Patrick Ball

This trio of short stories approaches the heights of Happy Hour. It's also far more affecting and closely felt than Drive My Car, while clocking in at a comparatively slim two hours.

The latest film from obvious-genius auteur Paul Thomas Anderson is sweet, charming, fun but also undeniably strange, even queasy.

A good-looking, well-wrought, surprisingly snappy noir thriller not marred by the delusional exceptionalism that usually accompanies American movies about American atrocities.

Religion, colonialism, space-oil – this is big and serious stuff. And while Denis Villeneuve could never be accused of being too ironic, in Dune his earnestness finally works.

The synopsis makes it sound like an arthouse parody of John Wick – but Pig is also a serious and meditative film about our relation to food, grief and each other.

Returning after a Covid hiatus, projects like Orange Cheesecake allow creative expression to be shared between different communities that might – especially at the moment – have little contact with each other.

It’s a testament to Sheffield DocFest’s curators that so many of the documentaries shown this year turned the camera toward liberation, in all corners of the world, says Patrick Ball in his write-up of the festival.

Still serving as inspiration for films and video games, in some ways the afterlife of Kinji Fukasaku’s 2000 cinematic masterpiece is no surprise.

Archivist documentarian Adam Curtis returns with ‘An Emotional History of the Modern World’, an attempt to chart how we came to be ruled by machine intelligences and blood-and-soil idiocies.

In many ways new ground for director Josephine Decker, Shirley is also unmistakably hers, exploring unspeakable horror and strained man-woman interactions which conjure spectres.

By Japanese director Sion Sono’s standards, this film-about-film is restrained. It’s also egalitarian, moving – and one of the best of 2020.

Garrett Bradley’s tender and emotional documentary explores the unthinkable loss of long-term incarceration in America’s racist prison system.

The giant divine moth, who would later share the screen with Godzilla, returns with a Blu-ray re-release of her first cinematic appearance in 1961.

Even taken purely as fiction, the latest film by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin is a mess of cognitive dissonance, a film profoundly at odds with itself.

A serious, impressively committed and entirely wordless indie horror about humans being hunted and slaughtered by other animals.

Screened as part of Spirit of Independence micro-budget film festival, Like avoids the pitfalls of the ‘found footage’ genre to comment on social media, performance and human relationships.

Something like Joker was inevitable. With the superhero genre having long since conquered contemporary cinema, it was only a matter of time…

Bait is a film about a familiar and very contemporary conflict: the locals of a tiny Cornish fishing village being squeezed out by an…

The set-up of The Farewell could be that of a straightforward melodrama or dark comedy. Billi (Awkwafina), a struggling writer in New York,…

Art-weird cinema tackles the zombie film in The Dead Don't Die, a shaggy, near-meaningless and characteristically deadpan half-parody from…