Little White Lies

Directed by ALFONSO CUARÓN Starring YALITZA APARICIO, MARINA DE TAVIRA, DIEGO CORTINA AUTREY Released 14 DECEMBER Let’s open on a question, a pretty hefty one all told: what is cinema? It’s sound and images and edits and actors, but what is its purpo

Picture your childhood home. How well do you remember it? The colour of the front door. The pictures on the walls. The shape of the kitchen; the way it used to smell in the morning. Every corner, cupboard and creaking floorboard. The view out of your

With Roma feeling like the creative capstone of an astonishing career, we take a look back at its maker’s diverse filmography, from sex comedies right through to space odysseys. While studying at Mexico City’s Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinemat

That sound you can hear is the South Korean filmmaking boom, still echoing around the globe. For lovers of cinema that’s politically engaged, formally challenging and still in its relative infancy, the annual London Korean Film Festival offers a boun

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For the truly expanded cinema experience, one simply must (re)visit Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in bed. I issue this proclamation from a place of fully absorbed experience, having both watched and expounded on the 19

In 1960, as it is today, Tokyo’s upmarket Ginza district was home to myriad swanky bars where well-heeled businessmen would entertain clients and amuse themselves with the elegant hostesses. Typically for the Japanese capital and its stacked-up urban

Shot in an 80-foot loft in December 1966 and screened for the first time the following year, Michael Snow’s Wavelength is a landmark of avant-garde cinema. Reviewing it in 1969, the American critic Manny Farber speculated that this 45-minute work, wh

The growing pains of adolescence can be acute no matter the setting. In Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut from 1999, The Virgin Suicides, a 1970s leafy Midwestern suburb is home to the five enigmatic Lisbon sisters. An exploration of teen obsession,

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a much stranger film than its cult status and influence suggests. Its formula is more experimental and sensation-focused than we may imagine when considering the iconic figure of the chainsaw-wielding Lea

Richard M Nixon (Philip Baker Hall) enters the plush, oak-panelled office of his New Jersey home. It is the late 1970s, five or so years after his resignation as 37th President of the United States in the wake of the Watergate scandal. After slipping

When I was young, I shared a set of bunk beds with my little sister. The secondhand pine monstrosity sat in the corner of our bedroom, covered in Pokemon stickers and felt-tip graffiti,for the best part of five years, creaking ominously and leaving d

My favourite living movie star is looking at me. We shake hands. His gaze is direct. His voice familiar. Five decades on from his role as the Sundance Kid, he may have aged, but those eyes and that voice are exactly the same. Robert Redford is in the

Directed by DAVID LOWERY Starring ROBERT REDFORD SISSY SPACEK CASEY AFFLECK Released 7 DECEMBER Robert Redford’s raised a lot of hell. Prison breaks, audacious heists, train robberies – in a career spanning 50 years, he has left an indelible mark on

From piquant comedies of social manners to hushed, psychosexual period pieces, there’s a particular flavour to films that prominently feature the maid’s uniform. The sartorial details are familiar to us all, thanks to fancy dress shops and the popula

Directed by HIROKAZU KOREEDA Starring KIRIN KIKI LILY FRANKY MIYU SASAKI Released 23 NOVEMBER Lily Franky is the kind of grown-up you would have loved to have known as a child. Impish, infectiously energetic and with a killer giggle, he stars in Hiro

Directed by BOOTS RILEY Starring LAKEITH STANFIELD TESSA THOMPSON ARMIE HAMMER Released 7 DECEMBER Capitalism’s a bitch. Cassius ‘Cash’ Green (Lakeith Stanfield) knows this. Twentysomething, unemployed and living in his uncle’s garage, he’s ill-at-ea

Who would have thought a film about the power of unionisation would be the toast of Sundance? Certainly not Boots Riley, who’s been trying to make his debut film, Sorry to Bother You, since he first wrote the script in 2012. A surrealist comedy about

Directed by YANN DEMANGE Starring MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY RICHIE MERRITT BEL POWLEY Released 7 DECEMBER Newcomer Richie Merritt stars as the titular White Boy Rick in a gritty and grimy account of the true events that saw his fall from grace as the young

Directed by NURI BILGE CEYLAN Starring DOGU DEMIRKOL MURAT CEMCIR BENNU YILDIRIMLAR Released 30 NOVEMBER Given that Nuri Bilge Ceylan is yet to celebrate his 60th birthday, it would be pre-emptive to describe The Wild Pear Tree as a late-period film

Directed by LARS VON TRIER Starring MATT DILLON BRUNO GANZ UMA THURMAN Released 14 DECEMBER There is something truly perverse about the idea that actors, as an essential part of their job, must be able to convincingly fabricate the process of dying.

Directed by JOEL COEN, ETHAN COEN Starring TIM BLAKE NELSON ZOE KAZAN LIAM NEESON Released 16 NOVEMBER It’s hard to imagine any other contemporary filmmaker(s) forging a path through such well-trodden terrain with this much verve and inventiveness –

Directed by JOHN MCPHAIL Starring ELLA HUNT MALCOLM CUMMING SARAH SWIRE Released 30 NOVEMBER Nailing the tone for a zombie apocalypse high school Christmas musical was always set to be a tricky task. Anna and the Apocalypse, from Scottish director Jo

Directed by LAURENT CANTET Starring MARINA FOIS MATTHIEU LUCCI WARDA RAMMACH Released 16 NOVEMBER This is the first film Laurent Cantet has made in France since his 2008 Cannes winner The Class, and a lot has changed since then. We’re post-Bataclan,

Directed by PAUL DANO Starring CAREY MULLIGAN JAKE GYLLENHAAL ED OXENBOULD Released 9 NOVEMBER A sense of trepidation always hovers when a young actor announces their intention to chance their hand behind the camera rather than in front of it. If Wil

Directed by YORGOS LANTHIMOS Starring OLIVIA COLMAN RACHEL WEISZ EMMA STONE Released 10 JULY Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos is an exorcist of cinema. He has the ability to remove the vapours of spirit from all those who dare step in front of his cam

Sandy Powell has more awards than you’ve had hot dinners. Okay, not literally – but she has a lot of awards, and deservedly so. She began her career in the best way possible for a budding costume designer: working with Derek Jarman. In 2009 she score

Directed by NATHANIEL KAHN Released 10 JULY This documentary by Nathaniel Kahn focuses on the vagaries and sometime cruelties of the art market right now. It deserves its title on the technicality that anything these days can be contemporary art. Coo

Directed by LUCA GUADAGNINO Starring DAKOTA JOHNSON TILDA SWINTON CHLOË GRACE MORETZ Released 16 NOVEMBER ‘Simulacrum’ is the single word that elderly psychologist Dr Jozef Klemperer (played by one Lutz Ebersdorf, a pseudonym for Tilda Swinton) write

Countless horror movies end with the Final Girl left insensible after a terrifying ordeal. For she has run the gauntlet of the cruel, the strange, the perverse, sometimes the supernatural and always the transgressive. In a film’s closing moments, we

Directed by JEAN-LUC GODARD Released 2 DECEMBER In a year of seemingly unmitigated horrors, there’s a perverse comfort to be had in the arrival of a new film by New Wave godhead turned cut-and-paste collage maestro, Jean-Luc Godard. And based on this

Directed by JIMMY CHIN, ELIZABETH CHAI VASARHELYI Released 10 JULY Alex Honnold is caught between a rock and a hard-on. He’s preparing to climb an egregious, 900-metre granite wall in Yosemite National Park, but his spoil-sport girlfriend, Sanni McCa

Directed by STEVE MCQUEEN Starring VIOLA DAVIS ELIZABETH DEBICKI COLIN FARRELL Released 6 NOVEMBER If you were to take bets on what Steve McQueen’s passion project would be, few would guess ‘a film based on an ’80s ITV drama about women carrying out

Directed by MIKE LEIGH Starring RORY KINNEAR MAXINE PEAKE NEIL BELL Released 2 NOVEMBER With the UK government locked in a self-perpetuating, seemingly endless dispute over Brexit, it’s fitting that Mike Leigh has chosen another calamitous political

Attempting to trace a pattern in the work of the great French filmmaker Louis Malle is a way to lose your mind. He is associated with the French New Wave, but never went in for all that self-aggrandising swagger. He worked across fiction and nonficti

San Sebastián is a city for romance. I arrived shot through with anxiety Then went for a walk down the River Urumea and was flooded by the mysterious sensations that beauty excites. Follow the river for long enough and you reach the festival hub, whi

There’s an escalator in the Scotiabank Theatre in downtown Toronto which seems to extend on indefinity. For two weeks in September it becomes the gateway to countless screenings located within the multiplex as the Toronto International Film Festival