In the 1820s, a taciturn loner and a Chinese immigrant team up on a dangerous scheme to steal milk from the wealth landowner’s prized Jersey cow. Depicting the peculiar rhythms of daily living in rural America, First Cow is a tender, meticulous and affecting take on new beginnings and male friendship.
In 1990s Scotland, a group of Catholic school girls get an opportunity to go into Edinburgh for a choir competition, but they’re more interested in drinking, partying and hooking up than winning. An affectionate, hilarious and honest exploration of sexuality, pregnancy, class difference and the tumultuous path of true friendship.
Director Edgar Wright’s documentary is a musical odyssey spanning five weird and wonderful decades with brothers Ron and Russell Mael, celebrating the inspiring legacy of Sparks – your favourite band’s favourite band.
On a fictional remote Scottish island, gifted young musician Omar and his fellow Syrian asylum seekers endure a puzzling cultural-awareness lesson from an oddball pair of locals. Separated from home and family and burdened by the weight of his grandfather’s oud, which he has carried all the way from his homeland, Omar waits in limbo for others to decide his future.
Based on the eponymous novel by Yasmina Khadra and directed as an animated drama by Zabou Breitman and Éléa Gobbé-Mévellec , The Swallows of Kabul portrays life under Taliban control in the Afghan capital. Violence is neither fetishised nor sanitised. The directors portray a regime that relentlessly and sadistically castigates females and suggests that women are less worthy than men and is even more heartbreakingly pertinent under current circumstances.
This sumptuous costume epic evokes the unique rapport between a French missionary (played by Melvil Poupaud) and the Manchurian empress (Chinese super-star Fan Bingbing) whose portrait he is ordered to paint. The film recounts the feverish moment when the Empress meets the Jesuit painter … a moment when the electric relationship between the painter and his model is caught up in the constraints of the court and its rigid rules of etiquette.
In 1990s Scotland, a group of Catholic school girls get an opportunity to go into Edinburgh for a choir competition, but they’re more interested in drinking, partying and hooking up than winning. An affectionate, hilarious and honest exploration of sexuality, pregnancy, class difference and the tumultuous path of true friendship.
Henry (Adam Driver) is a stand-up comedian who falls in love with Ann (Marion Cotillard), a world-renowned opera singer, and the pair live glamorous lives in contemporary Los Angeles. However, when they welcome their daughter Annette into the world, her mysterious gifts change their lives forever.
On a fictional remote Scottish island, gifted young musician Omar and his fellow Syrian asylum seekers endure a puzzling cultural-awareness lesson from an oddball pair of locals. Separated from home and family and burdened by the weight of his grandfather’s oud, which he has carried all the way from his homeland, Omar waits in limbo for others to decide his future.
Henry (Adam Driver) is a stand-up comedian who falls in love with Ann (Marion Cotillard), a world-renowned opera singer, and the pair live glamorous lives in contemporary Los Angeles. However, when they welcome their daughter Annette into the world, her mysterious gifts change their lives forever.
This sumptuous costume epic evokes the unique rapport between a French missionary (played by Melvil Poupaud) and the Manchurian empress (Chinese super-star Fan Bingbing) whose portrait he is ordered to paint. The film recounts the feverish moment when the Empress meets the Jesuit painter … a moment when the electric relationship between the painter and his model is caught up in the constraints of the court and its rigid rules of etiquette.
Based on the eponymous novel by Yasmina Khadra and directed as an animated drama by Zabou Breitman and Éléa Gobbé-Mévellec , The Swallows of Kabul portrays life under Taliban control in the Afghan capital. Violence is neither fetishised nor sanitised. The directors portray a regime that relentlessly and sadistically castigates females and suggests that women are less worthy than men and is even more heartbreakingly pertinent under current circumstances.
The untapped poetry in the lives of ordinary people, leading seemingly ordinary lives, is expressed as high art in this gentle story of an aging woman who discovers the poetry within herself. Heartbreaking and inspiring but without an ounce of sentimentality, Yun Junghee’s memorable performance as Mija, whose life becomes ever more complicated by circumstances out-with her control, is as understated as it is powerful.
Director Pablo Larrain discards the standard biopic formulas and depicts a fabulously mythologised version of the great Chilean poet and activist Pablo Neruda. Told from the perspective of Neruda’s police antagonist, played sympathetically by Gael Garcia Bernal, the movie captures the spirit of the poet, his extraordinary influence on Chilean politics of the time, and fuses film noir with poetic fantasy.
To what lengths would you go to achieve fame? A pair of Scottish chancers relocate to the epicentre of the hip hop counter-culture and pass themselves off as a Californian rap group. Their cheeky antics are hilarious yet the film shines a caustic light on the illusory nature of celebrity and the gullibility of the suited execs in the hierarchies of the music industry.
