched feeling of abandonment. But among the male-focused pain captured in popular culture, Daniel Draper’s new documentary Iron Ladies reveals the important role that women activists played in supporting and sustaining the Strike. This engaging 100-minute documentary interviews many of the women who were there and places their contribution in a lifetime of political protest, revealing the deep scars…

Writer and Director: Anuparna Roy The gendered experience of Mumbai is the focus for Anuparna Roy’s 80-minute drama Songs of Forgotten Trees that places a sex worker still pining for her lost childhood friend in a flatshare with a young woman on the hunt for marriage. The complex depiction of female friendship looks at the quite different morality of Thooya and her housemate Shweta, strangers bought together by chance in the city, over a period of months when a connection flourishes and cleaves apart. But writer-director Roy suggests that the outcome for both women at the whim of men who…