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.
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.
