International: Europe Reviews
SILENT FRIEND Review: If Trees Could Talk
Tony Leung stars in his first European production, directed by Ildiko Enyedi. Léa Seydoux also stars.
HERESY Review: Dark Medieval Horror That Is Quite Fun
Didier Konings' folk horror film stars Anneke Sluiters, Len Leo Vincent, and Reinout Bussemaker.
HOKUM Review: Nonstop Fright Factory
Adam Scott stars in Damian McCarthy's latest chiller.
AMRUN Review: Austere and Solitary Observer with Confused Psyche
Jasper Billerbeck, Laura Tonke, Lisa Hagmeister, and Kian Köppke star in this historical drama.
Diagonale 2026 Review: MOTHER'S BABY Masks a Paranoid Thriller Within an Ambiguous Psychological Portrait
Marie Leuenberger and Claes Bang star. Austrian filmmaker Johanna Moder tackles post-partum depression and potential psychosis as a slow-burning paranoid thriller, where maternal anxiety is filtered through an unreliable perspective and edged with traces of dark humour.
Diagonale 2026 Review: WHITE SNAIL Subverts Girl-Meets-Boy Into Anti-Romance
Austrian-German filmmakers Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter's fiction debut reworks social drama conventions into a psychologically driven, docu-fiction hybrid centred on an unstable relationship shaped by loneliness, death and an implied autocratic backdrop.
Diagonale 2026 Review: PORTRAIT OF NOWNESS Assembles a Fragmented Mosaic
Co-created by Juri Rechinsky and Mario Hainzl, the film constructs a first-person docu-experiment in which body-camera footage across multiple continents reframes notions of everyday life through contrasting conditions of normalcy.
Diagonale 2026 Review: THE STORIES Turns Familiar Tragicomic Family Saga Tropes into Finetuned Crowd-pleaser
Abu Bakr Shawky's film unfolds as a multi-generational family saga that situates an intimate love story within the shifting social and political landscape of Egypt from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Diagonale 2026 Review: WAX & GOLD Probes Memory and Myth of Ethiopia's Beloved Autocrat
Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann uses the spatial and historical layers of the Hilton Addis Ababa to examine how the legacy of Haile Selassie is constructed, negotiated and contested through personal memory, archival material and competing narratives.
Diagonale 2026 Review: ROSE, Sandra Hüller Excels in Period Drama Examining Pursuit of Freedom Through Cross-dressing
Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer's third feature casts Sandra Hüller as a woman who adopts a male identity within a Protestant farming community during the Thirty Years' War in order to secure property, labour autonomy and social legitimacy otherwise inaccessible to her.
THE STRANGER Review: Senseless Actions, Racist History
François Ozon adapts Albert Camus' classic novel, giving a deeper context of understanding the protagonist's senseless actions, based on France's racist colonial history.
ALPHA Review: Violent Grief and Desperate Love
Grief is not a straight line that slowly leads from deep sorrow to acceptance and remembrance; it comes in waves, and can reignite like a bonfire at the strangest moments, even decades on. Fear can likewise come like an tornado...
THE STRANGER Review: Cool Aloofness
Francois Ozon's new version of Albert Camus' book debuted at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
KONTINENTAL '25 Review: Escalating Into Crisis, Guilt, and Complicity
Eszter Tompa stars in Radu Jude's provocative drama.
Thessaloniki 2026 Review: CANDIDATES OF DEATH, Homemade Horror from Poland
A long-term experiment in filmmaking, Candidates of Death started almost 20 years ago when documentarian Maciej Cuske took his son Stasiu and his friends Rafal and Adrian on a vacation. Friends since kindergarten, the three youths were fans of horror...
TWO PROSECUTORS Review: Horror in a Bureaucratic Hell
Sergei Loznitsa's newest film stars Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, and Anatoli Beliy.
MIROIRS NO. 3 Review: Compact and Masterful, with Affecting Performances
Christian Petzold's film stars Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, and Enno Trebs.
LATE SHIFT Review: Nursing Care Under an Overwhelming Workload
Leonie Benesch delivers a restrained yet striking performance in Petra Volpe's unsparingly realist feature.
SXSW 2026 Review: HOKUM, Be Very Afraid Of Damian McCarthy's Latest
In 2024 Damian McCarthy lit up the horror world with his quietly terrifying Oddity, a film I reviewed for its SXSW world premiere, and while it was topping year end horror lists left and right, I was a bit less...
Berlinale 2026 Review: TRACES Follows Survivor Networks Documenting Wartime Sexual Violence
Ukrainian filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko, working with co-director Marysia Nikitiuk, examines the documentation of conflict-related sexual violence during Russia's war against Ukraine through the work of survivor and activist Iryna Dovhan.
