Critics might have fallen for Luca Guadagnino’s erotic tennis romp but it’s a vapid string of disappointing choicesI have spent the week and a half since seeing Challengers on the brink of throwing a racquet-trashing, expletive-scattering, McEnroe-style tantrum. Is Hawkeye working? Did they not see it? How, for an exhausting Mahut-Isner length of huffing...

Cauleen Smith’s 1998 debut about a California girl who takes Polaroids of young black men as an endangered-species record, is captivatingThe title is an African American term from the US south meaning “ordinary” or “ordinariness” – but there’s nothing ordinary about this 1998 indie from artist and film-maker Cauleen Smith, rereleased for its 25th anniversary....

La Chimera looks like a crime caper about looters in 1980s Italy. But it’s about way more than that. The great director, loved by everyone from Scorsese to Gerwig, talks about the dark secrets of the heart – and her debt to beesAlice Rohrwacher could be the European arthouse made flesh, or its distilled essence, bottled and preserved for the ages. She’s...

Pierrette is beset with troubles, from a robbery to a house flood and more, but the neorealist drama comes with solidarity and surprising humourThe simple image of pushing a seam through a sewing machine becomes a profound life statement in Rosine Mbakam’s debut feature, which is focused on talented clothier Pierrette (played by the director’s cousin...

Eka Chavleishvili is superb as an unmarried fortysomething woman whose life is turned upside-down by romance in Elene Naveriani’s handsome dramaThe local gossips, with their tittering, pitying glances, might find it hard to believe, but 48-year-old Etero (Eka Chavleishvili) is single by choice. Finally free from the overbearing chauvinism of her father...

Soudade Kaadan’s poetic tale of family life in the bombed-out Syrian capital is visually poetic, if a touch too theatricalThere’s an unexpected flourish of magical realism in this story of life under siege in Syria. Fourteen-year-old Zeina (Hala Zein) lives with her mother and father in Damascus; at the dogged insistence of her father, Mutaz (Samer...