Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms movie review: the tragedy of the immortal
Epic yet intimate, this is a visually gorgeous and emotionally lush fantasy drama about love and hope set in a violent but beautifully realized invented world.
girls/women
Ocean’s Eight movie review: revenge of the women
Breezy fun that sticks a shiv into Hollywood’s — and the larger culture’s — disdain for women. Wonderfully subtle comic performances from a great cast having a ball make for a perfectly suitable light diversion from the world right now.
Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist documentary review: counterculture’s wise elder woman
There’s nothing fawning and plenty ironic about this essential first documentary to cover a major female fashion designer, a woman whose life is almost a perfect reflection of the trajectory of 20th-century feminism.
Half the Picture documentary review: a woman’s place is behind the camera (Sundance London 2018)
Authoritative and insightful, this essential film gives much needed cultural breathing room to some remarkable Hollywood women to discuss how they are undermined or shut out entirely from the industry.
Hereditary movie review: the haunting is coming from inside the family (Sundance London 2018)
The sinister ambiance has a terrible grace, but its raw and honest portrait of grief and guilt is ultimately diminished by the supernatural horror that is also at play.
A Kid Like Jake movie review: the kid is all right; the parents are freaking out
A movie as generous and as nonjudgmental as its protagonists, as frustrated yet as gently questing as they are. Claire Danes and Jim Parsons are extraordinary.
The Breadwinner movie review: a daring girl’s adventure
Beautiful and startling, bursting with both brutality and hope, this animated adventure is too intense for young children, but the brains and bravery of its young heroine will inspire older kids and adults alike.
Edie movie review: go scream it on the mountain
This is no twee old-lady adventure. The magnificent Sheila Hancock crafts a portrait of elder womanhood as a tangy triumph of risk-taking over regret, and resolution over resignation.
On Chesil Beach movie review: no sex, please, we’re British
This stilted, utterly implausible film manages the astonishing feat of being both histrionic and monotonous at the same time, trolling us with absurd clichés, yet doing so with a quiet solemnity.
Jeune Femme (aka Montparnasse Bienvenüe) movie review: the heroine of her own life
Laetitia Dosch burns with a passionate anxiety in French writer-director Léonor Serraille’s debut, a clever, wise, wildly unsentimental portrait of a woman learning how to be herself.
