Screen Rats

T he cinema landscape for the current millennium is noticeably more infantile than the one that preceded it. Sexless good guys are stalwart and true, the bad guys are …

N ew Wes, new merch. Just in time for Asteroid City to blast off in the UK and Ireland on 23 June, fans will be able to admire a range of original artwork of Wes Ande…

W hen the unbelievably named Reality Winner printed out a classified intelligence report revealing Russian interference in the 2016 US election from her National Secur…

S tephen King’s 1975 short story The Boogeyman blurs the psychological and the supernatural. Unfolding entirely within the confines of a psychiatrist’s office, it purp…

W e all know how it goes down… The Cannes press corps spend ten days collating, speculating and algorithmically predicting in the hope that they can offer the inside t…

I n Which Side Are You On? , his 1984 documentary on the miners’ strike, Ken Loach focuses on the public spaces, the clubs and halls, where the miners and their famil…

L ike the other two legendary 1933 backstage musicals from Warner Bros (42nd Street and Footlight Parade) Gold Diggers of 1933 is a charmed convergence of individual t…

I ndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny isn’t the only film at Cannes 2023 to concern itself with archaeological derring-do, ancient artefacts, memory and mortality: S…

I n 1858, in Bologna, then part of the Papal States, carabinieri acting under the authority of the Inquisitor of Bologna demanded entry to the home of the Jewish merch…

“G ardening is a belief in the future,” Narval Roth (Joel Edgerton) tells us in a measured voice over, as he – like almost all Schrader protagonists – scribbles away i…

I t’s hard to know for sure how Abdellatif Kechiche felt when, for the first time in the history of the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme D’or was awarded not just to hi…

I n their astonishing new feature De Humani Corporis Fabrica, filmmakers Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor once more tease and prod conventional definitions of…

I t’s likely that none of us will have bestowed upon us the epithet, “The Napoleon of Something Something” within our lifetimes. Yet epicure extraordinaire, Dodin Bouf…

T he very idea that there now exists in the world a new feature film by the long-absent Spanish director Victor Erice is a cause for celebration in and of itself. That…

W hen Catherine Parr married King Henry VIII, Brazil was a young country at 43. At that point, the Portuguese were still vigorously tearing at South American land and …

A t this point, the only phrase more bone-chilling than “Suella Braverman policy” is “Disney live-action remake”. Sludgy, ugly, pointless ways to squeeze every last bi…

T he last time Wes Anderson took us on a class trip to the theatre, optional safety glasses and earplugs were provided to all patrons. With his scintillating and archl…

I n 2009 Jessica Hausner presented Lourdes at the Venice Film Festival – a film about the French town which has become a revered sight of pilgrimage for many Catholics…

I n Master Gardener , Paul Schrader continues his late-career cycle of “man in a room” films, about men who carry the sins of a nation, and work towards an increasingl…