This Season’s Films

Jodie Foster on career best form (and speaking fluent French!) as psychoanalyst cum sleuthhound Lilian convinced a patient’s death was not suicide. The film also explores Lilian’s own strange mindscape introducing a comic element. Most critics agreed Lilian was a...

When a new teacher joins the staff at a failing school in a community blighted by criminal gangs, he decides that unorthodox educational methods are needed to turn around the lives and aspirations of his students. He finds himself opposed by unmotivated colleagues and...

Set in a remote Cornish fishing village. Three decades before, the Rose of Nevada vanished at sea along with its crew. Its reappearance is embraced and gives hope to local citizens. Joining the crew is Nick, desperate to provide for his young family and Liam a...

An intimate experience of Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s rule. Lamia, nine years old, is selected to prepare a cake to celebrate the President’s birthday. In the era of US sanctions and in a landscape of fear and scarcity, Lamia sets out on a determined journey to the...

Wagner Moura stars as Marcela, a widowed technology professor who has found himself on the wrong side of the authorities during the 1977 Brazilian dictatorship. He flees to his home town of Recife hoping to reconnect with his son and flee the country. The city is...

A grieving widow, (Emma Thompson), travelling alone through snowbound northern Minnesota, interrupts the kidnapping of a teenage girl. Hours from the nearest town and with no phone service, she realizes that she is the young girl’s only hope in a race against time....

In an unnamed Chinese city, 15-year-old Tu Wei lives with his well-off parents. Dad is a biological scientist and Mum, a former flight attendant. Wei brings home his more studious classmate Yan Shuo, whose upbringing is decidedly less privileged. The Tu family...

There have been many films in the past with a dog or a horse as the leading character but this is surely the first non-animation picture to star a chicken! After escaping from a battery farm the Leghorn hen (played brilliantly by 8 birds) finds itself in a family...

A small-town private investigator delves into a series of strange deaths tied to a mysterious church. This second solo outing from Ethan Coen (as director and co-writer with his wife Tricia Cooke, after 2024’s Drive Away Dolls) starts as a playful, modern-day noir,...

Two blustery 50-somethings have an obsession: going for their last drink. One night, they run into Giulio, a shy architecture student, whose way of seeing the world and love will be transformed as the trio wander from bar to bar of Veneto. Sossai doesn’t...

An impassioned historical epic set in Palestine in 1936 when villagers revolted against brutal British rule. We follow Yusuf, a village boy, who finds work on a newspaper in Jerusalem and is politicised and radicalised by his experiences as he moves between village...

Shot in black and white, this haunting and visually arresting road drama is set in a Bradford car wash and its surrounding moorlands. A stolen watch and the tragic death of a co-worker see two undocumented migrant workers, Cristl and Yusuf make the fateful decision to...

Floria, a dedicated nurse, navigates the relentless pace on a surgical ward with unwavering dedication and warmth even though the shift is understaffed. Faced with fully occupied wards, Floria does her best to keep the ship afloat. Leonie Benesch (2023’s The Teachers’...

The eponymous Paris food delivery cyclist and asylum seeker has two days to prepare his story for a make-or-break interview to secure legal residency in this highly-rated psychological drama. Souleymane comes up against the challenges of an unjust immigration system...

In the 1930s, Brothers “Smoke” and “Stack” Moore return home to Mississippi after working for the Chicago Mafia. They buy a sawmill and a juke joint and use their experience as gangsters to ensure that their businesses flourish. Things appear to be going well but...

Returning to the rural village of Saint-Martial for his late boss’s funeral, out-of-work baker Jérémie’s stay with widow Martine becomes entangled in a disappearance, a threatening neighbour and an abbot’s suspicious behaviour. This dreamlike, enigmatic film is...

A dark and satirical thriller confronting Iran’s repressive regime and exploring the pros and cons of revenge. When Ebrahim has a minor road accident and needs to find a garage, the garage owner Vahid believes Ebrahim is the man who tortured him years earlier. He...

After 20 years away, King Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washes up on the shores of Ithaca, haggard and unrecognisable. He has returned from the Trojan War much scarred by the experience. His beloved wife (Juliette Binoche) is a prisoner in her own home, hounded by suitors...

At the peak of the Cold War a reclusive Swedish farmhand, fearing a nuclear holocaust, decides to transform his home into a fallout shelter for the community, using collected junk. Shot in ravishing black-and-white, and with very little dialogue, the film stars...

When a businessman arrives in a cotton-farming Sudanese village with two proposals, to modernise the local industry with genetically modified crops and to marry the teenage Nafisa, she becomes the focus of her community’s struggle for the future, guided by her...

Stoned revolutionary Bob (Leonardo di Caprio) is surviving off-grid with his spirited daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). When his evil nemesis Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, in one of his best performances for years) resurfaces and she goes missing, Bob scrambles to find...

After being fired, a man devises a unique plan to secure a new job and maintain his lifestyle; eliminate the competition. Directed with pristine precision by Park Chan-wook, No Other Choice is a wickedly clever takedown of the corporate rat race that finds a perfect...