Stephanie Bunbury

The 2025 Venice Film Festival got underway on Wednesday, August 27 with Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s latest La Grazia, kicking off an 82nd edition that includes films starring the likes of George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Idris Elba, Jacob Elordi, Cate Blanchett, Emily Blunt, Tony Leung, Oscar…

Beautiful, elusive and peppered with provocative nuggets about the nature of life and our place in it, Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi's Silent Friend is the Venice Film Festival's parting gift to all those who have lasted the distance. Festival press shorthand has dubbed it "the tree film" — its…

Right from the first turn of the ignition, director Potsy Ponciroli lets us know that the things we might expect of an action film set in '70s Detroit are exactly the things he intends to deliver. A stream of gas-guzzling sedans, a neon motel sign, a load of sawn-off shotguns (remember them?) and a…

Few minds could be less masterly, you might think, than the stoner sponge between the ears of J.B. (Josh O'Connor), who, in Kelly Reichardt’s Cannes-closer The Mastermind, conceives a plan to steal four paintings from the art gallery that is the chief weekend haunt for his family. As his two sons run…

For nearly 50 years, the Dardenne brothers have been faithfully hoeing the same cinematic row; Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make films filled entirely with the kinds of people who generally pass beneath notice: people who struggle to manage their lives, who battle addictions, who are born poor and…

The 2025 Cannes Film Festival has wrapped following days of star-studded premieres, red carpets and dealmaking on the French Riviera. This year’s lineup included major Hollywood premieres including Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme starring Benicio del Toro and Michael Cera, Richard Linklater…

A textbook example of the difficult follow-up album — or feature film, in this instance — Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón's Romería strains under the weight of her last film Alcarras, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2022, was then invited to 90 more festivals and was as close to a perfect…

Once again, French director Julia Ducournau takes us into the lower depths. Four years after winning the Palme d'Or with her extraordinary Titane – in which humans and cars fused with grinding, crunching erotic energy – she returns to the Cannes Film Festival competition with Alpha, a film just as…

In the midst of a society that, as we are told by one of the characters in Chie Hayakawa's Renoir, is characterized by diligence and modesty, young Fuki Okita (Yui Suzuki) is living on instinct and imagination. Her father (Lily Franky, familiar from the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda) is in hospital…

As an actor, Kristen Stewart brings a restlessly kinetic energy to every role she plays; even when still, she still seems to be vibrating with her own intensity. As a director, she infuses The Chronology of Water – an adaptation of an impressionistic memoir by cult writer Lidia Yuknavitch, screening…

Sometimes, the stacks of paper on Inspector Bertrand's desk pile up so perilously that it look as if she is about to disappear under an avalanche of files; her computer screen is like a retaining wall, with the thin, ferrety inspector burrowed in behind it. Stéphanie Bertrand's (Léa Drucker) job…

The Berlin Film Festival kicked off its 75th anniversary edition February 13 with the opening-night world premiere screening of The Light, Tom Tykwer’s politically charged film that takes stock of German society in the first quarter of the 21st century. It starts 11 days of debuts including for…