Ben Flanagan

By the time Franco joins together strands that the audience will most likely have seen coming, ‘New Order’ grinds to a halt.

This fascinating vérité film about a Las Vegas watering hole and its patrons blurs the lines between fact and fiction to ingenious effect.

Chaitanya Tamhane helms this quiet drama about a musician whose attempt to master his instrument is upended by a changing world.

Brandon Cronenberg is deeply confused.

Many British micro-productions focus on Britain’s mud. ‘Rose’ shows us the frost.

The Intruder’ interpolates the parts of Giallo without the scares, keeping true to the genre’s more strictly crime-oriented titles like ‘The Cat o’ Nine Tails'.

This year’s London Film Festival shorts programme was a win for accessibility, even if the shorts were up and down in quality. Here are 6 favorites.

What links together Joe Exotic and Michael Jordan? 2020’s two larger-than-life documentary stars are charismatic products of celebrity culture, whose stranger-than-fiction stories focus on one person’s herculean rise/fall/rise chronicle. Their nostalgic tales are fed to viewers through Netflix, the streaming service that has arguably given “Documentary” a new cultural cache, even if the form seemed already u...

Matthieu Kassovitz's monochrome masterpiece, a call to arms against police brutality, gets a fresh outing courtesy of a stunning 4K restoration

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet finally arrives in theaters, and only in theaters, after several delays as the first blockbuster of the Covid era, even as the pandemic rages on around the world. How apt, then, that the film distills existential and contemporary anxieties into its bloated and riotous spy-movie package. Here, time moves forward and backward simultaneously and the characters wear gas masks, wanting for a return to normality as nefarious forces seek to accelerate the destruction of the...

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‘[Welles] comes back from the grave, gives you a masterpiece and you groan.’
Nick Pinkerton, Film Comment’s Best of 2018 talk at Lincoln Center, 2018
If th...

The Space Theatre reopens this week with Thiasos’ Ploutos, a comedy as resonant in the shadow of Canary Wharf as in any amphitheatre. The venue is a rare untouched building in the Isle of Dogs, a suburb of new builds and flats that, beside the imposing city district in the near distance, gives one the impression of travelling back in time. In Aristophanes’ play, farmer Chremylos (Charles Sobry) has been instructed by an oracle to take the first man he sees home to Greece. The blind beggar (Oe...

The Last Five Years at the Southwark Playhouse is uniformly inventive and has lost no spark since its initial run was cut short in March when theatres shut.

What begins as a rather serviceable thriller from Dutch filmmaker Paula van der Oest goes awry when it tries to tackle serious topics.

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