David Cronenberg’s glacial and oddly moving fetish thriller Crash turns 25 this year. But has its depiction of futurism and kink become dated, or does this erotic thriller still shock? “Slow down, slow down, not so fast,” a man moans. Not during sex — he’s in a car, and his driver is moving too quickly for his liking past a deadly car crash. The man has his camera poised; he is ready to take photos of the crumpled bonnets and…

What do fictional serial killer Patrick Bateman and I have in common, aside from an encyclopaedic knowledge of the musical ‘Les Misérables’? Our favourite film is Body Double. Despite its schlocky veneer, make no mistake: Body Double is a carefully crafted masterpiece that parodies and pays homage in equal measure. Sure, in American Psycho the violently deranged sociopath Patrick Bateman rents it 37 times. But in the same way that many mistake Bret Easton Ellis’ novel for anything…

How do you solve a problem like Paul Schrader? It’s difficult to think of a director with a filmography as varied in quality as Paul Schrader’s. Having penned the scripts for Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ and directed many celebrated films from First Reformed to American Gigolo…

Some may find the sweeping chilliness of Francis Lee’s sophomore feature too bleak, but consider this critic’s cockles warmed. Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet are devastatingly brilliant in Ammonite, forming an unlikely romance between a sickly young wife and a respected paleontologist. Though most take a little warming up to…

Thirty-six years after Stop Making Sense set the bar stratospherically high for the concert film, an unlikely duo has created an urgently joyous match. Spike Lee and David Byrne’s new venture combines the rapturous joy of Byrne’s music with Lee’s trademark style of confronting us with contemporary truths. The result is nothing short of wondrous. Especially in 2020, the words ‘American’ and ‘Utopia’ seem oxymoronic when put together. In his bid to Make America Great Again, President Trump has created a canyon of fear and loathing, whipping up racial hatred and contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands with his mangled COVID strategy-and that’s…

Erica Riva plays a traumatised woman drowning in the sound of her own nightmares in this De Palma-esque thriller. The Intruder is an unnerving Argentine thriller from Natalia Meta, that sets out to explore how PTSD can manifest itself in the wake of horrific events. Erica Riva plays Inès, a fortysomething woman who relies on her voice for work: she’s a voice actress for foreign film audio dubbing, as…

Supernova is an elegant, elegiac story of two soulmates facing the cruelty of dementia, with director Harry Macqueen crafting a mature, affecting story of galactic proportions. Every star in the night sky looks the same to me-glinting uniformly in the inky darkness, unthreatening in their anonymity. Would I find the night sky less beautiful if I was told that each tiny dot in the sky once had a face and a name? Would it matter if…

“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” This is a proverb quoted early on in Charlie Kaufman’s arresting and poignant new film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which spends most of its time under a flurry of snowfall. We’re not quite sure what the sin is. All we know is that the snow is inescapable, and things…

The three most-liked reviews of Captives on the film social network Letterboxd are pretty similar in their brazen horniness for Tim Roth. “this was absolute garbage but i want tim roth to spit in my mouth” reads the first. “MY BODY IS LITERALLY A HOLE FOR TIM ROTH I WANT…