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Tallinn 2025: Our festival highlights
Returning for its 29th edition, Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) this year named Júlia de Paz Solvas’ The Good Daughter as the 2025 Grand Prix winner, with the Best Director award going to Turkish filmmaker Ali Vatansever for his emotive drama LifeLike.
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#LFF 2025: Broken English review
★★★★☆ Doing for English singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull what they did for Nick Cave in 2014’s 20,000 Days on Earth, Broken English (2025) finds filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard in inventive form once again.
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#LFF 2025: Black is Beautiful – The Kwame Brathwaite Story review
★★★☆☆ Black is Beautiful (2025) seeks to unravel the titular slogan of black empowerment, tracing it all the way back to a pointedly little-known photographer and activist from Harlem, Kwame Brathwaite.
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#LFF 2024: It’s Not Me review
★★★★☆ A swift but singular filmmaking self-portrait, Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me reflects on the French auteur’s 40-year directorial career, as well as his many cinematic – and canine – influences.
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#LFF 2024: Conclave review
★★★★☆ Ralph Fiennes approaches top form as a spiritually and morally-conflicted cardinal during a Vatican Conclave in Edward Berger’s gripping, oft-humorous follow-up to the multi-Oscar-winning All Quiet On the Western Front.
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Film Review: Firebrand
★★☆☆☆ “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,” Percy Shelley once wrote in his sonnet England in 1819. He was firing his barbs at King George III but the words could just as well be used for any number of English monarchs including Henry VIII.
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Film Review: About Dry Grasses
★★★★★ Turkish master director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to the Cannes Croisette with About Dry Grasses, a wonderful wintry meditation on male fragility and the way we often make our own hells and then deceive ourselves that we’re trapped.
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Film Review: Green Border
★★★★☆ From sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan, Syria to Iraq and Iran, the climate crisis, drought, war, and oppression has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is treated as an ethical conundrum, but it isn’t. Either we wish to save those who are in danger of dying, or all our talk of human rights…
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Cannes 2024: Sean Baker’s Anora wins Palme d’Or
The 77th Cannes Film Festival concluded with a shift to the new generation. Notable awards went to Sean Baker’s Anora and Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
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Film Review: Challengers
★★★★☆ With Luca Guadagnino’s terrific Challengers, the acclaimed director of Call Me By Your Name brings us the sub-genre we never knew we needed: the erotic tennis thriller.
LFF 2026