BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER rarely fails to be entertaining, with the visuals and performances taking the film a long way. However, they are fleeting thrills in the service of an unmemorable story. Edward Berger’s film looks like a high roller, but it’s playing with buttons and matchsticks.
TO OUR FRIENDS posits some kind of theory about the tectonic shifts our social worlds go through and forwards that theory with documentarian conventions. In attempting to figure themselves out, people are always making it up as they go along, and their relationships may thrive or suffer in the wake of life’s vicissitudes. Wave after wave might strike us, and all we can really do is just keep treading water.
Nora Fingscheidt’s third feature film, THE OUTRUN, offers a raw and honest look into the life of an addict in the Orkney Islands of Northern Scotland. Based on Amy Liptrot’s critically acclaimed memoir of the same name, this film proves to be a faithful adaptation of a source that is part journal and part nature textbook.
A PALE VIEW OF HILLS lives up to a strong cinematic legacy of Ishiguro adaptations with its stunning, dreamy aesthetic and the performances of a talented cast across generations, but the script does not achieve the nuances of its preceding adaptations.
Overall, the ARE YOU KIDDING? strand of short films at London Film Festival 2025 has (for the most part) a commanding understanding of tone, pitching the collection into a tradition of morbid, dark and absurd humour.
Equal parts comical and concerning, LEFT-HANDED GIRL is about resilience in a man’s world, with a five-year-old’s innocent questions shattering illusions and bringing about change.
THE SMASHING MACHINE is an accomplished enough film, but the narrative seems to be all exploratory jabs and no haymaker. Safdie’s film skips deftly around several cliches, but fails to use that fancy footwork to advance something memorable of its own.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s proven filmmaking ability makes ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER a technically accomplished picture that is gripping and entertaining, taking sides in the battle for history without losing its capacity for doubt.
If any short contains the thesis of presenting the Gazan anthology FROM GROUND ZERO together, it is arguably a line from Mustafa Al-Nabih’s OFFERINGS: “We know they had a past, dreams, a life, and a future”.
TOGETHER makes an ambitious leap towards heady metaphors, but fails to fuse itself to an otherwise exciting and provocative emerging canon in horror cinema.
