Film

Perhaps one of the most inspiring things about Nora Twomey's Oscar nominated first feature animation The Breadwinner is how female it is in it all its aspects. Adapted from Canadian writer Deborah Ellis’s best selling Young Adult novel of the same name, and executive produced by Angelina Jolie, the film offers one of the most heartening stories you are likely to come across this year, and is further elevated by the simplicity of the means used to tell it. The...

“The stairs to our industry must be accessible to all,” declared Cate Blanchett as she stood on the steps of the Cannes Palais during the premiere for Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun. Below her stood 81 other woman from within the industry, representative of the number of female filmmakers who had walked that red carpet to see their film play in the Official Cannes Competition over the course of the festival’s 71-year history. By contrast, some 1645 men have...

I met Director Nora Twomey and lead actress Saara Chaudry to discuss The Breadwinner, an animation film set in Afghanistan under the Taliban, where 11 year old Parvana is forced to dress like a boy in order to work to support her family after her father is arrested. When did you first come across the story and what attracted you to the idea of making it into an animation film? NT: in 2013 my partners brought home the book from...

In 1993, Sylvester Stallone was going through, shall we say, a challenging period. He’d had a few box office disappointments. The Rocky series seemed to have played itself out with 1990’s poorly received fifth entry, and Stallone had attempted to shift into comedy, making disastrous choices in Oscar and Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot! The latter is one of Hollywood’s great practical jokes, as Stallone’s longtime box office rival Arnold Schwarzenegger pretended to be interested in making the film...

If someone had told me two weeks ago that the best film I would see at this year’s Cannes Film Festival would be a garish, blood-soaked exploitation thriller starring Nic Cage, I probably would have snorted at you with the sort of jeering derision reserved almost exclusively for certain members of the Cannes press corp. And yet, here we are. Directed by Canadian-Italian filmmaker Panos Cosmatos, this blistering rock ballad of a movie is the sort of euphoric cinema experience...

Nadine Labaki’s Capharnaüm isn’t a subtle film, but it’s one that will hit you hard. The story of a young boy navigating the slums of Beirut, it’s an idealistic but well-intentioned attempt to try and confront some of the pre-established socio-political structures within Lebanon; a country where you need a piece of official paper just to prove you exist. It begins, however, as something almost satirical. 12-year-old Zain (Zain Al Rafera) is in jail, convicted of stabbing a neighbour for...

Coercive Control - a form of abuse in a relationship that works not through physical violence but threats and other means of controlling a partner’s behaviour - only became a crime in the UK in late 2015. I don’t think it’s a commonly used description, or a crime, in much of the US, but Allure touches on it in some chilling ways. Laura (Evan Rachel Wood) is about 30 and works for her Dad’s house cleaning company. On her first...

Debuting at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where first time director Léonor Serraille won the Camera d’Or prize, Jeune Femme is a restless look at the turbulent life of its protagonist Paula (Laetitia Dosch). She is struggling to come to terms with a break-up following a 10 year relationship with a successful photographer and is ricocheting from one impulsive decision to another. We first see her attempting to break into the apartment of her ex-boyfriend Joachim (Grégoire Monsaingeon). Her efforts...

“It’s good to look at life again, through another lens,” we’re told about halfway through The Eyes of Orson Welles, Mark Cousins’ swooning love letter to one of cinema’s greatest pioneers. Many will know Welles most prominently for his iconic screen roles – as newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, or Harry Lime in The Third Man. While others will recognise his pioneering work behind the camera – the ‘Hall of Mirrors’ sequence in The Lady from Shanghai,...