World Cinema

In this stirring film by revered auteur Kelly Reichardt an odd couple discover friendship and free enterprise on the American frontier. Reichardt is one of the most exciting directors working today, beloved the world over for her minimalistic realism, outsider protagonists and distillation of wider social issues through the personal – all of which are masterfully realised in First Cow, ...

Shiva Baby is a relentless comedy of errors that opens with the sort of discordant string music one would ordinarily expect from a horror film – and it soon becomes abundantly clear why... What if your whole precarious life, your carefully constructed, fatally fragile persona, fell publicly to pieces amid the ritual and solemnity of a stranger’s funeral? ...

Andrea Arnold has created a kind of agribusiness pastoral about the daily life of cows on a working dairy farm. We hear human voices from the very beginning, often cheerfully calling the cows “girlies!” – no word could be less suitable for these mighty beasts. But we don’t see any people until the very end... ...

A powerful and moving story based on a memoir by Nobel Laureate, Annie Ernaux, recounting when, as a star student, she discovers she is pregnant and must come to terms with how this will change her life. Audrey Diwan’s Happening adapts Ernaux’s account into a lean, muscular film resolutely cinematic in its retelling ...

Tartly funny and plungingly sad in equal measure, this is nuanced, humane queer filmmaking, more concerned with the textures and particulars of its own intimate story than with grander social statements — even if, as a tale of transgender desire in a Muslim country, its very premise makes it a boundary-breaker ...

Adam is a young man living in a small fishing village with his father. A good student, the local imam puts him forward for a scholarship to the elite Al-Azhar university, the centre of Sunni Islam. Soon after he arrives he becomes embroiled in various plots for control of the university, its theology, and even Egypt itself ...

Stunning Iranian road movie from debut director Panah Panahi wowed festival audiences with its rich emotional nuance and sly political critique ...

There’s more than a hint of the supernatural when a young detective investigates the charred body found in a construction site in this assured and gripping Tunisian thriller ...