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…
Talk of the end of streetwear has fuelled fashion discourse in recent years – but someone forgot to tell the kids that stand in line outside Soho stores in London for brands like Palace, Supreme and Stussy on every single “drop day”. It’s this culture – its good and its bad – that is the focus…
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…
The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Mahābhārata, and the Rāmāyaṇa – the most canonical epics of literature in world history arguably share a commonality: the hero and a sole journey. Johannes A. B. van Buitenen, Simona Sawhney, Gabriel Germain, and Nicholas Justin Allen, for instance, recognise the parallels. Symmetries were drawn between Arjuna and Odysseus, the…
Are kaiju our friends? It’s comforting to hope so, but it’s also naïve to assume that ostensibly benevolent kaiju like Mothra, Gamera, and even Godzilla itself (at certain times) personify mankind’s best interests. Throughout their 70 year and counting history, Japan’s silver screen giants have more steadily been portrayed as protectors of land – the…
My Beautiful Laundrette, the Stephen Frears directed, Harif Kareshi-scripted film, came out in 1985. The film is – rightly – remembered as a boundary-pushing queer multi-racial love story, with the breakout star of Daniel Day-Lewis. But, with it back in cinemas for the fortieth anniversary this month, it’s a time to look again, and look…
Built across twelve hills and shaped by its uneven topography, Amman isn’t quite a metropolis, but a city in flux. Roman ruins stand beside concrete high-rises; traffic is a fact of life. Camps like Baqa’a and Marka, originally established after the 1967 war to shelter Palestinians displaced by the Israeli occupation, have evolved into semi-urbanized,…
A cinematic self-portrait by an artist who relished in muddying the lines between poetry, painting, theatre and film, in Jean Cocteau’s own words, his final feature, Testament of Orpheus (1960), “is nothing other than a striptease act, gradually peeling away my body to reveal my naked soul.” Throughout the film appear the enigmatic horsemen, heavily…