Fatima Sheriff

An American impulse for neat endings and recognisable stories gets in the way, but Rental Family is still beautifully written and gives little windows into Japanese life, from a Monster Cat festival to a rural diversion with breathtaking scenery, with Fraser’s endearing everyman as an emotional linchpin that viewers will love.

This is the best Marvel film in a while, but it doesn’t quite compete in the bigger leagues of the indie cinema it aspires to.

It has been a long production journey, but reaching the end of this winding yellow brick road has yielded movie gold.

No Other Land exemplifies the bravery and patience of activists and journalists. The occupation started over 70 years ago, and together, this unlikely pair capture its inhumanity with humanity.

My Favourite Cake is a slice-of-life film with considered dialogue and heartfelt performances that unravels a culturally specific repression, one that got the Iranian filmmakers banned from France and Germany to edit and promote this film, but also the more universal loneliness of the elderly who still have more life to live.

While beautiful, the impression left by Banel & Adama is confusing.

From a formal vantage, the fast-paced editing and hilarious zooms contribute to a sense of amusing anarchy, and as the graphic-novel-esque chapters unfold, Priya levels up like a classic video game character.

Romantic comedies are meant to be cringe-y and based on morally questionable conundrums, but James and Latif’s individual charms and dynamic is undone by the way their characters’ choices make them feel lost in a way that is completely unrelatable.

It’s a worthy subject confidently handled, but without a more textured landscape, Hive feels more isolated than it could be for the community its title refers to.