What strikes me about Kubrick films lately is the photography. He made images that feel created for pure storytelling, almost as if they're captured by the mind rather than a camera. The image is usually a bit soft, suggesting a rejection of sharpness & clarity as desirable visual qualities. If you pull on that thread you end up noticing the way colour, composition, light & shade are used in atypical ways along the same lines. The cinematography gets more special, and takes…

Rewatching for the first time since cinema viewing, I wondered if I'd over-rated this. Nope: it's better than I thought, and I loved it first time round. The characters of Maud and Amanda have great depth, as if taken from a classic novel. It's a dual character study, and a lot could be written on the dynamic between them. The look of the movie is incredible—Scarborough is a surprisingly perfect location to shoot this story in. You can just drink…

Excellent cinematography (Claire Mathon) and a powerful sense of place and time create an impressive backdrop for this love story between a female portrait painter (Noémie Merlant as Marianne) and the lady of the house (Adèle Haenel as Héloïse). Terrific performances memorably etch two strong-willed personalities, equally stubborn and intelligent, in the mind. Set at the end of the 18th century (the time of Jane Austen, whose style of romantic literature this film feels part of), the manners and behavioural…

A road trip to meet the parents turns into an inner voyage where identity breaks down and questions itself, and personalities and timelines shift. No-one really knows where they’re going, but danger seems to lie ahead. The film could almost be a spin-off of the last episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, with a long, bleak drive through an odd environment towards a strange place (to meet the parents, no less), and the basic facts of reality becoming less clear…