What if there was a pill you could pop that gave you superpowers? The only catch is that, while it might make you invisible or bullet-proof, it might also boil your brain or make you explode with just one hit.
Belgian filmmaking duo the Dardenne Brothers have long been darlings of Cannes Film Festival, winning awards for hardhitting dramas like La Promesse, Le Silence de Lorna and The Kid with the Bike. Their latest offering Young Ahmed is no different, a domestic terrorist tale which won them Best Director at 2019’s festival.
Like a sub-par Natural Born Killers for Gen Z, director-screenwriter Joshua Caldwell’s latest film, featuring Disney-child-star-turned-porn-director Bella Thorne, tackles the perils of social media like a parent trying to navigate TikTok.
Fate: commonly understood to mean the opposite of chance or, more narrowly speaking, a theological concept. Often synonymous with predetermination – an idea which might be used to justify a set of unfortunate or fortuitous events, whether you are religious or not – it gives a shape for Jorge Consiglio’s novel Tres Monedas. A poet and an academic, Consiglio wrote this novel over the course of a ‘single scorching summer’ in his hometown of Buenos Aires. It is a book that moves toward a vista of overlapping concepts, saturated by the desire to transcend the rigidity of circumstance.
Aged 87, director Mike Hodges is due another revival, with Flash Gordon soon to join this Blu-ray resurrection of 1989’s Black Rainbow, an atmospheric, enigmatic Southern Gothic which, like much of his work, was barely released.
Picture an antiquarian book dealer. Typically, it’s all Harris Tweed, horn-rimmed specs, and a slight disdain for actual customers. At the beginning of D.W.
Yoram (Menashe Noy), a vet in a Tel Aviv safari park, knows how to treat a sick jaguar (startling to see such a magnificent beast in an oxygen mask) but he has no idea how to comfort his troubled 17-year-old daughter Roni (a powerful Zohar Meidan). Both are mourning the death of Roni’s mother a year ago, but all they can offer each other is a tortured silence.
Have you ever visited a destination you saw on film, only to realise it’s not quite how you imagined? Filled with tourists, the scars of mass visitation, and caught between its own culture and staying commercially attractive. The Thai city of Krabi is one such location, made famous by such films as The Beach and The Man with a Golden Gun. New release Krabi, 2562, from festival favourite directors Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers, tackles these issues.