★★★★★ - STUFF  - It's hardly a bonus of Covid-19, but with very few films being made available for cinemas to show, there are some unexpected treats finding space on the big screen that might otherwise have gone undistributed and unremarked. So, as well as welcome repeat runs for Parasite, Knives…

★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN  - Julia Garner excels as a junior assistant to a predatory media mogul boss in Kitty Green’s powerfully understated #MeToo drama -  A performance of few words but immense physical eloquence by Julia Garner anchors this impressively chilling #MeToo-era drama about workplace…

★★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN  - Cornish film-maker Mark Jenkin’s breakthrough feature is a thrillingly adventurous labour of love – a richly textured, rough-hewn gem in which form and content are perfectly combined. A refreshingly authentic tale of tensions between locals and tourists in a once-thriving…

★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN - Nick Broomfield’s riveting documentary gives us a vivid snapshot of the early 1960s and a complicated, mysterious love story. In this era, the poet and future music star Leonard Cohen fell in love with a beautiful and sensitive Norwegian woman called Marianne Ihlen on the…

★★★★ - STUFF  - Director Ladj Ly was at home when the events that inspired Les Misérables unfolded. He already had a series of short documentaries to his name.  Witnessing an act of police brutality inspired him to get his camera out again and put together a sweeping portrait of the largely North…

★★★★ - STUFF  - The year is 1984 – of course – and in Soviet Russia, the most famous and beloved stand-up comic of them all is Boris Arkadyev. Boris is hitting middle-age like a beetle hits a windscreen. His material is stale, but still wildly popular with the audiences on the state-sanctioned…

★★★★ - STUFF  - Eva Green is superb in this French Film Fest headliner -  Before we see Eva Green light up the small screen as Lydia Wells in the BBC/TVNZ co-production of Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, there's a chance to see her luminous qualities on display as part of this year's French Film…

★★★★★ - STUFF  - Why you need to see Mark Ruffalo's new movie -  Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) was Taft, Stettinius & Hollister's great white hope. For eight years, the Cincinnati corporate defence lawyer had skilfully helped the law firm's key petroleum company clients mitigate and avoid any…

★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN  - In this gripping real-life thriller, Mark Ruffalo plays a lawyer who takes on the company that dumped toxic chemicals in West Virginia for decades -  Todd Haynes is such a distinctive authorial voice in American cinema, a genius from left field, notably addressing identity…

★★★★★ - FLICKS  - Fleabag viewers will find so many reasons to love the NT Live solo performance -  Phoebe Waller-Bridge performs her award-winning solo show Fleabag (inspiration for the TV phenomenon of the same name) in a live recording from London’s West End that’s in limited cinema release…

★★★★★ - DAILY MAIL - MILITARY WIVES DESERVE A CHORUS OF APPROVAL -  This hugely engaging, enormously moving film tells the true story of the first Military Wives choir, the one that started even before choirmaster Gareth Malone and the BBC got in on the act. It hits all the right notes, with Dame…

★★★★ - STUFF  - The Ukrainian famine of 1932 to 1934 – The Holodomor – is a still little understood disaster. Whether or not the mass starvation was the result of a deliberate policy by Joseph Stalin to destroy the Ukrainian resistance movement is debated, as is the number of deaths. Three million…