Features and reviews
Discover the latest from the BFI, the UK’s lead organisation for film, television and the moving image.
Tetris: falling blocks escape the Eastern Bloc – via licensing agreements
This boardroom drama masquerading as a spy thriller is an absurdly jingoistic account of Dutch entrepreneur Henk Rogers’s wrangling of the commercial distribution rights for the eponymous game.
By Mark Asch
Winners: an optimistic Iranian cinephile drama
By Philip Kemp
Allelujah: a woolly, wobbly Alan Bennett adaptation
By Caspar Salmon
Words of Negroes: a bitter documentary about the lingering poison of servitude
By Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom: gentle Bhutanese drama
By Leigh Singer
The Middle Man: this morbid, mordant comedy plumbs the psychosis of the Trump era
By Anton Bitel
The Wife and Her House Husband: a scattershot drama in need of more narrative discipline
By Will Webb
Calls from Moscow: this documentary about Cuban migrants in Russia feels thin and overly repetitive
By Ela Bittencourt
Typist Artist Pirate King: this portrait of Audrey Amiss is by turns riotous and touching
By Catherine Wheatley
Y Sŵn: this dramatisation of the struggle for S4C is worth tuning into
By Glyn Morgan
‘The most self-aware slasher ever made’: Scream reviewed in 1997
By Kim Newman
Manodrome: this unedifying portrait of toxic masculinity rings hollow
By Jessica Kiang
On the Adamant: a thought-provoking portrait of a refuge for Paris’s mentally unwell
By Travis Jeppesen
Till the End of the Night: an unconvincing exercise in neo-noir
By John Bleasdale
Tótem: a dazzling, vibrant child’s-eye view of jubilation and tragedy
By Jessica Kiang
Inside: this Ballardian high-concept experiment is an intriguing anti-caper
By Nicolas Rapold
Being in a Place: an allusive, pleasingly fluid portrait of Margaret Tait
By Sophia Satchell-Baeza
Afire: Christian Petzold finds his funnybone
By Caitlin Quinlan
Close: this portrait of a messy friendship is too neat for its own good
By James Lattimer
Disco Boy: a dark vision of mercenary madness in the jungles of Nigeria
By Carmen Gray
Let Us Flow: this mesmerising Georgian documentary combines the personal with the mythopoetic
By Emily Maskell
#Manhole: a taut situational nail-biter
By Lou Thomas
The Plough: a downbeat meditation on art and love
By Giovanni Marchini Camia
Horse Opera: a mystifying combination of equine scatology and fictocriticism
By Travis Jeppesen
Fashion Reimagined: this woolly, self-congratulatory doc isn’t as radical as it thinks it is
By Annabel Bai Jackson
Perpetrator second-look review: an exceptionally assured, politically resonant horror
By Carmen Gray
Electric Malady: a poignant documentary about electrosensitivity
By Ben Nicholson
Fleishman Is in Trouble: this talky upscale drama goes long on New York neuroses
By Kate Stables
Subject: this sensitive documentary explores the price of documentary fame
By Nick Bradshaw