The first two hours *****

The last half hour ***

Hoping to reveal to mankind the hitherto censored truth about aliens visiting Earth, a man and a woman flee their pursuers across the United States – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, June 10th

The plot is in the title. This is the day we find out. The day when everything is revealed. As in the film’s posters. The man (Josh O’Connor from Rebuilding, Max Walker-Silverman, 2025; The History of Sound, Oilver Hermanus, 2025; La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher, 2023) and the woman (Emily Blunt from The Fall Guy, David Leitch, 2024; Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan, 2023; A Quiet Place, John Krasinski, 2018)) saw a deer and a bird. The implication is that that encounter caused them to see and understand; the title further suggests that they want to disseminate that understanding to the wider world. All this sounds very evangelical to me: receive the message, get the word out. You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free.

Daniel (O’Connor) has been caught with a rucksack containing a bunch of objects.… Read the rest

***1/2

Cyborg artist Neil Harbisson, unable to see in colour, has had an antenna implanted in his head to hear colours instead – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 20th

This opens with a title sequence of weird, psychedelic images of what appears to be moving coloured liquids forming strange, never to be repeated natural patterns. If that implies a striking visual sensibility, that’s deceptive, since this documentary follows a fairly straightforward structure of following people around with cameras and talking to them as it introduces us to cyber artist Neil Harbisson and his artist partner Moon Ribas.

Neil stands out from other people because he has an antenna protruding from the back of his head to dangle in front of his forehead. He was born with the unusual condition of achromatism, which means that he sees not in colour but in monochrome. (Less severe, more common forms of colour blindness include the inability to differentiate between green and red.) This came to light in his childhood when the family got a new colour TV, and he and his sister would watch cartoons. At this point, the film throws in a clip of the children’s sci-fi cartoon series Robotrix (John Gibbs, Terry Lennon, 1985).… Read the rest

*****

The story of two lives – an old woman dying in Laos and a goat born in Zanzibar – and the connection between them – is out in cinemas in the UK in the new year on Friday, January 26th following its screening in the 2023 London Film Festival

You think you’ve seen everything there is to see in movies, and then along comes a movie that does something unexpected that completely breaks the mould. In the middle of this film, we are invited to close our eyes and not open them again until asked; if we follow this instruction, something extraordinary occurs.

The word Samsara is used in a number of Asian religious systems (notably Hinduism and Buddhism) to denote the idea of a constant cycle of reincarnation: you are born, you die, you are reborn in another form, you die, you are reborn in another form, an so on. This idea is contrary to that of the Judeo-Christian religions in which you are born, you die, once only, and you are judged.

What Samsara does so brilliantly is show us the first of these two systems, showing the end of one life and the beginning of another.… Read the rest