Trevor Johnston

Cartoons aren’t just for kids, of course. But for most kids, cartoons are where a love of movies often starts. No matter how highfalutin your taste in movies as an adult, chances are, your first cinematic obsession was an animation – whether it was a classic of Disney’s Golden Age or its ‘90s renaissance period, a Pixar heart-tugger or perhaps even a Studio Ghibli masterpiece. It’s a love most of us never never fully grow out of, either. Ask any parent about the joys of early child-rearing and they’ll undoubtedly tell you about showing their kids a cartoon they loved as a young’un. It’s a magical experience you get from few other forms of entertainment.   But the best animated movies don’t just appeal to kids, nor childhood nostalgia. They work on multiple levels, for broad audiences and age groups. In composing this list of the greatest animated movies ever made, we polled Time Out writers and experts including Fantastic Mr Fox’s Wes Anderson and Wallace and Gromit’s Nick Park, and the results run the gamut, from from those Disney, Pixar and Ghibli no-brainers to stop-motion nightmares, psychedelic headtrips, illustrated documentaries and bizarre experimental features that are decidedly for adults only. The movies on this list may make you feel like a kid again – but they may also blow your grown-up mind in ways you never expected.  Written by Trevor Johnston, David Ehrlich, Joshua Rothkoph, Tom Huddleston, Andy Kryza, Guy Lodge, Dave Calhoun, Keith Uhlich, Cath Clarke and M

Everyone loves a good action movie, even if some won’t admit it. Film school snobs may pretend to turn up their noses, but no matter how cultured you’d like to think you are, there’s a part of your lizard brain that loves explosions and shootouts and badass one-liners – and it needs to be satisfied.  But action flicks needn’t be dumb, loud or graphic to succeed. Some find beauty in orchestrated violence. Others might crane-kick you right in the heart. Some even have – gasp! – character development. And so, to help put together this definitive list of the greatest action movies ever made, we reached out to some of the people who understand the action genre better than anyone, from Die Hard director John McTiernan to Machete himself, Danny Trejo. Pull the pin, light the fuse and batten down the hatches – these are the most pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat thrill rides ever put to film.  Written by Eddy Frankel, Eddy Frankel, Yu An Su, Joshua Rothkopf, Trevor Johnston, Ashley Clark, Grady Hendrix, Tom Huddleston, Keith Uhlich, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Dave Calhoun and Matthew Singer Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🪖 The 18 greatest stunts in cinema (as picked by the greatest stunt people)🥋 The 25 best martial arts movies of all-time

Sports are the apex of genuine human drama. Sure, for non-fans, professional athletics can seem like frivolous games, and in the broad view, that’s perhaps what they are. But sports are also a framework to tell great stories – of winners and losers, triumph and tragedy, conquering behemoths and inspiring underdogs.  No wonder, then, that filmmakers frequently draw upon sports for inspiration. Yes, sports movies can be filled with clichés, but there are many that manage to either subvert them or deliver them with so much emotion it’s like experiencing them for the first time. In this ranking of the 50 greatest sports movies, we’ve stuck to traditional athletic competition – apologies to The Color of Money and Searching for Bobby Fischer.  RECOMMENDED:🤾 The best Olympics movies to get you in the Olympic Spirit🌊 The 15 most epic surf movies🔎 The best biopics of all-time, ranked

Comedy gets no respect, no respect at all. Sure, everyone loves to laugh, and just about every film buff has a comedy movie they hold close to their heart. But for some reason, when it comes to awards and canonisation, comedies still get short shrift in the history of cinema. That’s probably because, more than any other genre, comedy is dependent on context. What’s funny in 1924 might land with a thud in 2024. And that’s to say nothing of varying tastes in humour.  That makes coming up with the best comedy films of all time especially tricky. We had to ask ourselves: what makes a truly great comedy? There’s many criteria, but one of the most important is the question of: ‘Is this film still funny now, and will it still be funny five years, ten years… a century from now?’ With the help of comedians like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard, actors such as John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker and a small army of Time Out writers, we believe we’ve found the 100 finest, most durable and most broadly appreciable laughers in history. No matter your sense of humour - silly or sophisticated, light or dark, surreal or broad - you’ll find it represented here.  Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🤣 The best comedies of 2024 (so far)🥰 The greatest romantic comedies of all time

A comédia é um género frequentemente ignorado pelos prémios e pela crítica. Mas produzir uma grande comédia, uma comédia intemporal, é uma das maiores conquistas no cinema. É uma forma de arte em grande parte dependente do contexto: aquilo que faz uma plateia chorar a rir em 2024 pode ser recebido mais tarde com olhares vazios – nem sequer é preciso passar meio século, como é muitas vezes o caso; bastam alguns anos de diferença. Por isso mesmo, aqueles que nos fizeram rir durante décadas são verdadeiramente especiais. Para elaborar esta lista das 100 maiores comédias de sempre, pedimos a comediantes como Diane Morgan e Russell Howard, a actores como John Boyega e Jodie Whittaker e a uma pequena legião de escritores da Time Out sobre os filmes que mais os fazem rir, e por mais tempo. Ao fazê-lo, acreditamos ter encontrado as melhores, mais intemporais e amplamente apreciáveis 100 comédias da história do cinema. Independentemente do seu sentido de humor – disparatado ou sofisticado, leve ou sombrio, surreal ou mais abrangente – vai encontrá-lo representado aqui. Recomendado:🔥 Os 100 melhores filmes de sempre🥰 As melhores comédias românticas de sempre

There’s a reason Martin Scorsese has dedicated part of his life to championing Italian movies – and it’s not just to keep his nonna happy. It’s the national cinema that gave us Fellini, Visconti, Rossellini, Pasolini, and De Sica – where one minute you can corpse to the slapstick silliness of Commedia all'Italiana capers and the next, have your heart smashed into tiny pieces by a human drama about an old man and his dog. Where dodgy politics spawns angry thrillers and seismic historical events are tackled in sweeping epics. And where Clint Eastwood chewed on a cheroot while dispatching bad guys, and Argento and Bava gave us the lurid shocks of giallo. It’s flamboyant, glamorous, jaded, shocking and sexy – sometimes all at once.  And it’s not just sexy people standing in fountains, either. Rome’s famous old Cinecittà Studios powers on, the Venice Biennale is the world’s coolest film festival (sorry, Cannes), and modern-day moviemakers like Alice Rohrwacher, Matteo Garrone, Paolo Sorrentino and Gianfranco Rosi keep offering up fresh slices of la dolce vita (or its darker sides). With the BFI celebrating the work of the Taviani brothers in February and neorealism in May-June, a ‘Cinema Made in Italy’ season running at London’s Ciné Lumière in March, Rohrwacher’s La Chimera and Garrone’s Oscar-nominated Io Capitano coming to cinemas soon, not to mention a cinema re-release of Rome, Open City in May. There’s plenty of Italian films to sample out there. Allow us to add 50 more to t

Sex scenes are back! After a chaste period that had the internet wondering why cinema had lost its libido altogether, big-screen nookie has made a comeback. From Poor Things’ orgy of ‘furious jumping’ to Passages’ complex, elicit ménage à trois, to All of Us Strangers’ tender gay romance and Femme’s much less tender one, sex is everywhere you look – and it’s all to the good. Because while Jermaine Stewart wasn’t wrong when he sang that: ‘you don’t have to take your clothes off to have a good time’, some well-judged on-screen sex can definitely help a filmmaker tell their story – and ideally, not in a porn-y, lascivious, exploitative way. Because as a means of deepening a romance, building character, shocking and provoking an audience, there’s plenty to be said for kicking off the undies and getting down to it. But there’s a bigger story here, too, because the story of sex scenes is the story of cinema: a slow evolution from Hays Code-era censorship to a more open and honest view of human behaviour marked by sudden advances in what’s depicted – and more than a few regressive ones, too. The good, the bad and the ugly – looking at you, Last Tango in Paris – are all represented by the 101 entries below, a list that show how films’ steamier sides has shaken up the medium – and the world. Sorry Jermaine, but we’re taking cinema’s clothes off.  Written by Dave Calhoun, Joshua Rothkopf, Cath Clarke, David Ehrlich, Phil de Semlyen, Daniel Walber, Trevor Johnston, Andy Kryza, Daniel Wa

If you have Disney+ subscription, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you’re paying for: a lot of Marvel, a bunch of Star Wars, a heap of Pixar and every animated Disney flick you can think of. Even so, it’s still possible to spend half the night endlessly scrolling before giving up and going to bed. And just because you have a better sense of what’s available doesn’t guarantee that anything you throw on will be a winner. So we’ve combed through the streamer’s offerings to compile the can’t-miss options. It includes plenty of classics and buzzy recent releases, sure, but there are also a few hidden gems worth digging for. Recommended: 🐭 The 50 best Disney movies for family night🦸All the Marvel movies ranked from worst to best👾 The 52 best Star Wars characters

What are the greatest movie sex scenes? The ones you really don’t want to come on when you’re enjoying a quiet night in front of the telly with your parents? It can be tough to avoid. From cinema’s seemingly chaste early days through a century-and-a-bit of shadowy film noirs, swooning romances, erotically charged ’80s thrillers and just about every film with Marlon Brando in, sex is there, ready to engulf us in its sweaty embrace. Some filmmakers chose to cut tastefully around the deed itself; some have thrown caution (and clothes) to the wind to let it all hang out. Others, like Michael Winterbottom with his explicit indie bonk-athon 9 Songs, take it even further. We’ve put together 101 of the most groundbreaking sex scenes of all time to chart how the movies have chosen to put the moves on. A fair few of these films have won Academy Awards; some are classic feminist movies; controversy has stalked many of them. Let us know which ones we’re missing.RECOMMENDED: Our list of the 100 best movies of all time

O potencial cinematográfico (e não só) da ficção científica é quase infinito. É nestes filmes que os nossos maiores pesadelos podem tornar-se realidade e os nossos sonhos concretizar-se, ao mesmo tempo que é dito e posto em causa algo sobre o nosso presente. E o género sempre fez as delícias do público, desde o tempo dos efeitos especiais básicos e rudimentares dos filmes mudos ao excesso digital dos blockbusters contemporâneos. Hoje, no entanto, é a própria crítica quem aplaude e celebra muitos destes filmes, tal como acontece com os super-heróis e o terror. A pensar nisso, elegemos os 100 melhores filmes de ficção científica de sempre. Recomendado: Filmes em cartaz esta semana

The best comedies in the history of cinema achieve more than just making you laugh (although, granted, it’s not a great comedy if it barely makes you crack a smile). Classic romcoms like ‘Notting Hill’ have us yearning for true love while teen movies like ‘Mean Girls’ get us cringing at memories of being too dorky to join the cool gang at school (and ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ ticks both boxes). Then there are the political satires, like ‘The Death of Stalin’, which serve up uncomfortable truths alongside the funnies. And finally, when we need to get into the festive spirit, the Christmas film archives are crammed with titles that leave you giggling into your eggnog.  All of which makes choosing the 100 best comedies of all time a little tricky. To help us with the task, we enlisted the help of comedians (such as Russell Howard and Diane Morgan), actors (John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker, among others), directors and screenwriters (including Richard Curtis), as well as several Time Out writers. So the next time you need something to turn that frown upside down, you’ll know where to start. RECOMMENDED:  London and UK cinema listings, film reviews and exclusive interviews

Nooky. Rumpy pumpy. Slap and tickle. Fourth base. La whoopsy-daisy. Whatever you call it, sex runs through cinema like an electric charge. From its seemingly chaste early days through a century-and-a-bit of shadowy film noirs, swooning romances, erotically charged ’80s thrillers and just about every film with Marlon Brando in – up to and very much excluding Apocalypse Now – it’s there, ready to spark chemistry into actual fireworks. Some filmmakers chose to cut tastefully around the deed itself; some have thrown caution (and clothes) to the wind to show it in all its glory. Others, like Nagisa Oshima with his notoriously explicit In the Realm of the Senses, take it even further. We’ve put together 101 of the most groundbreaking sex scenes of all time to chart how the movies have chosen to put the moves on. A fair few of these films have won Academy Awards; some are classic feminist movies; controversy has stalked many of them. Let us know which ones we’re missing.RECOMMENDED: Our list of the 100 best movies of all time

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s evergreen symphonies, operas and ballets make him an icon of Russian musical culture. They thrum with a swoonsome romantic melancholy which seemingly expresses the Russian soul. His homosexuality, however, remains a contentious part of the picture. While his predilections were undoubtedly an open secret, this gristly historical drama shows us how an attempted cover marriage proved a disaster – not least for the woman who professed to love him dearly, and was callously excluded from his life. By choosing to tell the disturbing story of the discarded Antonina Miliukova rather than celebrate the great genius Tchaikovsky, writer-director Kirill Serebrennikov stands with the troubled outsider ahead of the cultural establishment. Clearly, it’s a film about the late 19th century when homophobia pushed gay men into dreadful circumstances, and women’s lowly legal status gave them virtually no civil rights. Yet in the figure of Antonina, who would not submit to myriad demands to relinquish her status as Tchaikovsky’s wife, we surely note echoes of the refuseniks in 2020s Russia facing suffocating state oppression. Serebrennikov, a noted Moscow-based director of film, theatre and opera – long mired in conflict with the Russian authorities – had not yet departed for exile in Germany when he shot the film at Mosfilm studios. Still, it plays like a determined effort to resist the expectations of cultural gatekeepers and audiences alike. We hear very little of Tch

She’s called Joy, but her life is no picnic. A Filipina maid flying under the radar without a UK visa, work allows her to sofa surf in posh London houses while the owners are away on holiday. Still, if they find out she’s hiding her stowaway daughter, deportation looms. Built-in tension sustains this keenly observed social realist tale, as the marginalised protagonist confronts a hostile immigration system, while daily facing condescending attitudes from her wealthy employers. So far, so Ken Loachian. But British-born Filipino first-time writer-director Paris Zarcilla isn’t out to make just that kind of worthy high-fibre movie. Right from the off, there’s a sinister genre-hybrid shadowing the story’s underlying threat – stalking camera moves and a sub-bass soundtrack drone suggest as much. And when Joy (Max Eigenmann) takes on a lucrative cash-in-hand gig looking after a semi-comatose old man in a dilapidated mansion, a decidedly gothic element takes hold. There are creepy ill-lit passageways, dark family secrets, and a locked wing in the big old house. And you don’t cast gimlet-eyed character actor David Hayman just to have him zonked out in bed... Needless to say, for young miss Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla, delightful), Joy’s mischief-loving daughter, this expansive new abode is a fun palace, with plenty to explore and lots of hiding places. No wonder Joy’s stress levels are rising, striving to keep her little girl safe while not dampening her natural high spirits. Centred

Having made her reputation as a contentious chronicler of NYC twentysomethings in Girls, Lena Dunham would hardly be first on anyone’s list of likely candidates to go all Monty Python and the Holy Grail and deliver a knowing medieval frolic. Turns out, she has, and it’s an adaptation of a favourite novel: Karen Cushman's similarly titled 1994 YA title, which approached the age-old problems of girlhood from the vantage point of a thirteenth-century English village. So for Bella Ramsey’s hugely relatable Catherine, dubbed ‘Birdy’ because she keeps tiny pet birds, there are hopeless crushes, a crap dad, a beloved best friend who betrays her, and the fathomless mysteries of kissing. The confusion and embarrassment of getting her first period circa 1290 however, comes with decidedly scary complications. Now that she's – technically – marriable, her cash-strapped dad (Andrew Scott, the most charming of wastrels) is swiftly eyeing her up for dowry cash-in potential. Eeeek! Given that a prime contender is Paul Kaye’s beardy, flatulent and horribly wealthy lord, the consequences are awful to contemplate, though Dunham knows she’s making a film for a family audience, so without downplaying the issues of being a powerless young girl in a patriarchal society (so what else is new?), keeps the proceedings light and breezy throughout.  If this means dialling down historically appropriate filth and squalor, so be it, and in Ramsey’s open features she has an actress who not only looks like sh

He’s a boozy Chelsea society doctor, she’s a little-regarded children’s author. Their marriage could be in its death throes. What better idea to revive it than schlepping out to the Sahara for a weekend of partying with their ‘friends’, a filthy rich gay couple in show-off mode at their renovated fort. Unsurprisingly, it does not go well. Barrelling along barely signposted desert roads in the dark, they hit and kill an Arab boy who steps out to try and hawk them some fossils.It’s a tiresome irritation for that struggling couple, the Henningers (Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain), but they can always evade such scrapes with hard cash – until the bereaved father arrives at their destination and demands an act of contrition. Does Fiennes’s fiftysomething ex-public schoolboy have it in him to feel anything for the Berber family’s loss? Adapted from Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel of the same name, this is evidently a story with literary influences, not least Paul Bowles’s ‘The Sheltering Sky’ (filmed to decorative, if somewhat empty effect by Bertolucci), where the bourgeoisie confront their empty souls in the blazing Sahara.  There’s no doubt the rich material here has a grisly fascination, its two-hour running time held together by the looming realisation the inscrutable Arab patriarch might be planning to extract a deadly payback. For writer-director John Michael McDonagh, though, the challenge is to find some useful moral wiggle room within the story's seemingly binary opposit

A life-affirming true story, with nerdy hobbyists doing what the military couldn’t, the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, in which a dozen smiley Thai schoolboys and their teacher were retrieved from certain underground doom, was bound for our cinemas from the moment the last child emerged alive from the cave. Here it is, crafted with serious care and attention by veteran director Ron Howard, whose work with Apollo 13 and the Formula 1 drama Rush make him a safe pair of hands with such fact-based fare. Viggo Mortensen and a slimline Colin Farrell provide star quality as the western cave divers who channel their niche pastime into live-saving deeds, but they don’t hog too much of the limelight. Instead, Howard scrupulously and respectfully reserves space in the story for the Thai families, authorities and local religious leaders involved.  Then again, Thirteen Hours owes its overview approach to the media feeding frenzy that kicked in once the rescue was over: National Geographic bought the rights to the cave divers’ experiences for its thrilling documentary The Rescue. And Netflix secured the story of the schoolboy football team for its as-yet-untitled Thai-made limited series. So, it’s unsurprising that the screenplay by Shadowlands writer William Nicholson gives us a bit of everything, while scrupulously avoiding the white-saviour angle after a team of Thai Navy SEALs prove unable to reach the stricken boys, lacking the special equipment or particular expertise of the middle-age

As a nipper he'd watch Italian football on TV with his dad. Now he's signed for Inter Milan at 17, and the hallowed turf of the San Siro beckons. Earning a shedload of money, Swedish teenager Martin Bengtsson is living every boy's dream. Well, not exactly, as it turns out. Adapted from Bengtsson’s own memoir, with all the other characters (presumably for legal reasons) presented as fictional versions of real people, Ronnie Sandahl's film presents an intriguing journey into a big league football academy, which proves closer to strict boarding school than the glitzy lifestyle of the marquee stars.  Martin, played convincingly by wide-eyed, uptight Erik Enge, is thrown in with the largely Italian crew who’ve been there for years. They greet this stick-thin Scandinavian with braced teeth as if some 12-year-old virgin has appeared in their midst. They're all supposed to be a team, but everyone's auditioning to be kept on or sold off, and self-involved Martin, who barely speaks a word of Italian, soon realises that ace footballing skills alone may not equip him for this cut-throat environment. It’s a vivid, chastening look inside the ruthless promised land that is top-level sport Tigers, though, impresses more for this chillingly immersive milieu than it does for the increasingly stressed figure at the heart of it. You can understand why his team mates don't exactly fall for this humourless introvert, but less clear is why Martin, with a dysfunctional family background eating away

The cave opening frames the blue sky like a human smile, as we angle upwards to spot a couple of cows peering down over the edge. It might remind some viewers of that old Oscar Wilde zinger about some of us being in the gutter but looking up at the stars, and it's certainly an opening image that's both earthbound and cosmic.Yep, this is a film about a massive hole in the ground, in Calabria, in 1961 – and if there's anyone who could even think of doing that it’s surely director Michelangelo Frammartino, the man who turned mounds of charcoal, an old shepherd, and cute baby goats into the stuff of arthouse entrancement with 2010’s Le Quattro Volte. Carefully composed and paced, this certainly looks like the work of the same filmmaker. The wind whistles and cowbells clang in a remote, verdant valley as another grizzled old geezer watches over his livestock. A timeless scene, but at night the local bar has the village's only TV set beaming in black and white images of Italy's economic miracle, which has built the country's tallest building in Milan and left the distant south far behind.  We are, in effect, watching a historical reconstruction, underlined when an official party of Piedmont speleologists bring their gear to the very same valley to explore an uncharted cave system. As their lorry negotiates its way off-road, it's like invaders have arrived from another planet. Don’t come looking for some simplistic ‘tech = bad’ vs ‘green = good’ smackdown We expect the film to dram

If you go down in the woods today, prepare for several nasty surprises. A Swedish couple have already been through a lot, having lost their daughter just before she could unwrap a vintage music box they’d picked out for her eighth birthday. Time has moved on, and they’re still together, though bickering constantly, when they decide to go off-road in deep countryside and camp out in a clearing. Where their nemesis will pounce in the form of an oddly-matched trio – a boater-topped variety entertainer, a hulking giant and a kimono-wearing lady – whose scary dog is hungry for fresh meat. Writer-director Johannes Nyholm is keener on unsettling suggestion than outright gore, although, as these terrifying events rewind and repeat, like some weird fusion of Groundhog Day and Funny Games, it seems as if the ill-fated duo are trapped in some howling feedback loop of grief and paranoia. Which doesn’t answer the question of why the three psychos are the same distinctive figures painted on the side of the aforementioned music box, whose single nursery-rhyme song about a dead cockerel (pronounced ‘koko-dee koko-day’, by the way) haunts the soundtrack like an aggressively invasive earworm. Whether all this adds up to anything is a seriously moot point, since the film gestures towards psychological portraiture before veering off into dark fable territory, and seems to be open to multiple interpretations rather than a single coherent throughline. Still, while it’s often as exasperating as its

The ANC’s white South African members played their part in the struggle for freedom, too. In this true-life drama, we see the contempt in which activists Tim Jenkin and Stephen Lee – played by Daniel Radcliffe and Daniel Webber – are held when in 1979 they’re convicted of leafleting against the regime. They’ve every right to be nervous when they arrive at a tough whites-only prison on the outskirts of Pretoria, and find themselves lumped together with the other political detainees. With little prospect of tunnelling out or scaling the high walls, they come up with an admittedly bonkers escape plan. If they can cut wooden keys the same as those hanging from their jailers’ belts, they should be able to unlock their way out... Okay, so it helps that CCTV hasn’t yet come to the facility. This gives them the run of the place at night as they face the eleven doors they need to open. Still, black British director Francis Annan presents the escalating tension with a steely grip, since evading detection is as much of a task as creating the keys from woodwork shop offcuts. Putting his wizarding days even further behind him, Radcliffe is very persuasive as the intense, focused Jenkin, who’s gnawed by anxiety the longer the process goes on. Webber has little to work with beside him, and their volatile French cohort (Mark Leonard Winter) is a fictional construct – though given that the script is based on Jenkin’s memoir, we’re not too far from the truth. That said, while the historical co

They chuck learned quotes from Pascal and Flaubert at one another, while swooning over obscure Russian movies. Welcome to the world of film students at Paris 8 uni, where no one actually wears a beret, but they smoke a lot, knock back copious amounts of red wine and sleep around, all in chic black and white. Pretentious, nous? Well, absolutely, but that’s the point of this expansive coming-of-age drama from writer-director Jean-Paul Civeyrac, who knows what’s he’s talking about since he teaches at one of Paris’s top film schools. From that brief description you’ll already know whether this sounds indescribably up itself, or a deliciously Gallic survey of a would-be artist’s formative years. It takes itself all very seriously, but ‘A Paris Education’ has strong insights into the vulnerability of lanky Lyonnais new arrival Etienne (newcomer Andranic Manet, spot-on), who comes under the potentially destructive influence of an opinionated film snob (Corentin Fila), whose supposedly wonderful films no one, of course, has ever seen. There’s a lot of pensive chat about why you’d even want to make films when the world’s obviously falling apart, and while much of the action feels hermetically timeless to a counter-productive extent, we do cumulatively get drawn into Etienne’s unfolding intellectual micro-crises. It may not have quite the emotional impact of similarly themed titles like Olivier Assayas’s ‘Late August, Early September’ or Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘Eden’, yet the film’s quiet s

An under-recognised area of Holocaust history gets an airing with this Filipino-made historical drama chronicling President Quezon’s struggles to offer Jewish families refuge from the Nazis in the early part of World War II. It’s a little-known story which means writer-director Matthew Rosen’s debut feature has to strain to explain the specific political context, to the film’s detriment. We start in 1938 when the Philippines is two years into a decade-long transition to gain full independence from the US, so America still controls visa restrictions on new arrivals. The country’s elected leader, Manuel Quezon, needs to keep Washington sweet since invasion by the Japanese is a very real prospect, but tension looms when a Jewish cigar-maker in Manila suggests inviting Jewish professionals from Germany to help the Philippines’ much-needed modernisation. The US administration has already refused entry to German Jewish refugees, so can they be persuaded to allow them into the Philippines? It’s an intriguing set-up, though the movie unfortunately makes heavy weather of moving the drama forward. There’s lots of clunky dialogue exchanges in the corridors of power, but little action to go with it, and fake vintage newsreels with not-altogether-convincing narration to help Rosen get his points across. Raymond Bagatsing is a handsome, if dramatically inert, presence as the earnest Quezon, and the movie’s reverent portrayal loses much sense of an actual human being behind the worthy aspir

Start chasing after memories and you risk disappearing down a rabbit hole, suggests this virtuoso Chinese drama. Back in his hometown after 20 years away, Luo (Jue Huang) decides to find the girl who left him all those years ago. It’s always raining in China’s tropical south-east, and while Luo’s voiceover and the roving camera echo the work of Wong Kar-wai, the surrounding urban wasteland provides a setting straight out of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’. Meanwhile, the moody atmosphere showcases a story split in two. Firstly, we cut between Luo’s quest and his possibly addled memories of the girl in question (Wei Tang from ‘Lust, Caution’). Then Luo, maybe on the verge of tracking down his elusive prey, goes to the movies, slips on his 3D glasses and the film turns into a gobsmacking extended single take in 3D. From there, things only get stranger. If you like everything cut-and-dried it might prove a slog. But as Luo’s life seems to loop back on itself, a hypnotic spell is cast. If he can just get to the end of this corridor, or up these stairs, perhaps the answer awaits? Writer-director Bi Gan has a marvellous eye for scuzzy, rainswept visual poetry. His tracking shots entice you into a miasma of memory from which there seems no escape. You may not have a clue as to the whys and wherefores of it all, but you’ll certainly know you’ve seen something.