The standout films from the BFI London Film Festival 2025 were all from seasoned directors whose oeuvre could not be more distinguished from each other. From the rippling realism of Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident to Joachim Trier’s beautifully perceptive Sentimental Value, and Park Chan-wook’s darkly comic No Other Choice, I was whisked…
The 20-minute single shot opening sequence of director Oliver Laxe’s Sirât has the granular texture of a documentary – there is a palpable sense of the shimmering heat, the swirling dust of the vast desert, the colours dissolving into the horizon against the mountains at dusk and the clamour of a sea of bodies gyrating…
When Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, first found me, I was on the cusp of a new decade of my life. It was winter in Boston, where I was beginning a semester’s long haul. I wanted to read fiction that would work through me, move me, and ask me questions. Nearly two…
In Dur e Aziz Amna’s debut novel American Fever, Hira, the sixteen-year-old female protagonist, has no second thoughts when her mother asks her, “If you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?” “A Pakistani man,” she replies. This terse exchange had a spectral presence in my mind as I read A Splintering,…
As The Guardian’s chief theatre critic, it is perhaps inevitable that Arifa Akbar’s works of narrative nonfiction are unbuttoned from the constrictions of a single genre or perspective. Her second book Wolf Moon: A Woman’s Journey into the Night follows in the footsteps of her acclaimed memoir Consumed: A Sister’s Story by establishing a form…
The first time I watched Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty, I was electrified. Even on successive viewings it continues to leave me exhilarated in its hyperbolic and acerbic portrayal of Rome’s literati glitterati. The film gestures towards a recurring idea in Sorrentino’s body of work – the exploration of beauty and decay mostly through…
Beyond the titles featured in our 2025 preview of global independent and arthouse cinema for the first half of the year, there is a gamut of imaginative, accomplished works to look out for during the rest of 2025. A vast cross-section of these feature films — from promising debut directors to veterans of the industry — will…
The opening pages of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection are lavished with an itemised description of a chic apartment complete with Scandinavian furniture, a geometric berber rug, lush monstera plants and past issues of Monocle and the New Yorker stacked neatly. Originally written and published in Italian as Le Perfezioni in 2022, Perfection is a slim novel…