Ben Flanagan

Tilda Swinton is exceptional in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's funny, mediative tale of an expat drawn to a strange sound in Colombia
It begins with an overture of silence, and then a bang. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a titan of the arthouse scene, winner of the Palme d’Or for 2010’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, ventures for the first time outside of his native Thailand to deliver Memoria, a film that’s as searching, meditative, and funny as any of his previous six features.
Jenni...

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi delivers his best film yet with this self-consciously epic, three-hour tale about a director and his driver
As a new day dawns, Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) hops into his shiny red car and drives along the highway to his next destination. As syrupy music plays and the opening credits roll, Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi sets us up for another one of his trademark dramas of mysterious self-discovery. There’s just one problem: we’re already 40 minutes into Drive My C...

Voice can be like a guiding light. It controls our eyes, tells us what to focus on or ignore, it reminds us that someone is behind the camera, making choices about what we see. The use of the voice as a narrational tool reveals the broad notion of the documentary form being an exclusive hunt for truth as a silly one. The imposition of narration is an unmistakable stamp of authorship and control. This makes way for the entrance of the raconteurs, personal documentarians who turn their truth in...

As the BFI launches a season dedicated to the works of the American auteur, Ben Flanagan offers a route into his highly diverse canon...
Although the filmmakers of the “New Hollywood” are often amorphously painted as big kids who used their toys to rally against the establishment, none were quite like Robert Altman. A little older than the likes of George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, Altman was a Kansas City native who cut his teeth in the era of live television production on programmes such as...

The British film industry is littered with has-beens, also-rans and couldn’t-get-theres, and there are few filmmakers who better encapsulate this curse than Paul Andrew Williams. You see, there are limited pathways for every auteur of these isles after their critical or commercial breakthrough: make a prestige drama (usually a period piece), make a comedy aimed at old people, direct television or retreat into the scuzzy world of the B-movie circuit. Williams’ debut London to Brighton (2006) i...

The great Isabelle Huppert stars in filmmaker Ira Sachs' handsome but emotionally inert drama about a terminally ill actress
Frankie, the latest from American filmmaker Ira Sachs, first premiered at Cannes 2019, though critics ignored it in favour of the flashier Parasite. That silence belies its commercial flavour. Across one day in Sintra, Portugal, the closest family and friends of a famous French actor, Frankie (Isabelle Huppert, of course), reunite. The luxurious surroundings cause them ...

An excellent 4K restoration of the ensemble drama brings greater clarity to the director's trademark overlapping dialogue
Bigger than any one person, bigger than its city setting, and almost bigger than the cinema screen itself, Robert Altman's Nashville is a towering ensemble piece that shows the failure of individualism to do more than ripple like the wind blowing across an American flag. And yet watching this divisive, almost three-hour 1975 film – back at the BFI with a new 4K restoration...

Director duo Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw offer up a gorgeous and evocative portrait of ageing truffle hunters in Italy
In northernmost Italy’s Piedmont province, the delicate Alba white truffle can be found in areas of luscious forest. This food is the black gold at the heart of The Truffle Hunters, first-time director duo Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s documentary meditation on ageing, tradition, and the changing face of capitalism. Dwek and Kershaw film the forest like a fungi, d...

Nicolas Pariser's look at French local government is really just a front for a middlebrow quasi-father-daughter relationship drama
Without fizzle, spark, or the hint of ideas, Alice and the Mayor, Nicolas Pariser’s follow up to 2015’s The Great Game, continues his observation of French political life, but strips it of any intrigue. The result is a drama that’s as flat as its overlit city hall setting. French cinema is often parodied as overly sexy and experimental, but this mundane romance of...

With Cannes 2021 now underway, Ben Flanagan looks back at the festival's most memorable filmic appearances to date...
What a wonderful dream is the Cannes Film Festival. To promenade on the Croisette! To toast festival director Thierry Frémaux from a Miramax-owned yacht! To queue for three hours to witness the latest Tarantino film, a fortnight before general release!
I’ve never been to Cannes, but like any self-respecting cinephile, I am not immune to two weeks of incomparable summer cinema ...

The great French actor gives his best performance to date in Quentin Dupieux’s loopy comedy about a man obsessed with his jacket
Deerskin’s path to UK cinemas – it was an audience favourite at the London Film Festival in 2019, and its country-wide rollout was pushed back (twice!) in 2020 – has been fittingly difficult for this bizarre shaggy dog story, a film that amounts to very little but is delivered with so much panache that it barely seems to matter.
The premise of Quentin Dupieux’s late...

An Ivory Coast prison becomes the setting for a tale within a tale in this atmospheric drama from writer-director Philippe Lacôte
Philippe Lacôte is Ivory Coast’s most high-profile filmmaker. Watching Night of the Kings, it isn’t difficult to see why. The writer-director’s intense follow-up to 2014's Run is one of the most satisfying films to land in UK cinemas this summer, a glimpse inside an African mega-prison that uses storytelling and physical theatre to interrogate its surroundings.
A y...

Winner of Best Film at the 2021 César Awards, Albert Dupontel’s screwball comedy stars Virginie Efira as a woman out to find her son
When the global pandemic wiped the majority of last year’s films from the release slate, the hope was that awards season would be opened up to a higher number of movies that veered from the beaten path. That didn’t quite pan out in the US, where the American fable Nomadland triumphed at the Oscars, but at France’s equivalent César Awards, Bye Bye Morons, a silly...

Phạm Ngọc Lân’s latest is an extraordinary study of landscape, built around a moody and reflective story of a young couple
Phạm Ngọc Lân’s soulful The Unseen River, the Vietnamese director's most accomplished work yet after a series of promising shorts, opens with a shot of water so black in its waves that depression practically splashes onto the camera lens.
Just as it begins to feel unbearable, we cut to a bold frame: two youths by the Mekong, which drapes them like wallpaper. These are the...

Egyptian writer-director Ayten Amin grapples with the relationship between teens and social media in this poignant coming-of-ager
Cinema, a reactive art that has always asked questions of truth, representation and reality, is now obsessed with our online lives. Recent blockbusters like Free Guy and Space Jam: A New Legacy celebrate the melding of our corporeal forms with binary code. Now Ayten Amin’s presents her own take on this phenomenon with Souad, an Egyptian drama that is so committed t...