Patrick Ball

2021 was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s year. After making one of the best films of the last decade in Happy Hour (2015), a five-hour drama of…

For what might seem a self-centred genre, the best coming-of-age stories have always included a profound social element. After all,…

Paul Schrader makes good movies. He also makes movies that are almost invariably about the bad feelings of damaged men, from Taxi Driver…

Frank Herbert’s psychedelic sci-fi novel Dune has a long history with adaptation. The first attempt to put it on film was in 1975, when the…

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.

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…

The afterimages of violence circulate through multiple worlds in Birds of Passage, the newest film from the Oscar-nominated Embrace of the…

The winner of the Audience Award at last year's Sheffield Doc/Fest, Minding The Gap is a stunning, heartfelt and candid chronicle of the…