Locarno FF 2026 - Roma Elastica
Damon Percival - August 11th 2026

Among the more feverish films at this year’s Locarno, Bertrand Mandico’s Roma Elastica was difficult to ignore. It is the kind of film where almost every frame seems to be daring you to look away, following a French actress played by Marion Cotillard as she arrives in Rome to make a tawdry science-fiction picture. Set in 1982, Mandico treats the city less as a historical location than as a playground of artificial sets, sculptural bodies and cinematic debris, creating a Rome that seems permanently on the verge of collapsing into a studio backlot.

The film’s greatest strength is also its principal limitation. Every image has clearly been designed, but the accumulation of design leaves little room for surprise. Cotillard’s Eddie drifts through increasingly decadent encounters as drug use and professional exhaustion begin to blur her surroundings, yet the film’s deliberate artificiality keeps her at a certain distance. Even moments of psychological breakdown are presented with the same sculptural precision as everything around them.

Still, there is something compelling in Mandico’s refusal to distinguish between cinematic fantasy and personal disintegration. The unfinished interiors, severed sculptures and ersatz genre sets become extensions of Eddie’s own fractured state, even when the symbolism feels more carefully arranged than discovered. Roma Elastica is less interested in telling a story than in letting cinema consume its protagonist — excessive, certainly, but rarely anonymous.

Locarno FF 2026 - Far From the Trees
Damon Percival - August 10th 2026

Meritxell Colell Aparicio’s Far From the Trees was one of the quieter discoveries of Locarno 2026, but it was precisely its quietness that made it difficult to shake afterwards. Adela, a sound artist descended from Catalan exiles, travels through Peru recording endangered languages, accompanied by a local guide and translator. What initially appears to be a straightforward journey gradually becomes something more elusive, as voices, archival material and fragments of childhood memory begin bleeding into the present.

Sound is naturally the film’s organising principle. Adela is constantly listening, recording and replaying voices, and the distinction between preserving a language and preserving a person becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Colell’s mixture of 4K digital images, Super 16mm footage and archival material gives the film an unstable sense of time; the past does not appear as a finished period but as something continually reconstructed.

There are moments when the film’s elliptical structure threatens to become overly diffuse, particularly as the journey becomes more associative than geographical. But that looseness is also what gives Far From the Trees its particular character. Colell understands memory as something heard as much as seen, and the film is most affecting when landscape stops functioning as scenery and begins to feel like an extension of inherited memory.

London FF 2025 - No Other Choice

Raphael Allason - October 16th 2025

Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice was one of the films at this year’s London Film Festival that I found myself wanting to talk about almost immediately afterwards. Its premise is absurd enough to be funny — a recently redundant office worker decides that killing his competition might be the most efficient way back into employment — but Park gradually reveals something much more uncomfortable underneath the joke. Man-su’s descent is ridiculous, yet the humiliation driving it feels painfully recognisable.

The film’s comedy comes largely from the precision with which Park treats Man-su’s increasingly deranged behaviour. His murders are planned with the seriousness of job applications, while meticulous compositions and sudden bursts of violence turn professional anxiety into physical comedy. Yet Man-su is not simply chasing money. His job has become inseparable from his identity as a provider, husband and respectable member of society, making redundancy feel to him like an erasure rather than an inconvenience.

Park occasionally lets the satire sprawl beyond its strongest material, and some of the tonal shifts feel deliberately unruly. But that instability suits a character attempting to impose order on circumstances that have made him irrelevant. The film’s darkest joke is contained in its title: once the language of corporate inevitability has been accepted, almost anything can begin to look like necessity.

London FF 2025 - Ish
Raphael Allason - October 15th

What stayed with me after Imran Perretta’s Ish was how quickly its world changes. The film begins with two young friends, Ish and Maram, roaming the woods around their Luton home, building dens, eating berries and inventing their own rules. It is an unusually gentle portrait of childhood, which makes the film’s eventual rupture all the more affecting. After a police stop-and-search ends with Maram being taken and Ish running away, those same spaces begin to feel entirely different.

Perretta shoots Luton in striking monochrome, avoiding much of the familiar visual language of British social realism. The black-and-white photography gives the film the quality of remembered experience, while the natural performances of Farhan Hasnat and Yahya Kitana keep the drama from becoming overly schematic. Their friendship feels convincing because it is allowed to remain childish — petty, funny and impulsive even as the world around them becomes increasingly serious.

What makes Ish particularly affecting is its refusal to treat adolescence as a clean transition from innocence to knowledge. Ish does not simply learn something and move on; he becomes aware of forces he is too young to properly understand. Having attended Perretta discussing the film alongside its producer and co-writer, that tension between what the characters experience and what they can articulate feels central to its construction. The loss of childhood here is not a single event, but a gradual change in the way the world is seen.

Festival de Cannes 2025 - My Father’s Shadow
Raphael Allason - May 18th 2025

As a world premiere at Cannes, Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow immediately attracted attention for the historical weight surrounding its story. What compelled me to stay with it, though, was how little the film seems interested in treating that history as a grand event. Set in Nigeria in 1993, it follows two young brothers spending time with their largely absent father during the political turmoil surrounding the country’s disputed election. The crisis remains mostly at the edges of their experience, glimpsed through overheard conversations, soldiers and the increasingly strange behaviour of adults.

Davies keeps the camera close to the children, allowing Lagos to arrive in fragments: traffic, faces, buildings, noise and sudden changes in atmosphere. The performances of the two brothers give these encounters an unaffected quality, while the 16mm photography makes the city feel less reconstructed than remembered. Politics consequently becomes something the boys experience rather than understand, and the film’s most interesting tension comes from the gap between their limited perspective and the enormous events happening around them.

The episodic structure can occasionally make the journey feel more like a collection of memories than a tightly shaped narrative. Yet that looseness ultimately feels deliberate. The father remains partly unknowable, just as the political events surrounding the family are understood only through impressions. My Father’s Shadow is less interested in explaining the past than in recreating what it feels like to inherit it — fragmented, intimate and only partially understood.

Festival de Cannes 2025 - Nouvelle Vague
Raphael Allason - May 18th 2025

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague was always going to be difficult to resist at Cannes. A film about the making of Breathless, one of the defining works of the French New Wave, risks becoming little more than a very expensive piece of cinephile nostalgia. What makes Linklater’s version worth writing about is how knowingly it embraces that danger. Rather than explaining why Godard’s film matters, he recreates the strange, chaotic circumstances in which it came into existence and lets the process speak for itself.

Shot in black and white and populated by an appealingly eccentric collection of filmmakers and actors, the film treats cinema history less as an academic subject than as a group of people improvising their way towards something they do not yet understand. Godard wanders, delays, rewrites and disregards convention, while everyone around him attempts to make sense of what he is doing. The contradiction is neatly captured by Linklater’s own approach: a film about rejecting established cinematic grammar that has itself been constructed with considerable precision.

There is inevitably something slightly safe about the whole exercise. Breathless felt revolutionary partly because it seemed accidental, whereas Nouvelle Vague can never escape the knowledge that the significance of its subject has already been decided. But that affection is also its charm. Linklater is not attempting to make another Breathless; he is recreating the experience of watching one being born, and allowing his own admiration for cinema to become the film’s organising principle.

Festival de Cannes 2025 - Sirãt

Raphael Allason - May 16th 2025

There are few films at this year’s Cannes that demand to be experienced quite as physically as Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt. From its opening moments in the Moroccan desert, where bass from an illegal rave reverberates against the mountains, the film seems determined to overwhelm before it explains. Luis, searching for his missing daughter, enters this world almost as an outsider, and Laxe makes the viewer share that uncertainty. The result is a film that stayed with me less for its plot than for the sensation of having been somewhere genuinely unfamiliar.

Sound is the film’s great organising force. David Letellier’s electronic score is almost physical, while engines, wind and explosions constantly compete with the music. As Luis joins a group travelling deeper into the desert, Sirāt gradually leaves the conventions of the search film behind and becomes something closer to a spiritual road movie, with landscape and sound increasingly overwhelming character and dialogue.

That abstraction will inevitably test some viewers, particularly as Laxe withholds the emotional signposts a more conventional story might provide. But that refusal is central to what makes the film so affecting. Sirāt is built around a journey with no guaranteed destination, and its form keeps pushing us forward without offering the comfort of explanation. At its best, it feels less like watching a story unfold than being physically carried somewhere you may not want to go.