4o3v2h

Heraldo relies on crime to get by, but when a hit goes wrong, he escapes into the darkness of a roadside sex motel to hide. The eccentric owner and his restless wife let him stay as long as he helps them out, but as they spend time together, emotions begin to bubble under the surface, hidden desires emerge, and a complex dance of conflicting feelings and secret agendas begins.

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Julie is a high school tennis prodigy who attends an elite tennis academy, but when the academy’s previous star player takes her own life, and the head coach is suspended, Julie’s world is thrown into disarray. A study in cinematic tension, this is a taut, delicate exploration of a character’s inner world as she quietly reckons with what has happened and what to do next.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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When a flood of biblical proportions washes its home away, a solitary cat must seek refuge with a motley crew of animals (including a dog, a capybara, a lemur and a secretarybird), who gradually learn to get along in this endearing, Oscar-nominated animation.

🐈‍⬛

Read more on the Curzon Journal:

Interview with Gints Zilbalodis.

A Short History of Cats in Film.

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The Fire Inside is the inspirational true story of Claressa Shields, arguably the greatest female boxer of all time. Claressa, a high school Junior from Flint, Michigan, aided by her tough-love coach, Jason Crutchfield, pushes past all limitations to become the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing. But even at the pinnacle of success, Claressa has to reckon with the fact that not all dreams are created equal, and the real fight has only just begun.

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From the reunited director, writer, and stars of Forrest Gump, Here is an original film about multiple families and a special place they inhabit. The story travels through generations, capturing the human experience in its purest form. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, screenplay by Eric Roth & Zemeckis and told much in the style of the acclaimed graphic novel by Richard McGuire on which it is based, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in a tale of love, loss, laughter and life, all of which happen right Here.

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Elwood Curtis’s college dream shatters alongside a two-lane Florida highway. Bearing the brunt of an innocent misstep, he’s sentenced to the netherworld of Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory sunk deep in the Jim Crow South. He encounters another ward, the seen-it-all Turner. The two Black teens strike up an alliance: Turner dispensing fundamental tips for survival, Elwood, clinging to his optimistic worldview. Backdropped by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Elwood and Turner’s existence appear worlds away from Rev. Martin Luther King’s burnished oratory. Despite Nickel’s brutality, Elwood strives to hold onto his humanity, awakening a new vision for Turner.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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When Layla, a struggling Arab drag queen, falls in love for the first time, they lose and find themselves in a transformative relationship that tests who they really are.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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In this fresh, big-hearted take on the classic coming-of-age fable, free-spirited teenager Elliott (Maisy Stella) encounters her wisecracking 39-year-old future self (Aubrey Plaza)—and can’t escape her influence. On the cusp of leaving home for college, Elliott is determined to have one last summer packed with good times and girl-crushes. To celebrate her 18th birthday, she boats off to a remote island with her best friends to trip on mushrooms. But just when Elliott thinks she’s not feeling a thing, she suddenly finds herself chatting with a woman who claims to be her literal “old ass” (Aubrey Plaza)—the person she is apparently destined to become in two decades.

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A beautifully delicate and nuanced concoction of a film, My Favourite Cake, co-written and directed by Iranian filmmakers Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, explores themes of love, regret and second chances with nuance and grace. It’s set against the backdrop of a country with strict rules and restrictions, especially when it comes to the rights and freedoms of women.

'Silencing Cinema - The Impact of Censorship on Art'
Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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Of the 80,000 native Irish speakers, 6,000 live in the North of Ireland and three of them became a rap group called Kneecap. This is the real-life story of how this anarchic Belfast trio became the unlikely figureheads of a civil rights movement to save and reinvigorate their mother tongue.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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The day after the US and Allied forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban immediately moved to occupy the Hollywoodgate complex, a former US base in Kabul. What they find, partially destroyed, is what the most technologically advanced military in history left behind. Over the next year, from the inside, the film follows their transformation from a fundamentalist militia into a military regime.

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What if the place you thought was safest suddenly became a battleground for your sanity? Young couple Hyun-su and Soo-jin are about to become new parents when, one night, heavily pregnant Soo-jin wakes up from a deep slumber to her husband’s first act of parasomnia. Debut director Jason Yu brings audiences a clever, well-crafted and genre-bending thriller.

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A tense, atmospheric thriller, Hounds is Moroccan director Kamal Lazraq’s impressive feature film debut set on the streets of Casablanca. It follows a hapless father-son duo who run into trouble after a kidnapping goes wrong and things go from bad to worse.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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Set in the 1980s, in the former Etruscian landscape of rural Italy, Arthur, a vagabond-type character, is mourning the loss of his love. A local ragtag group of graverobbers make use of his archaeological skills to find ancient tombs filled with artefacts, but Arthur uses the digs to search for a door to the afterlife, of which myths speak, where he imagines reuniting with her.

Read more about the films of Alice Rohrwacher on the Curzon Journal here.

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Marco Bellocchio's new drama follows the true story of how a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, was taken by the Catholic Church following claims that he was baptised by the family’s maid as a baby. While the distraught Mortara family fight to get him back, they find themselves at the epicentre of a wider historical battle between the forces of Catholic authoritarianism and the growing opposition movement.

Read our interview with director Marco Bellocchio here.

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Carla Nowak, a dedicated teacher, starts working at a high school when one of her students is suspected of theft. Idealist Carla decides to take the matter into her own hands, while confronting the structures of the school system and the consequences of her own actions.

Read our interview with director Ilker Çatak on the Curzon Journal here.

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A heart-swelling, hand-drawn delight that invites audiences of all ages to explore love and loss through its tender portrait of a new friendship. Part of the Official Selection of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, Oscar-nominated Robot Dreams is the first animated film from Pablo Berger

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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Set in the early 1970s, post-colonial Madagascar, the film follows eight-year-old Thomas growing up on a French Air Force base. But as adolescence grows near, he begins observing his parents and their circle of friends with new eyes, and childhood innocence slowly gives way to a more shadowy understanding of the hypocrisy and racism that defines ’s military involvement on the island.

Read our interview with director Robin Campillo on the Curzon Journal here.

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Nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor, American Fiction is a scorching satire of the publishing industry. Jeffrey Wright stars as a commercially unsuccessful writer who leans into Black stereotypes to sell books, to dismaying success.

Read the Journal interview with writer-director Cord Jefferson here.

Read the Journal article on Jeffrey Wright here.

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Spanish director Lois Patiño, who cut his teeth in experimental cinema, uses techniques from that world to astonishing effect with Samsara, bringing audiences a truly transcendental experience. Like a conversation held on the border between one lifetime and the next, Samsara is a meditation on the journeys we take upon the wheel of life.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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Fifty-something Sue (Maggie O’Neill) is now back on the dating scene. She meets a mysterious biker called Ron (Tony Pitts) at her brother's funeral and sparks fly. But when she meets Ron’s social-media influencer son Anthony (Harry Trevaldwyn), Sue finds herself in an increasingly surreal battle of wills with this ambitious teenager who is convinced that his dance troupe ‘Electric Destiny’ is tipped for stardom. Will she find the purpose and imagination to bring this little unconventional family together for a chance at happiness?

Leo Leigh on Sweet Sue - Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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An experience like no other, renowned director Wim Wenders creates an expressive portrait of one of the world’s most prominent and important contemporary artists, Anselm Kiefer. Having played as a Special Screening at Cannes 2023, Anselm is Wenders’ second foray into 3D filmmaking since the groundbreaking Pina (2011).

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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Moored on the banks of the Seine in the heart of Paris, the Adamant is a floating care centre that welcomes adults suffering from mental disorders. Using a variety of different approaches, they offer care that grounds participants in time and space, helping to keep spirits high on the path to recovery. The team that runs it tries to resist the deterioration and dehumanization of psychiatry as best they can. The film invites us to board to meet the patients and caregivers who inhabit the Adamant in their day-to-day lives.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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Estibaliz Urresola’s delicate debut film is a tender, heartfelt drama that follows an eight-year-old trans girl during an indelible summer holiday of self-discovery.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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A resonant adaptation of David Chariandy’s 2017 novel – with shades of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight – Brother ably wrestles with themes of memory, grief and regret. A film which never shirks the stultifying and deadly impact of racism, whilst nevertheless celebrating the joy and love that strengthen resistance.

Read our interview with Aaron Pierre on the Curzon Journal here.

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Forest fires trap a group of friends in their holiday home on the Baltic Sea, where romance and jealousies soon take hold.

Christian Petzold’s Silver Bear winner unfolds like a modern-day fable, imbued with a sense of transcendent wonder not unfamiliar from his previous work.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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Penélope Cruz stars in this gorgeous, involving melodrama which makes imaginative use of director Emanuele Crialese’s own biography.

L'Immensità, which premiered in competition at last year’s Venice Film Festival, is a vibrant tale of self-discovery that explores gender identity, mental health and turbulent relationships.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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ASHES OF TIME REDUX

Wong Kar-Wai’s martial arts epic was revisited into a Redux version, which premiered at Cannes in 2008 with new opening titles, soundtrack and colour-scheme.

A broken-hearted hit man moves to the desert where he finds skilled swordsmen to carry out his contract killings.

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Fatima-Zahra and her devoted but defiant son Selim are living on the poverty line, hustling for survival. Their close – albeit warped – bond is tested when Selim discovers a painful truth about his past, setting the duo on a path they can’t turn back from. An acutely observed domestic tale of love, identity and belonging, this exceptional film interrogates the strictures of Moroccan society on the disenfranchised.

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Nobel Laureate and internationally acclaimed writer Annie Ernaux transforms her home movies into a fascinating exploration of self and family life.

The Super 8 Years is a record of lives lived between 1972 and 1981. Annie Ernaux, working with her son David, has drawn together footage that was mostly shot by her ex-husband (and David’s father) Philippe. It’s a detailed of domestic family life, at home and abroad, while also recording the period when Ernaux first became a published author. As a result, the film ultimately becomes a record of a marriage in a state of gradual decline, as well as the blossoming of her writing career.

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A womanising art dealer and a painter find the serenity of their Riviera vacation disturbed by a third guest, a vivacious bohemian woman known for her long list of male conquests.

A testament to Éric Rohmer's creative genius and an important contribution to the French New Wave momvement, La Collectionneuse is among the director's most celebrated films.

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Magali, a 45-year-old widow and winemaker, feels lonely in life. In order to help her, her friends Rosine and Isabelle secretly decide to find a partner for her.

An Autumn Tale is the fourth and last in the Éric Rohmer's Tales of Four Seasons series.

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Recent graduate Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) meets three women while on a holiday in northwestern and falls in love with all them. However, he realises that he must choose one from among them before things get too bad.

This is the third film in Éric Rohmer's Tales of Four Seasons series.

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A woman (Charlotte Véry) has an affair with her boss (Michel Voletti) and a librarian but longs for the man (Frédéric van den Driessche) she met five years ago.

Éric Rohmer's 1992 title is the second instalment of the Tales of Four Seasons series.

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Natacha, a pianist, invites Jeanne, a philosophy teacher, to stay over at her house and narrates the story of her missing necklace. Later, Jeanne meets Natacha’s father and strikes a chord with him.

Éric Rohmer's first instalment of the Tales of Four Seasons series.

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Writer-director Carolina Cavalli’s darkly comic feature debut, which received its world premiere at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, is a deliciously satirical character study of a twentysomething looking for purpose… and maybe also a friend.

Read the interview with Carolina Cavalli on the Curzon Journal here.

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King Arthur learns about his wife's, Queen Guinevere, affair with Lancelot, who at the same time remains loyal to the king, particularly after Arthur's traitorous nephew Mordred commits an attempt on his life.

Lancelot du Lac remains a significant contribution to Robert Bresson's filmography and a thought-provoking exploration of the Arthurian mythos.

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A group of young people rebel against a decadent, hopeless society that is destroying the environment. Charles, an upright, twenty year-old romantic member of the group, is searching for the meaning of life. But matters of the heart added to his trouble coping with life cast him into a deep depression where death is the only release.

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Chie Hayakawa’s thought-provoking drama imagines a world where a country with a low birth rate and dwindling workforce takes drastic steps to alleviate the burden of it’s aging population.

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Newcomer Julie Ledru excels as a young tearaway with a ion for motorbikes who finds herself drawn into a local bike gang’s criminals dealings.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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The newly restored Three Colours Trilogy returns to UK cinemas in a new staggering 4K restoration.

Kieslowski completes his Three Colours Trilogy and indeed his career, with a tale of parallel lives and interwoven destinies, and draws connecting threads with the two previous films. Valentine, a Swiss model, runs over a dog belonging to a retired judge. She discovers that he uses his amateur radio equipment to eavesdrop on his neighbours’ phone conversations. He urges Valentine to denounce him if her conscience commands.

Meanwhile, a young lawyer studying for his final exams is unaware that his girlfriend, a weather forecaster, is unfaithful. The student and Valentine live in the same suburban street and each other daily but have never met. Their paths cross and re-cross in a weft of portent, coincidence and unrecognised sign. Red encomes fraternity.

Superbly acted, photographed and scored, it is the most complex film of the three and echoes distinctive grace notes which span an entire career.

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Find out more about the new restoration here

Hlynur Pálmason’s extraordinary third feature finds a Danish priest battling both locals and a forbidding landscape in 19th-century Iceland.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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The newly restored Three Colours Trilogy returns to UK cinemas in a new staggering 4K restoration.

Following ,Blue, White is the second instalment of Kieslowski’s ‘Three Colours’ Trilogy of the French revolutionary ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

White stands for equality (and much else besides) in a droll tale of fortune reversed for which Kieslowski won Berlin’s Best Director award. Three Colours: White begins in Paris where Polish hairdresser Karol is really down on his luck: impotent, penniless, and divorced by his glamorous wife. A lugubrious compatriot offers an unusual job and a means of returning home and Karol receives a rude introduction to the new Poland, where everything can be bought and sold. He swims with the tide, determines to become ‘more equal’ than others and plots his own form of revenge.

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Find out more about the new restoration here

The newly restored Three Colours Trilogy returns to UK cinemas in a new staggering 4K restoration.

Three Colours: Blue was an immediate success, winning the top prizes at the 1993 Venice Film Festival and unanimous praise from critics and audiences the world over. Julie (Juliette Binoche) loses her composer husband and their child in a car crash and, though devastated, she tries to make a new start, away from her country house and a would-be lover. But music still surrounds her and she uncovers some unpleasant facts about her husband’s life.

Slowly Julie learns to live again, as music and the gift of creativity prove to be a healing force. Three Colours: Blue is the first part of Kieslowski’s trilogy on ’s national motto: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

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Find out more about the new restoration here

Winner of 9 Goya Awards and based on real-life events, The Beasts sees Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs play a married couple whose dream of moving to the countryside gradually turns into a living nightmare.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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Felice Lasco (Piersco Favino) has lived most of his life in Cairo, but at the urging of his Egyptian wife Arlette (Sofia Essaidi), he returns to his hometown of Naples, which he abruptly left while still in his teens. His first encounter upon his return is initially bittersweet.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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Peter Von Kant, a successful, famous director, lives with his assistant Karl, whom he likes to mistreat and humiliate. Through the great actress Sidonie, he meets and falls in love with Amir, a handsome young man of modest means.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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A short piece of found film becomes a fascinating journey into the past in Bianca Stigter’s haunting and moving documentary.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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Ruben Östlund's latest PALME d'Or winner is an outrageous comedy that takes aim at the super rich aboard a hyper-luxury yacht.

Read more on the Curzon Journal here.

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The director of Duke of Burgundy and In Fabric serves up a delectable feast of art satire and black humour, seasoned with a little autobiography.

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From exclusive new releases to award-winning classics, explore our entire Curzon Film catalogue.

Curzon Film has released more Cannes Palme d’Or winners than any other UK distributor and is the recipient of multiple Academy Awards including Best Picture for Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, which made history in 2020 by becoming the UK’s highest-grossing foreign-language film of all time. In 2017, Curzon received a BAFTA in recognition of its Outstanding Contribution to British Cinema.

Visit our Curzon Film website to see our theatrical and home entertainment releases.

• Parasite
• Andrei Rublev
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire
• Stalker
• Memories of Murder
• The Handmaiden
• Paris, Texas
• Satantango
• A Separation
• A Man Escaped

...plus 511 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Step into the weird and wonderful world of Peter Strickland with our comprehensive 6-disc collection which boasts his complete feature filmography to date: Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy, In Fabric, Flux Gourmet, and Strickland’s debut film, Katalin Varga, available on Blu-ray for the first time.

Also included are more than a dozen short films spanning over 30 years of Strickland’s filmmaking journey, from his first forays into making music videos, to a brand-new short, Anglo-Hellenic, available for the first time exclusively in this collection. Many of these short films have never been seen before, and are newly restored!

Interested? Find all details on the collection and where to order on curzon.com

• Katalin Varga
• Berberian Sound Studio
• The Duke of Burgundy
• In Fabric
• Flux Gourmet
• Rising Within the Realms of Sleep
• Between God and Inspiration Lie Heaven and Hell
• Fall-Out (aq)
• Relapse
• Bubblegum

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Cinema has done so much to progress the representation of LGBTQ+ lives. This collection, available to watch on Curzon Home Cinema, entertains as much as it informs.

• 1985
• BPM (Beats per Minute)
• Ahead of the Curve
• Ailey
• All About My Mother
• Ammonite
• Anaïs in Love
• And Then We Danced
• Appropriate Behavior
• Bad Education

...plus 92 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

There are certain hallmarks you would expect to find in an Éric Rohmer film: sensuality, banality and infidelity. His insouciant style has become synonymous with the French romp, as evidenced by the seminal quadrilogy, Tales of the Four Seasons, which is now available to watch on Curzon Home Cinema.

• A Tale of Winter
• A Tale of Springtime
• A Summer's Tale
• A Tale of Autumn
• My Night at Maud's

With 7-disc 4K UHD Blu-Ray, the Three Colours Trilogy Curzon Collection 💙🤍❤️ includes Krzysztof Kieślowski's famed trilogy in a new 4K restoration, alongside 12 short films, bonus features and a 32-page booklet.

Check out the titles included in the collection in this list and find out more about its special features here.

• Three Colours: Blue
• Three Colours: White
• Three Colours: Red
• The Office
• Tramway
• Concert of Requests
• I Was a Soldier
• Factory
• Hospital
• Seven Women of Different Ages

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

As the protagonist of Curzon Film’s latest release Nostalgia learns, sometimes you have to look back to move forward. The titles featured in this collection all share that specific, bittersweet feeling of reminiscing memories.

• Nostalgia
• Memories of My Father
• Monsoon
• This House
• 45 Years
• Memory Box
• Waltz with Bashir
• Aftersun
• The Wife
• The Levelling

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From fleeting romances to long-suffering marriages, we have assembled 50 of the greatest romances in cinematic history... and they are all available to watch on Curzon Home Cinema right now.

• Two of Us
• Mauvais Sang
• Compartment No. 6
• What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
• Wuthering Heights
• The Handmaiden
• Paris, 13th District
• Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
• God's Own Country
• Monsoon

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Our new authoritative 22-disc collection encomes the 50-year career of award-winning filmmaker Wim Wenders.

Interested? Find all details on the collection and where to order on curzon.com

Alongside his masterpieces Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, the collection features his electrifying debut The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, his classic road movie trilogy (Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move and Kings of the Road), the director’s cut of Until the End of the World and the acclaimed documentaries Buena Vista Social Club, Pina and The Salt of the Earth. The collection also features a wealth of extras, an illustrated booklet, film posters and four Polaroid images shot by the filmmaker.

• The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
• The Scarlet Letter
• Alice in the Cities
• Wrong Move
• Kings of the Road
• The American Friend
• Lightning Over Water
• The State of Things
• Paris, Texas
• Tokyo-Ga

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

By Laura Venning

As recognisable as his penchant for symmetrical framing, whip-pans and French pop songs from the 1960s are Wes Anderson’s deeply flawed fathers and the families that endure their bad behaviour. From Dignan (Owen Wilson) haplessly looking to career criminal Mr Henry (James Caan) for paternal approval in 1996’s Bottle Rocket, to the grief-fuelled hostility between Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) in 2023’s Asteroid City, fathers and families, whether made up of blood relatives, colleagues or companions, are at the core of the director’s work.

In The Phoenician Scheme Anderson crafts another imperfect patriarch. Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) is an eccentric business tycoon – and the father of 10 children – with a knack for surviving plane crashes. And yet in this latest entry in the Anderson oeuvre the director turns his gaze away from fathers, sons and brothers towards the relationship between a father and daughter. Anderson had previously only touched on this dynamic, and this shift of focus can probably be credited to him becoming the father to a daughter in 2016.

Read the article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Yasmin Omar

In 1986, at the age of 61, the blue-eyed heartthrob Paul Newman reprised his iconic role as the hustling pool player ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson for the legacy sequel The Color of Money. By this time, Newman had settled into the old-man phase of his career, slackening his youthful vitality and allowing himself to appear past his prime. The text of the movie demarcates this shift, with Eddie being outmanoeuvred by a smart-mouthed young buck. That young buck was Tom Cruise. Now a year older than Newman was in ’86, Cruise has resolutely refused to transition into Fast Eddie parts. In Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning he plays the heroic, world-saving spy Ethan Hunt – who’s supple enough to pummel his adversaries, astute enough to foil their evil plans – for the eighth time. It’s also the last time.   

The closing film in any franchise carries a lot on its shoulders. It must consolidate the legacy of the series as a whole, and The Final Reckoning wears this responsibility heavily. The stakes have never been higher. The Entity, the sentient AI that was the big bad of the previous instalment, has spent the ensuing two months wreaking immense global havoc, resulting in martial law and civilian distrust of technology. The AI has been taking control of each nation’s nuclear-weapons cache one by one – as indicated by several alarming shots of flag-emblazoned warheads poised to attack – and is plotting the annihilation of the human race. The mission Ethan and his team have chosen to accept is finding The Entity’s original source code to bring it down. Their chances of success are estimated at one in a trillion.   

Read the full review on the Curzon Journal here.

By Billie Walker

We are experiencing masked-killer fatigue in horror films. Halloween was resuscitated, then buried once more. Texas Chainsaw Massacre returned for a brief stint. There seems no end in sight for Scream, and in a few months we’ll see the return of I Know What You Did Last Summer’s veiled avenger. 

These slashers hinge on masked psychopaths, who (with the exception of Scream’s revolving killers) gained an unspoken immortality when they returned to reboot franchises, which made the new movies feel all too familiar. At the turn of the century, however, James Wong’s Final Destination (2000) was designed to offer something different: the feeling of being stalked by a malevolent presence without the need for a masked man. In the absence of a killer, the franchise amplified a universal dread – death itself.  

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Miriam Balanescu

In Andrew Ahn’s tender, contemporary reworking of the 1993 queer cult rom-com The Wedding Banquet, the path to happiness is by no means predictable. The gentle drama coaxes together not one couple, but two. It revolves around college best friends Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Chris (Bowen Yang), and their respective partners, who are each navigating what swapping late nights for settling down entails for them as queers: whether that be marriage, parenting, co-parenting, none or all of the above.

Ahn’s film follows a spate of queer rom-coms – mostly skewed towards male leads – which shook up the boy-meets-girl narratives that have long dominated cinematic history. 2022’s Bros was the first to be ushered in by a major studio, a story of two singletons who, falling in love, ditch their philandering ways. Single All the Way (2021), 2022’s Spoiler Alert (despite its unhappy ending) and Kristen Stewart’s Happiest Season (2020) put a festive spin on the light-hearted subgenre, and the likes of YA series Heartstopper (2022-2024) and Red, White & Royal Blue (2023) cemented the gay rom-com’s place in the mainstream.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Jess Bacon

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been without a core assembly of superheroes since the Infinity Saga, a slate that spanned 23 films and concluded in the two-part epic, Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). In Thunderbolts*, director Jake Schreier starts to rebuild the foundation of the vast franchise on five fallen heroes labelled ‘dejected losers’ and ‘tragedy in human form’. 

Long gone are the classic, morally righteous heroes like Captain America and in his place are Marvel’s new band of misfits, reminiscent of the Guardians of the Galaxy, though these antiheroes notoriously only ‘punch and shoot’ with little to no real superpowers between them. Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), a former Russian assassin turned mercenary, fronts the makeshift team that consists of the knock-off Captain America John Walker (Wyatt Russell); Ava (Hannah John-Kamen), the ghost woman who can walk through walls; Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), a semi-stable former warrior and current congressman; and Yelena’s adopted father figure Alexei – aka the Red Guardian (David Harbour) – a Soviet super soldier past his prime.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Amon Warmann

There is no musical score in Warfare, a visceral tale of an American Navy Seal mission gone wrong in enemy territory, co-directed by Iraq veteran Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland. The soundscape is instead dominated by the bleak, uncomfortable and punishingly loud noises of gunfire, bombs and the blood-curdling screams of men at war. 
As a technical feat, it’s an impressive achievement. We spoke to the film’s Oscar-winning sound editor Glenn Freemantle (Slumdog Millionaire, 2009; Gravity, 2014) about how he and his team helped to plunge us into the harsh reality of war.

AMON WARMANN: What does your job look like on a day-to-day basis on a film like this?
GLENN FREEMANTLE: It starts off when we have the first meetings with Alex, where we break the film down into lots of bits. They’re about making sure we’re able to get everything 100% real, how we’ll do it and where we’ll source the sounds. We figure out where we are each time, and then we talk about it again. It’s a way of making it the best we possibly can. Sometimes you’re not on it. Some days you look at it and go, ‘We’ve got to do that again.’ It’s a constant flow of thoughts. 

Read the full interview on the Curzon Journal here.

By Sophie Monks Kaufman

Movie stars have been working overtime so far in 2025, playing dual roles in a number of projects. The latest addition, in Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending vampire film Sinners, is Michael B Jordan as twins Smoke and Stack, whose personality distinctions are amplified by red and blue colour-coding. He is hot on the heels of Robert Pattinson confronting a reprinted version of himself in Bong Joon Ho’s playful and dystopian sci-fi Mickey 17. Elsewhere, Robert De Niro portrayed rival mob bosses in The Alto Knights, and Theo James had a blast as both a good and an evil twin in horror comedy The Monkey.

One actor playing multiple roles goes back to early cinema, however recent technological developments mean that, while success used to live and die on techniques applied during a film shoot – with double-exposure capturing differently styled versions of, say, Douglas Fairbanks or Mary Pickford – emphasis has now shifted to post-production, where digital tools are implemented to sell a trick vision.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Rógan Graham

In Joshua Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic musical The End, George MacKay plays Son, the isolated adult-child of Mother (Tilda Swinton) and Father (Michael Shannon), who was born into a luxurious bunker where he and his wealthy family have been living for over 20 years. They fill their days by rearranging rescued art pieces, practising emergency drills, building dioramas of America and writing the memoirs that will exonerate Father – who made his money in fossil fuels – to any future readers. When a vulnerable interloper arrives (Girl, played by Moses Ingram), the family's meticulously curated mythology threatens to unravel. The star of 1917 (2019), Femme (2023) and The Beast (2024), MacKay discusses the value of creativity, what his character smells like and falling in love at the end of the world. 

<h5>Rógan Graham: You’ve worked on a lot of films with original scripts. Is originality what draws you to a project">Read the full interview on the Curzon Journal here.

By Emily Maskell

They say the kitchen is the heart of the home; the commercial kitchen, on the other hand, has more negative connotations. In cinema, restaurant kitchens are ripe for drama and naturally heighten intensity. Temperatures rise, tempers flare and ambitions clash – while chefs scramble to get the perfect dish to the . Mexican writer-director Alonso Ruizpalacios knows this all too well, and embraces the chaotic nature of one such stainless-steel workplace in his nerve-shredding drama La Cocina. Like Boiling Point (2021) and Ratatouille (2007) before it, the film uses a stressful kitchen workplace to comment on wider labour, and interpersonal, issues. 

La Cocina is based on Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen – which revolves around a frantic lunch rush – but makes a few notable changes. Ruizpalacios relocates the action from London to a Times Square tourist hot spot named The Grill. He also translates the title, and much of the dialogue, into Spanish, and swaps Wesker’s continental European immigrants for Latin American and Arab chefs. These updates allow the filmmaker to draw attention to the failures of the American Dream, establishing a racial and linguistic hierarchy (with white locals at the top and immigrants of colour at the bottom) that reflects the United States itself.  

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Laura Venning

A 15-year-old girl darts around a deserted sports hall, a space as grey and unwelcoming as a warehouse. At first glance, she seems to be playing tennis under the glare of bright white industrial light, giving it everything she has. But there’s no sound of the ball hitting the racket, only the stamp of her feet and her grunts of exertion. She’s miming.

The opening moments of Julie Keeps Quiet, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, aren’t just visually arresting. They establish this young tennis star’s determination to win, not just through practising movement without a ball, but also by imagining herself playing well enough to win. ‘It’s so cinematic, because it’s like Rocky, it’s like you’re imagining you’re the king of the world!’ says writer-director Leonardo Van Dijl of his feature debut. ‘Through this miming performance she’s expressing what she wants to be.’

Read the full interview on the Curzon Journal here.

By Lauren Morley

Part of the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick's Cold War comedy classic, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1965), lies in its visual gags. There are the classic, standout images, including Burpelson Air Force Base plastered in signs that loudly proclaim ‘Peace is Our Profession’ as the base is thrown under Condition Red and ordered to fire upon anyone who dares enter; or nuclear missiles marked ‘Nuclear Warhead: Handle with Care’.

But there are more understated winks and nods everywhere you look: nameplates that reveal the mad General’s full name to be Jack D. Ripper, and show advisor General Buck Turgidson to have a folder labelled ‘World Targets in Megadeaths’. Kubrick frequently lets the camera do the storytelling, cutting between cowboy pilot Major TJ ‘King’ Kong's face, the code on the dashboard and the translation in the code book as he pieces together what they’ve been asked to do and what must have happened for that particular code to come in. It’s subtle, and allows for the different layers of the joke to hit at different times.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Victoria Luxford

Steven Soderbergh blurs the lines between love and duty in his slick spy thriller Black Bag, which challenges the perception of secret agents on screen. These operatives are often presented as infallible figures precisely because they’re unattached, allowing them to save the world without endangering a significant other (who could easily be exploited as a bargaining chip). However, an interesting wrinkle emerges when matters of the heart intrude on missions. They split allegiances and have the potential to destroy our central character – and the world at large. 

Such is the case in Black Bag. Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) and George (Michael Fassbender) are a married couple working for the same government agency. Despite being devoted to one another, they accept the rules of the industry and the secrets therein. This understanding is tested to its limit when George is asked to smoke out a mole with a deadly device – and Kathryn is the lead suspect. George remains loyal to his wife, which his colleagues find more problematic than noble. His attachment is seen as a professional shortcoming that puts the mission at risk. As the film goes on, the question remains: if she is the mole, can he be trusted to pull the trigger? 

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Ian Haydn Smith

The winner of five Oscars – including Best Picture – at the 2025 Academy Awards, Anora is the eighth feature by Sean Baker and third since his international breakout hit, the iPhone-shot, LA-set trans comedy Tangerine (2015). Like all of his recent work, Anora is a non-judgemental journey into the lives of sex workers. It follows Ani, brilliantly portrayed by Mikey Madison, a Brooklyn stripper who is drawn into the hedonistic orbit of Ivan (Mark Eydelsteyn), a Russian oligarch’s spoiled son. Alongside writing, casting, directing and co-producing the film, Baker edited it – a practice he has continued since his directorial debut Four Letter Words (2000).

The filmmaker made his first feature at a moment of seismic change in film technology. ‘The film was stuck in a strange time between analogue and digital. Half of it was edited on a Steenbeck [an analogue flatbed editing system]. It was taking so long that we ended up completing the film on Avid [the industry standard for digital editing]. That change opened my eyes. I’m glad I had access to analogue editing, but I never want to repeat that process. I think the best part of our digital revolution is how it transformed post production. Nonlinear digital editing changed everything in of speed and the choices one can make.’

Read the full interview on the Curzon Journal here.

By David Opie

Nothing is off limits for South Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho. That’s true of the violence depicted throughout each of his movies, yes, but it’s even more true of the humour that comes with it. Despite the plethora of genres he’s explored over the past three decades, Bong’s work as a writer and director is instantly recognisable thanks to his savagely wicked funny bone. Falls, especially, seem to tickle him no end. No one is safe from face-planting to the floor in his movies, whether a well-meaning father is looking for his kid (The Host, 2006) or a mutant super pig is smashing its way through Daiso (Okja, 2017).

The pull of gravity is truly inescapable in Bong’s universe, yet it’s his latest space-set adventure, on a ship where gravity is technically non-existent, that his love for pratfalls and slapstick comedy as a whole shines through most. And crucially, it’s not just included for laughs either.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Billie Walker

Throughout the 20th century, various totalitarian regimes controlled countries across the world, and cinema has been a conduit to examine these governments’ crimes against their people. In the case of Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), a Frankenstein tale becomes a cloak to explore the realities of Spain’s Franco regime. Erice’s masterpiece is not alone in using gothic fairy tales and distant-future settings to critique those in political power (2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth and 1985’s Brazil, respectively, do the same). Guillermo del Toro’s use of fairy tales in Pan’s Labyrinth, however, isn’t out of fear of censorship: it’s a way of communicating with his predecessor Erice.

Today, with the privilege of distance and the clarity of time, cinema often prefers to directly depict fascist regimes: see The Childhood of a Leader (2016), Parallel Mothers (2022) and this year’s Oscar-nominated I’m Still Here. This political subgenre has shifted from the partial safety of metaphor to a face-on confrontation of the last century’s crimes. It also remains committed to analysing the lies and mythmaking that power state control.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Yasmin Omar

In the opening scene of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), the haughty human-rights lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) snaps: ‘I do not need a blind date, particularly not with some verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and dresses like her mother.’ He’s insulting Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger), the heart-on-her-sleeve publicity assistant he will be involved with, on and off, for over a decade. This character-assassinating comment (that she overhears) sets in motion a Pride and Prejudiced-inspired, enemies-to-lovers romance that, across three films, never persuasively makes the case that Bridget and Mark should end up together. A matchmaking algorithm in Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016) puts their compatibility at a woeful eight percent and, based on their rocky courtship, that seems reasonable. She’s likely better off with Mad About the Boy’s young charmer (One Day’s Leo Woodall).

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Ian Haydn Smith

Iman (Missagh Zareh) has a new job, albeit not the one he desired. Having long held ambitions to be a judge, he finds himself appointed to the lower position of inspector, responsible for interrogation and g off on punishments that sometimes seem little more than the whims of his superiors, even when their judgements are fatal. With his new role, Iman decides that his two daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), should finally know what he does – so unpopular is his position that public knowledge of it could place his whole family in danger. What he hadn’t expected, however, is for the two young women to be more aligned with the generation that desires radical change in their society, their opinions echoing the rising number of demonstrations on Tehran’s streets. This stark contrast in perspectives sets in motion the rapidly escalating conflict between Iman and his family.

The domestic drama of The Seed of the Sacred Fig plays out against the wider canvas of Women, Life, Freedom movement (or Jina Revolution) that spread throughout Iran in September 2022. It was sparked by the suspicious death in custody of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian who had been detained by the morality police for wearing her hijab too loosely. The demonstrations saw hundreds of protestors killed – and thousands injured – as the authorities attempted to crack down on dissent. In Rasoulof’s film, Rezvan and Sana have access to a VPN on their smartphones that allows them to secretly see what’s happening on the streets outside their closeted apartment. Their home becomes a prison as Iman’s rule in the household reflects that of his workplace, where he processes the multitudes who believe that Iranian women should no longer be oppressed. 

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Meg Walters

There was a moment in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl when I suddenly, unexpectedly, started to cry. The scene in question featured Jamie Lee Curtis doing a bizarre interpretive dance to ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ (1983). It’s a pivotal sequence in the film that likely helped secure her Best ing Actress BAFTA nod. 

Curtis plays Annette, an ex-showgirl now working as a casino waitress. Coppola lingers on Annette’s dance for just a little longer than is comfortable. In a single take, we see Curtis mount a platform in a brightly lit casino hall and begin to move in erratic, but deeply felt motions to the utter disinterest of the many gamblers around her. At first, she is merely an object of ridicule; Annette isn’t exactly your typical cocktail waitress, after all. Her skin is tanned to a dark leathery brown and bears the visible signs of ageing – lines, curves, stretch marks. 

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Laura Venning

As much as Hard Truths marks a welcome return for Mike Leigh, his first film in six years, above all it’s a testament to the extraordinary and undersung talent of Marianne Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh on screen for the first time since Secrets & Lies (1996). She’s a towering presence in the film as Pansy Deacon, a middle-aged woman so frightened by intimacy that she deliberately repels those around her with unrelenting hostility.

In the first half of the film, Pansy’s misanthropy is played mostly for bitter laughs as she grumbles about the absurdities of her suburban London life. She unleashes some very funny diatribes, including a dinner-table rant about baby clothes with pockets (‘What’s it gonna keep in its pocket? A knife?’). But as the film progresses the humour collapses, giving way to piercing, profound observations about the human condition. Only her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) seems to have any sense of how vulnerable she really is, and offers her a place of real love and acceptance.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Sophie Monks Kaufman

Bob Dylan is a white whale of a subject. The 83-year-old, born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, is a mercurial figure who means so much to so many. Any filmmaker who tries to provide a definitive portrait all but guarantees an orchestra of harumphing from the millions who thrill to the lightning of his lyrics.

The best of his stark, conversational verses build up a story until you are pinned to the back of your chair. In ‘Masters of War’, included on his first original album, 1963’s Freewhelin’, he sings in that distinctive nasal twang: ‘You’ve thrown the worst fear/That can ever be hurled/Fear to bring children/Into the world/For threatening my baby/Unborn and unnamed/You ain’t worth the blood/That runs in your veins.’

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Yasmin Omar

‘Welcome to America,’ murmurs a teary-eyed László Tóth (Adrien Brody) to his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) when they are reunited at a Pennsylvania train station in 1953 after a protracted, five-year separation. Thus begins the second act of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, an immense, awe-inspiring tome of a movie, structured novelistically with chapters and an epilogue, but realised cinematically in splendorous 70mm VistaVision. László’s greeting to Erzsébet, delivered with love and sincerity, suggests a homely warmth towards his adopted country that the place itself is yet to reciprocate.

Since his solo arrival on US shores in the Forties, fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust with a broken nose and spirit, the Hungarian-Jewish László’s comforts have been cold, housing precarious and employment unstable. In the first of the film’s consistently striking images, the bobbing camera swoops from László’s giddy, back-slapping relief at reaching Ellis Island to behold an inverted Statue of Liberty looming above. It’s disorienting to see this symbol of freedom upside down; it presages that the American Dream, for all its promise of betterment and opportunity, has also been upended.

Read the full review on the Curzon Journal here.

By Ian Haydn Smith

For a drama that explores celebrity as a form of myth, Pablo Larraín’s new film opens in the most prosaic way. The body of world-renowned opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) is found on the floor in her Paris apartment by her devoted, but harried, housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler/chauffeur (Piersco Favino). Callas was just 53 when her heart gave out on 16 September 1977. By that point, she had transcended the vagaries of any average human existence; she had become as mercurial and reclusive a public figure as Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes or Thomas Pynchon. 

Maria is a Proustian of Callas’ last days, moving seamlessly through time as the singer reflects on her life, loves and achievements. It follows on the heels of Larraín’s Spencer (2021) and Jackie (2016), completing a biographical triptych about women who made an indelible impression upon late 20th-century culture, whose private and public lives were often blurred, and whose every move was the subject of intense media scrutiny. For Jackie, Spencer and now Maria, Larraín had only one actor in mind to play each of the eponymous roles. 

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Yasmin Omar

The life of the tech CEO Romy (Nicole Kidman) is rigidly ordered. Each minute, each second, is pruned to its optimal capacity. At home, she packs her daughters’ lunches with handwritten notes; orders birthday presents; schedules family photoshoots; fishes a dead skunk from the swimming pool. This sense of structure is also apparent in her office wardrobe – a parade of clean-cut tailored suits and diaphanous high-necked blouses, invariably styled with her hair pulled back in a harsh chignon. Every day, she heads to Manhattan’s 31 West 27th Street, the headquarters of the automation company she founded, to continue taking charge. In many ways, Romy’s business is an extension of herself, since it too is designed to bring order (there are several shots of cardboard boxes being ferried through warehouses and slotted, neatly, into their rightful place). Even her downtime is active, dedicated to aesthetic improvement with cosmetic surgeries, plunge pools and EMDR light therapy.     

Romy controls everyone and everything around her. She gives out orders but, deep down, she’d prefer to take them. On her knees. And that’s exactly what she does in Halina Reijn’s psychosexual thriller Babygirl, an unstinting portrait of a woman who’s been wound so tightly for so long that she cannot help but snap. Romy blows up her 19-year marriage because she is unfulfilled by the tender, sustained-eye- lovemaking of her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), and seeks out erotic debasement from the firm, guiding hands of her intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). She’s a girlboss, but wants to be reduced to a babygirl. It’s not complicated. Pop psychology will tell you she’s craving what she doesn’t have (a throwaway detail that Romy was raised under the stringency of cults further substantiates this theory). 

Read the full review on the Curzon Journal here.

By Gabriella Geisinger

Jesse Eisenberg hears voices. He heard David and Benji’s long before they became the central characters of his buddy dramedy A Real Pain. They appeared in his plays The Revisionist (2013) and The Spoils (2015), and his Tablet Magazine short story ‘Mongolia’ (2017). Now, the pair have been brought to life cinematically for A Real Pain, wherein the neurotic, rule-abiding David (Eisenberg) heads to Poland with his lovable rascal of a cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) to pay respects to their deceased grandmother at their ancestral home, and learn more about their Jewish heritage.

<h5>GABRIELLA GEISINGER: HOW DID YOU WORK ON PUTTING THESE CHARACTERS INTO THIS VERSION OF THE STORY">Read the full interview on the Curzon Journal here.

By Ian Haydn Smith

It makes sense, Robert Eggers directing a remake of Nosferatu. FW Murnau’s film revels in the Gothic, which has been a constant element in all of Eggers’ work. It’s there in his striking debut, The Witch (2015), a portrait of supernatural happenings affecting pilgrim-era settlers in a 17th-century village. It’s present in his surreal coastal potboiler The Lighthouse (2019). It’s even there in his Viking vengeance saga The Northman (2022).

​​Like Dracula, the 1897 novel by Bram Stoker from which it was adapted, Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is a tale of abject love. A connection exists between Ellen Hutter, a young woman from the German port town of Wisborg, and the ravaged Transylvanian aristocrat Count Orlok, who exists on human blood and is fated to live forever. When Ellen’s clerk husband Thomas is dispatched to the count’s castle to finalise the purchase of property in Wisborg, he is imprisoned there while Orlok makes his way to to forge an unholy bond with Ellen.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Yasmin Omar

In the video for his seminal 2000 pop banger ‘Rock DJ’, Robbie Williams strips himself bare. He throws off his singlet and steps out of his jeans to reveal tight, tiger-printed Y-fronts; after a few moments of thrusting and bicep-flexing, he takes them off as well. Full-frontal nudity would seem like the logical endpoint of any striptease (Take That’s jelly-smeared buttocks serve as the final frames of their 1991 ‘Do What You Like’ video), but Williams is a solo artist now, and dammit he has something to say. His initially stricken expression settles into determination as he rips off his skin, tears into his blood-glistening muscles and pelts hunks of meat at the blank-faced women rollerskating around him, who feast on it carnivorously. By the end of the song, he is nothing more than a dancing skeleton.   

It’s an expected, yet still powerful, image of how the British public, and our scabrous tabloid media, demand their pound of Williams’ flesh. A completely unexpected image – though ittedly deriving from that same fame-shunning impulse – underpins his musical biopic Better Man. In the film, the rockstar is played by a computer-generated chimp. One more time: a computer-generated chimp.

Read the full review on the Curzon Journal here.

By Meg Walters

This article contains spoilers for ‘We Live in Time’. 

On the big screen, the recipe for love almost always includes a good meal. Annie Hall’s (1977) runaway lobsters evoke the bubbly joy of the early days of a love affair. The tennis racket-strained spaghetti in The Apartment (1960) summons up the chaotic, cosy domesticity of a couple who is simply meant to be. The roadside, fried-chicken picnic in To Catch a Thief (1955) peels back the glamor of its leads (Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, of course), giving an unexpected glimpse of intimacy. The poisonous-mushroom omelette in Phantom Thread (2017) becomes a symbol of obsession and control, evoking the darker side of love.

Cinema is filled with such romantic foodie moments, moments that remind us that the acts of preparing and enjoying food have a singular way of bringing a love story to life on screen. After all, there is nothing more sensuous – or indeed sensual – than cooking for, or eating with, another person. Lust, love, affection, intimacy, yearning… it can all be captured in a single taste. 

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Josh Slater-Williams

Fourteen years since their last TV show, 16 since their short A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008) and nearly 20 after the Oscar-winning The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), Wallace and Gromit finally return to our screens. Merlin Crossingham and franchise creator Nick Park direct the duo’s second feature-length adventure, Vengeance Most Fowl (2024). 

And, for the first time, animation powerhouse Aardman is bringing back one of its most enduring characters: criminal mastermind penguin – or is he a chicken? – Feathers McGraw. He’s out for revenge on Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead) and Gromit because of the events of The Wrong Tros (1993), through the sinister sabotage of Wallace’s latest invention Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), a ‘smart gnome’ assistant that’s the talk of the town.

Ahead of the theatrical release of Vengeance Most Fowl, Josh Slater-Williams talks to the production’s head of puppets, Aardman veteran Anne King, about the return of the stop-motion animation icons.

Read the full interview on the Curzon Journal here.

By Ian Haydn Smith

No matter the genre, or whether they indulge in the tender or the visceral, Luca Guadagnino’s films revel in the tactility of physical encounters. Across a wide-ranging filmography, from the swooning romance of Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Challengers (2024) to the flesh-peeling shocks of Suspiria (2018) and Bones and All (2022), Guadagnino combines the sensual and corporeal to startling effect. 

In Queer, Guadagnino’s adaptation of notorious Beat author William S Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical sophomore novel, penned by screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, every moment exists in the service of his characters’ – and by extension our – experience of the subterranean world. It unfolds in early 1950s Mexico City, where William Lee (Daniel Craig) has taken refuge, escaping a drugs charge north of the border in New Orleans. Life is cheap in this world, as is the entertainment, and, in a place where charm can carry as much currency as capital, sex. 

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Yasmin Omar

‘Heartfelt, impactful, vulnerable and tender.’ That’s how Colman Domingo wants you to describe his body of work and, candidly, you’d be hard-pressed to find better adjectives. He’s heartfelt as the loving father ing his pregnant-teen daughter in the achingly tragic romance If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). He’s impactful as the civil-rights reformer, arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr, marching on Washington in the Oscar-winning docudrama Selma (2014). He’s vulnerable as the trombone player explaining the importance of faith in the August Wilson adaptation Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020). He’s tender as the warm-hearted NA sponsor prescribing tough love to Zendaya’s self-destructive addict in HBO’s Euphoria (2019–). Even if his characters have lost their moral comes – the villainous sex trafficker in Zola (2020), the abusive partner in The Color Purple (2023) – the projects themselves espouse his values, distilling sociopolitical issues into captivating, empathetic stories.

‘I can see the line,’ Domingo says. ‘What I’m concerned about as a human being is very consistent, and I’m happy that it arrives in my work.’ His latest film Sing Sing, which was released in the summer and is back in the conversation as an awards contender, further extends this line. Within the crushing despair of the titular maximum-security prison, a fraternity of incarcerated men sow seeds of hope when they come together to stage a play as part of the real-life, recidivism-reducing theatre programme Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA). Domingo plays John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield, a founding member of the group and the pillar of its community, who is serving a 25-year sentence for a homicide he didn’t commit. The rest of the cast is largely populated by what Domingo calls ‘real reals’ (i.e. people who did time at Sing Sing, where they were part of RTA). ‘My heart is connected to this story because I am a Black man in this world who could be wrongly accused of a crime and end up in one of these institutions,’ the actor observes, gravely. ‘It’s really uncomfortable for me to watch the film because it taps into something so deep within me.’  

Read the full interview on the Curzon Journal here.

By Miriam Balanescu

The end of the world might not seem much cause for laughter, but in Guy Maddin’s doomsday satire, Rumours, a surreal and hilarious series of events marks humanity’s final hours. We spend them at a G7 summit, where global leaders convene to draft a platitudinal statement in response to an unspecified crisis – while a slightly more pressing disaster, nay the apocalypse itself, unfolds around them.

Humour in Maddin’s film stems as much from the ineptitude of these eight decision-makers – hailing, a title card reminds us, from the world’s wealthiest countries – as the bizarreness of how this concluding catastrophe comes to . While the assorted statesmen, spearheaded by the Chancellor of (Cate Blanchett), seek out a secluded nook in the woods to brainstorm ideas for their speech, unbeknown to them a new dynasty of resurrected bog men (disgraced chieftains who were once slain in sacrifice) have returned to stake their claim to power. ‘What I have in mind,’ the US President (Charles Dance, enigmatically sans American accent) valiantly proposes to his panicking colleagues, ‘is that we go back in the chateau together where we find a comfortable spot conducive to the kind of productive, diplomatic colloquy that befits our station as leaders, until such a time as help arrives.’

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Victoria Luxford

Edward Berger’s tense new thriller Conclave draws back the curtain on one of the Catholic Church’s most solemn traditions. Following the death of the Pope, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the Dean of the College of Cardinals, oversees a sequestered conclave as they vote to appoint a new pontiff. However, political wrangling and rumours among the voting cardinals lead him to unveil a shocking conspiracy. 

Lawrence’s conundrum challenges his faith in the sanctity of the Church. One by one, his assumptions about the purity of the papal candidates are shattered by evidence of scandal. His enduring belief that the purest heart will be chosen is challenged by the more practical Cardinal Sabbadin (Merab Ninidze). ‘We’ll never find a candidate who doesn’t have a black mark against them,’ he explains during a secret meeting on a stairway, with both men standing in the shadows as if avoiding God’s gaze. ‘We’re mortal men. We serve an ideal, we cannot always be ideal.’

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Billie Walker

‘Are you a good witch or a bad witch?’ Glenda (Billie Burke) asks Dorothy (Judy Garland) in Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). For Dorothy, who isn’t a witch at all, it feels like a loaded question, but in the Land of Oz magic is a given: you just have to decide which side you’re on. Jon M Chu’s movie adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Wicked, a prequel to Fleming’s Technicolor classic, returns to Oz, where animals can talk and sorcery is practised among selected students. Following Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), whose green skin makes her stand out even in this magical kingdom, Wicked tells the story of how this once ambitious student earned the moniker the Wicked Witch of the West.

Glinda, originally from the L Frank Baum Oz novels, was the first presentation in popular media of a good witch, designed to counteract the crone-like depictions that dominated. However, her existence did have some unwelcome repercussions. In Elizabeth Sankey’s documentary Witches (2024) – which explores the portrayal of witches in connection with women’s mental health and particularly postpartum depression – this good witch exemplifies the societal pressures exerted on women. One can either, like Glinda, ooze pure altruism from every pore or, like Elphaba, become the definition of evil. Sankey likens this to the expectation placed on mothers to be inherently selfless, demonstrating through her own testimony and that of others how the image of the good mother negatively impacts those struggling with their mental health while childrearing.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Elizabeth Sankey

Stories about them are legion and their most acclaimed work has helped define the notion – cinematically, at least – of Britishness to international audiences. But do we know who Merchant Ivory really were? And does the impression some might have of their work – as musty, fusty portraits of the British aristocracy – fall far short of their brilliance, perhaps even missing the veiled social critique, barbed humour and anti-establishment sentiment embedded in films like A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993)?

Stephen Soucy’s new documentary Merchant Ivory pulls back the heavily brocaded velvet curtain to reveal the unexpected reality of the world in which Ismail Merchant and James Ivory operated. Merchant was a brilliant film producer: erudite, intellectual, full of charm and determination. He was also a man who paid people with bundles of cash out of a plastic bag and made films on credit cards. Director Ivory, the urbane US filmmaker with a taste for British culture and literary fiction, and whose most recent success was his Oscar-winning screenplay for Call Me by Your Name (2017), laughs when Merchant is described to him as a conman (‘He was!’). Another of his creative team, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, said that she fully expected to be visiting him in prison one day. Soucy makes plain the disparity between what the company was like and the lustrous films they produced.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Sophie Monks Kaufman

The English creator of Paddington Bear, Michael Bond, lived to see the first film adaptation in the current franchise. Talking to The Guardian in November 2014 on the occasion of its release, he explained how his cub was inspired by the sight of child evacuees ing through London. ‘They all had a label round their neck with their name and address on and a little case or package containing all their treasured possessions. So Paddington, in a sense, was a refugee, and I do think that there’s no sadder sight than refugees.’

Solidarity with refugees was in the DNA of both Bond’s books and Paul King’s loyal adaptation, but not within the walls of the Home Office. Launched the same year as Paddington, the Immigration Act 2014 was designed to make it difficult for ‘irregular’ migrants seeking bank s, driving licences and housing. It also removed key protections for Commonwealth citizens in the UK, laying the groundwork for the Windrush Scandal.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Rōgan Graham

Prolific Irish playwright Enda Walsh is the scribe behind Tim Mielants’ latest drama Small Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy in his first post-Oppenheimer, post-Academy Award role. Adapting Irish writer Claire Keegan’s novella, Walsh aids Mielants in bringing to the screen the story of Murphy’s coal merchant Bill Furlong, who’s grappling with the tyranny and injustice of the local convent, where young unwed mothers (or ‘fallen women’) are held and abused.

The Magdalene Laundries operated in Ireland under Roman Catholic orders from the 1820s until as recently as 1996. At times disguised in the community as places of refuge for women, in reality they operated as workhouses. Walsh’s screenplay is set in County Wexford in 1985. Bill Furlong is on one of his regular coal-delivery rounds shortly before Christmas when he sees a teenage girl being forcibly delivered to the convent by her parents. This encounter triggers uncomfortable memories of his own childhood. Furlong’s conscience takes over and that’s where Walsh’s incisive script shines.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Jess Bacon

World War II is well-documented on screen across biopics, documentaries and narrative features, all of which tend to centre on the action at the heart of the conflict (think Dunkirk [2017], Operation Mincemeat [2021] or Darkest Hour [2017]). Steve McQueen’s Blitz, by contrast, offers a rare insight into the wartime lives of women. Rather than making tea and patiently waiting for their husbands to return home, the female characters in McQueen’s movie are stoic, resilient women trying to live in the face of death. 

As the title suggests, the film documents the lives of those affected by the mass air attacks in London from September 1940 to May 1941. It focuses on the women, children (and some men) who were left behind, redeployed out to work during the day and hiding out in overcrowded bomb shelters or abandoned Tube stations at night. 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON THE CURZON JOURNAL HERE.

By Amon Warmann

Since 2016, the Oscar-winning composer Kris Bowers’ career has gone from strength to strength, and he’s lent his vast array of musical talents to films such as King Richard (2021) and The Color Purple (2023). But with The Wild Robot – an animated tale about Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), a robot stranded on a harsh, uninhabited island who takes it upon herself to raise a baby goose she names Brightbill (Kit Connor) – Bowers was presented with a new challenge. For this movie, he would have to infuse his music into every scene. In a sense, Bowers’ is the biggest voice of the film.

Unsurprisingly, he has risen to the occasion with a soaring, spectacular score. Here, he talks to Amon Warmann about how his relationship with his daughter inspired the glorious main theme, the dangers of AI in film composing and much more.

Amon Warmann: Once you came aboard this project, where did you start? 
Kris Bowers: My first thought was wanting to find a way to combine the organic and the synthetic for the sound of Roz on this deserted island. I didn't want to approach the wilderness in the typical, ethnic-flutes way. I wanted to find something different, and I came across Sandbox Percussion, this percussion ensemble who play tuned wood planks, metal pipes, oxygen tanks, log drums and things. So I started with a palette, exploring their sound, and then added the synthetic sound.

Read the full interview on the Curzon Journal here.

By Yasmin Omar

There’s a pivotal early scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) where Matthew McConnaughey’s seasoned banker Mark Hanna lays out his exploitative business philosophy to his newest twenty-something broker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) over lunch at an expensive restaurant. The name of the game, as far as Mark’s concerned, is to ‘move the money from your client’s pocket, into your pocket’. Jordan, abstemiously drinking water while his boss necks martinis, challenges this assertion, proposing a more egalitarian model. Mark sighs, noting conspiratorially to the waiter, ‘It’s his first day on Wall Street, give him time.’

The Apprentice – the highly polemical, Seventies- and Eighties-set villain origin story of one Donald J Trump – appears to self-consciously ape Wolf with its similar opening sequence. Sitting, somewhat stiffly, in the exclusive New York club of which he is now the youngest ever member, a teetotal Donald (Sebastian Stan) is beckoned over to the rowdy table of sleazy lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). The powerful men around Roy are his prophets, absorbing his unscrupulous life lessons and guffawing at his dirty jokes as Donald observes, ensorcelled. He is the newest congregant of the church of Roy Cohn...

Read the full review on the Curzon Journal here.

By Curzon

BFI London Film Festival Director Kristy Matheson talks to Curzon about the year-long marathon it takes to bring the expansive programme together.

<h5>CURZON: How does the programme start to take shape">Read the full interview on the Curzon Journal here.

By Nadira Begum

This week marks 20 years since the release of Bride and Prejudice, Gurinder Chadha’s Bollywood musical adaptation of the Jane Austen classic. When it came out, Bride and Prejudice was derided by critics for its supposed ‘parochialism’, but was appreciated by audiences who enjoyed the film’s levity in its approach to the beloved novel. In the ensuing two decades, Chadha has come to define British South Asian cinema. 

Rarely deferential to Britishness, Chadha approaches identity through the lens of a first-generation immigrant, making her work all too appealing for a subsection of the country who otherwise felt underrepresented by the established canon of British cinema (usually white period dramas). In Chadha’s films, it is almost always a South Asian woman trying to find her place in relation to Western society. In Bhaji on the Beach (1993), a group of predominantly Punjabi women go on a day trip to Blackpool Pleasure Beach and explore their place in contemporary Britain. In Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Jessminder ‘Jess’ Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) longs to be a British football legend. In Bride and Prejudice (2004), Elizabeth Bennet stand-in Lalita Bakshi (Aishwarya Rai) must confront her own preconceived notions of Western ideals.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Victoria Luxford

Todd Phillips brings his dark vision of the world of DC Comics back to our screens with Joker: Folie à Deux. A sequel to 2019’s Joker, it builds on that film’s audacious interpretation of its titular character. Phillips’ vision of the Joker is a man not born from a fall into a vat of toxic waste, as with previous incarnations; nor is he shrouded in mystery like Heath Ledger’s version in The Dark Knight (2008). Partly inspired by Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Joker shows Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck (the failed comedian who becomes the Clown Prince of Crime) to be a villain created by a system that allows him to fall through the cracks.

In the first film, his decline is punctuated by meetings with an indifferent social worker (Sharon Washington), who informs him of the budget cuts that exacerbate his spiral into crime. Like the Joker, Arkham Asylum is also reimagined from the comic books, becoming ‘recast’ as a mental-health institution unfit for purpose. It’s part of the system that accelerates his descent into darkness, rather than rehabilitating him. Joker: Folie à Deux is the latest film to look at mental-health facilities with scepticism, where clean white halls of healing are overcast with shadows of abuse.  

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Billie Walker

As the elder statesmen of cinema embark on their final film projects, there are two roads to travel. One involves reflecting on their personal history with the medium, as in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory (2019) and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022). The other requires reckoning with their previous philosophies, as is apparent in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022) and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Francis Ford Coppola, for his part, self-funded his ion project Megalopolis (2024) so he could work outside the restrictive confines of studio demands. The film follows architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who is desperate to take the City of New Rome into the future; his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), insists on maintaining the status quo. Both Catilina and Coppola question what it means to dedicate your life to artistic creation while espousing an optimism for the future.

While Coppola looks forward with Megalopolis, some of his peers have chosen to cast their eyes back. Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022) examines his lifelong fascination with film through a self-reflexive coming-of-age story. It’s an explicitly autobiographical work in which the young Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle), sister Reggie (Julia Butters), mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and father Burt (Paul Dano) are all stand-ins for Spielberg and his family, and the film details his parents’ divorce, a formative experience in the director’s young life. This may be Spielberg’s most overtly personal film, but it continues thematic ideas from his earlier work. The director has often been concerned with the breakdown of the nuclear family, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. (1982), Jurassic Park (1993) and War of the Worlds (2005). Even if these storylines only form the peripheries of his action-movie plots, divorce is omnipresent. 

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Laura Venning

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Saoirse Ronan turns in another astonishing performance, perhaps her best ever, in The Outrun, of which she is also a producer. Directed by Nora Fingscheidt and based on the memoir by Amy Liptrot, the film follows a young woman named Rona (Ronan), who returns to the Orkney Islands, where she was brought up, while struggling with newly found sobriety. At what feels like the edge of everything off the north coast of Scotland, she tries to suppress her memories of her escalating alcoholism. They puncture the isolation and monotony of feeding the sheep and staring out at the waves crashing against the cliff face.

Films about addiction, and specifically substance misuse, tend to veer towards unbearable grimness. Think of Nicolas Cage drinking himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas (1995), or the abject misery every character is trapped in at the end of Requiem for a Dream (2000). When these films are about women they might offer an honest representation of substance misuse but, in many cases, their female protagonists aren’t exactly fully realised. A female addict will often be portrayed as young, beautiful and full of promise, but either she’ll suffer a terrible misfortune that causes her to start drinking, or she’s introduced to hard drugs by a boyfriend/some other nefarious male influence. Aside from her addiction, she’s pretty much a blank slate onto whom any amount of misery can be inflicted for shock value, sometimes unintentionally glamourising said misery.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Meg Walters

Art often has an uncanny ability to tap into the cultural anxieties that define the age. Right now, it’s no great surprise that one of those anxieties centres around the ever growing unknowability of technology’s power – namely, its potential to warp our very humanity into something entirely unrecognisable. This fear has led to a slew of recent works that share a common and rather specific conceit: what if the next step in technology is a procedure that splits us up into pieces?

It is this theory that sits at the heart of Coralie Fargeat’s second feature, The Substance, a body-horror epic about a black-market ‘substance’ that splits the into two halves – while the original body stays as it was, a second young and perfect body is formed. Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, an ageing and soon-to-be redundant actress-turned-jazzercise instructor who uses the substance in an attempt to cling to her rapidly disintegrating career. In a sickeningly gory sequence, Elizabeth’s spine cracks open and out comes Sue (Margaret Qualley), her young, smooth, poreless counterpart. Sue prances off to take up her maker’s mantle, filming her own jazzercise show and swanning around town enjoying many iring glances. 

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Guy Lodge

On the face of it, My Favourite Cake does not seem like a film that would run afoul of censors. Warmly received at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, the second feature by Iranian directing duo Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha is a gentle, whimsical crowd-pleaser: a late-life romantic comedy centred on 70-year-old widow Mahin and her search for a new soulmate. Its portrait of sweetly reawakened desire and female agency has endeared itself to many – but not to officials in its country of origin, where it has caught heat for its focus on an independent heroine who is shown drinking, dancing and, most controversially, not wearing a hijab.

That perceived red line has earned My Favourite Cake a ban in Iran, while the filmmakers, facing court proceedings, also had their ports seized by the authorities, preventing them from travelling to Berlin for the premiere. ‘We feel like parents who are forbidden from even looking at their newborn child,’ Moghaddam and Sanaeeha said in a t statement. ‘We are sad and we are tired, but we are not alone.’

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Yasmin Omar

When an acting class of imprisoned students is invited to imagine their perfect place in the moving carceral drama Sing Sing, for a fleeting moment they are transported back outside to picnics in Prospect Park, to cherry ice lollies on neighbourhood stoops. In the absence of a location manager, the film’s co-producer Karin Shiel and producer Monique Walton were similarly tasked with finding perfect places – only they had to will theirs into reality. Sing Sing, which takes its name from a maximum-security New York prison, shows incarcerated men coming together to mount a play as part of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a real-life programme that helps people develop transferable skills during their sentence. A quietly affecting Colman Domingo, playing the group’s comionate de facto leader Divine G, heads up an ensemble of largely non-professional actors with first-hand experiences of the judicial system. The resulting film is a hopeful, heartwarming tale about finding dignity behind bars.

Naturally, the producers’ first instinct was to shoot within Sing Sing itself, where RTA was founded, though this proved impossible. ‘We did try, we did want to get access, it’s just very, very hard,’ Shiel explains. ‘Sometimes you can go in on a documentary-style format, but to do a narrative film inside a prison is really difficult.’ The compromise solution was to capture the facility’s specific, thematically resonant exteriors. Sing Sing is one of the only prisons in the world bisected by a commuter railway, whose free movement weighs heavily on the convicted population (‘It’s a profound thing that the men inside can hear and see that train’). On the first day of production, the director Greg Kwedar and cinematographer Pat Scola travelled up and down the Hudson on a ‘pretty turbulent’ boat ride, filming the Metro North tracks, lush vegetation and birds perched in coils of barbed wire as a means of emphasising the outside world’s apathy to the imprisoned.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Ian Haydn Smith

Beetlejuice (1988) didn’t just establish Tim Burton as a major commercial filmmaker who Warner Bros could trust with their cherished Batman (1989); it presented audiences with a director whose singular and gleefully macabre worldview stood in stark contrast to most Hollywood output of the 1980s. His vision, not unlike David Lynch’s (but never as dark or tortured), saw a veneered US whose often glossy surface hid a multitude of sins, desires and malevolence. Now, after almost two decades of films ranging from Planet of the Apes (2001) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) to Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Dumbo (2019), Burton and star Michael Keaton have returned to the world of the titular freelance ‘bio-exorcist’.

In the original film, Keaton played a puerile ghost-cum-ghoul who helps the dead scare the living out of their shared home. It’s while assisting one recently deceased couple that Beetlejuice encounters Winona Ryder’s death-obsessed Lydia. That character returns in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, alongside Jenna Ortega – the star of the hit Netflix series Wednesday that Burton directed – as her daughter Astrid, who has no idea what chaos she unleashes when she summons Lydia’s nemesis. The wonder of the original film, like the best of Burton’s work, lies in how fully we are immersed in his vision: that otherness, strangeness and the unusual are things to be embraced. It’s an outlook that was forged at a very young age.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.

By Yasmin Omar

At the London premiere of her directorial debut, Blink Twice, Zoë Kravitz took to the stage and, incongruously, said she’d keep her introduction ‘very demure, very cutesy, very mindful’. It was a reference to the recent TikTok trend, which, like most digital fads, immediately lost its allure when the grown-ups began explaining it in mainstream media. At first blush, her remark felt like a slightly desperate millennial lunge towards Gen Z relevance. But, after watching the film, it clicks into place. Kravitz’s twisty psychological thriller Blink Twice is stuffed with internet buzzwords – Michelin meals ‘hit different’, brunch is ‘so fucking real’ – and pays lip service to a number of fashionable topics (‘eat the rich’ anticapitalism, female empowerment, therapy, wellness…). She clearly spends a lot of time online, and her film reflects that.

In fact when we first meet its main character, Naomi Ackie’s Frida, she is tellingly scrolling through her Instagram feed, pants around her ankles on the toilet. Her algorithm has served her a video from disgraced billionaire Slater (Channing Tatum), who stepped down from his tech company after abuses of power were made public, and is now licking his wounds on his very own private island.

Read the full review on the Curzon Journal here.

By Rōgan Graham

Hungry for awards traction and reliable box office, Hollywood has been going music-biopic mad of late, with estates happy to cash in on pop-legend nostalgia, washing out a genre that has been (and still has the potential to be) an intelligent way for stars to metatextuality riff on their personas. Since Rami Malek’s Oscar-winning fake teeth in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), we have witnessed Rocket Man (2019), Judy (2019), Respect (2021), I Wanna Dance With Somebody (2022), Elvis (2022), One Love (2024) and Back to Black (2024), with the Michael Jackson biopic Michael and Timothée Chalamet-cum-Bob Dylan vehicle A Complete Unknown on the way. But what is the function of a music biopic where comparatively few people have heard its subjects’ music?

In his debut feature, British director Rich Peppiatt tells the story of the divisive Irish Republican rap trio Kneecap, with the musicians playing themselves in their eponymous biopic. Kneecap, in cinemas this Friday, premiered at Sundance in January months before the band had released their debut album, Fine Art. It took away the NEXT Audience Award at the festival, and has continued racking up prizes since. What sets Kneecap apart from other white rappers (and we’ll get to the most famous one shortly) is that they make music in the Irish language, a language that only roughly 80,000 people speak.

Read the full article on the Curzon Journal here.