French auteur Jean Luc Godard’s films are not for all tastes. His approach and subjects vary wildly, some of his movies are undoubtedly revolutionary, some feel like intriguing yet pretentious film school experiments while political works like Sympathy For The Devil, which features the Rolling Stones, contains some insufferable polemic hectoring. Godard no doubt enjoyed infuriating some viewers but no
Read moreChloe Zhao’s Hamnet is a Shakespeare biopic of sorts that, on one level explores the story behind the Bard’s writing of Hamlet, possibly the most famous work of English literature but also deliberately displaces Shakespeare to the sidelines to examine the plight of his wife Agnes. Rather than retelling a famous person’s story, this is a stark, striking looking, but
Read moreThe charming, erudite but undercooked British film The Choral from director Nicholas Hytner and playwright Alan Bennett, is part of that subgenre of films in which music is a redemptive and healing force for a community. Like Brassed Off, the recent My Brother’s Band and The Commitments, The Choral features a group of average folks uniting and transcending their lives
Read moreNorwegian film Sentimental Value from director Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World) was one of the most lauded movies of 2025. This insightful, superbly acted story of family conflict, artistic tension and the toxic effect of long held bitterness mostly deserves the accolades although it will tend to appeal to particular filmgoers. Renata Reinsve (who starred in The
Read moreThe History of sound is an evocatively shot, wonderfully acted but slow-moving story of musical anthropology, grief, fragile identity and queer romance. Paul Mescal stars as Lionel Worthing, a young man from a dirt-poor farm in Kentucky who, as a musical prodigy, wins a scholarship to a Boston conservatory. There, in 1917, he meets musician David White (Josh O’ Connor)
Read moreThe Avatar film franchise, which depicts the battle between the giant blue indigenous Na’vi people of the planet Pandora and us greedy humans, holds the number one and three positions on the list of highest grossing films of all time. This is a remarkable feat that seems due to a combination of a novel science fiction concept (in this case
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