Rafa Sales Ross

Festivals
The festival’s new creative director, Kristy Matheson, and her programming team select 10 personal favourites from this year’s lineup.
Returning to its traditional August slot after nearly 15 years and to a fully in-person format after two, the Edinburgh International Film Festival (12 to 20 August 2022) this year marks its 75th edition and the inaugural event under new creative director Kristy Matheson.
Alongside a reimagined central competition, the Powell and Pressburger Award fo...

Films are inherent tools of empathy, capable of significantly widening our worldview in a relatively short amount of time. This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival offers plenty of food for thought, starting with the clothes you are wearing right now. Becky Hutner’s incisive Fashion Reimagined follows British fashion designer Amy Powney as she travels from the wide fields of South America to family-owned European mills in search of the elusive answer to a vital question: is sustainab...

A bromance like none other, the story of an inventor and his robot has stolen our hearts. Rafaela Sales Ross meets one of the men we have to thank for it, Brian and Charles director Jim Archer.
With his feature debut, director Jim Archer managed to gracefully do what few others can: to build a deeply heartfelt exploration of loneliness that is also genuinely funny. Brian and Charles, based on Archer’s 2017 short film of the same name written by and starring David Earl and Chris Hayward, tells...

A sea sponge has no nervous system. It has no eyes, ears, or mouth. It can’t physically feel a thing. Yet, step on a sea sponge, and you’ll feel pain. Observe their vivid colors, their intrinsic nooks, and cranes, and you’ll feel awe. Hold them in your hand, and they’ll tickle — maybe you’ll spare a chuckle or two. Carrie Cracknell’s newest adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel “Persuasion” is the very opposite. It has a metaphorical nervous system — it moves and breathes. It has eyes and...

David Earl and Chris Hayward write and star in this hilarious, poignant and very British tale of a man and his artificial best friend
What a lovely thing it is to giggle. That belly-born, body-shaking, thunderous burst of laughter – harder to achieve as a goal rather than a consequence. But it's a reaction that director Jim Archer and writers David Earl and Chris Hayward manage to provoke in huge quantities across the length of their hilarious British comedy Brian and Charles, which tells the...

Ninja Thyberg’s ‘Pleasure’ is the latest in a line of great cinema about the complicated(?) industry.
A young, tanned Richard Gere as the American Gigolo. Jane Fonda rocking a shaggy bob and a glimmering turtleneck in Klute. Pretty Woman-era Julia Roberts in thigh-high PVC boots. Hollywood icons are often forged in the fire of portraying sex workers on-screen, and it takes a certain kind of actor to pull off the charm of a streetwise hustler without coming off corny, or badly mischaracterisin...

New films like Good Luck to You, Leo Grande are challenging cinematic tropes about sex workers. It's a refreshing change, writes Rafa Sales Ross.
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In the 1990 classic Pretty Woman, when Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) first picks up Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) in the luxury silver sportscar he borrowed from his lawyer, there is an implication he is somewhat oblivious to the fact that the woman is a sex worker. The businessman, a New Yorker lost amid the vast highways of Los Angeles, is initially...

O Festival de Cannes chegou ao fim na última semana e a Glamour te conta o que esperar dos filmes que passaram pela premiação; confira

Em grande retorno ao formato completo após cancelar a edição de 2020 e reduzir a capacidade da edição de 2021, o Festival de Cannes deste ano foi marcado por uma programação diretamente influenciada pelos turbulentos anos de pandemia. Foram muitos filmes mais intimistas, e a diversidade do catálogo caiu drasticamente. Nenhum longa brasileiro entrou pra lista d...

Depois do sucesso da série baseada no livro de Sally Rooney, Paul Mescal surpreende em Cannes nos filmes "Aftersun" e "God's Creature"
Durante o primeiro lockdown, em meados de 2020, Pessoas Normais (Normal People) se tornou o grande fenômeno de entretenimento dos tempos de pandemia. Baseada no best-seller de mesmo nome escrito por Sally Rooney, a série dirigida por Lenny Abrahamson conta a história de Connell (Paul Mescal) e Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones), um casal de adolescentes cuja históri...

From Top Gun to Eyes Wide Shut. There’s a reason Tom Cruise has been a megastar for nearly 40 years.

There aren’t many stars like Tom Cruise. Across four decades of superfame, he’s sustained a larger-than-life gravitational pull. His on-screen charisma; that lambent grin – audiences are as defenceless against them today as they were when Cruise first made his name in the early 1980s.

Introduced to viewers with minor roles in middling dramas Endless Love and Taps (both 1981), he rapidly ...

Riley Keough's directorial debut thrives in its depiction of youth but falls down whenever it shoots for social commentary

Many recent films come to mind while watching Riley Keough and Gina Gammell’s directorial debut War Pony. There is the lewd decadency of Sean Baker’s unofficial sex worker trilogy, the frequently claustrophobic political undertones of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, the sluggish rhythms of a small community laid out in Chloe Zhao’s The Rider, and the naïve ingeniousness of childr...

This true crime procedural from the Border writer-director relies too heavily on beaten tropes and brutal violence to make its point
Between the years 2000 and 2001, Iranian construction worker Saeed Hanaei (played in this fictionalised account by Mehdi Bajestani) killed between 16 and 19 women in Mashhad, a city famously known as a destination for religious pilgrimage. Posing as a client, the man picked up sex workers from the streets of his neighbourhood and took them to his house, where he...

This nuanced look at parenthood, with Paul Mescal, announces its debut director Charlotte Wells as a major talent right out of the gate
As children slowly grow into adults, romantic naïveté giving way to anxious trepidations, the all-engulfing realities of life are made clearer by the realisation that their parents have onetime had to walk the same trembling paths. It is at this point that one begins to wonder: who were the ones who made me before they even thought of making me? In Charlotte ...

Yes, Armageddon (1998) gave us Steve Buscemi as an astronaut. And true, The Day After Tomorrow (2004) blessed us with the archetypal ’00s pairing of Jake Gyllenhaal and Emmy Rossum. Hell, even overlooked gem The Core (2003) found its way into the collective consciousness thanks to the indelible charm of Stanley Tucci’s silver-fox wig. But still, the paramount disaster movie of the last quarter-century remains Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (1998).
Baby-faced Elijah Wood is Leo Biederman, a high-sch...

In the late 19th century, two French psychiatrists coined the term “folie à deux,” literally translated as madness for two, to describe what is now widely referred to as shared psychotic disorder, or when two — or more — people transmit delusional beliefs and occasional hallucinations to one another. The condition is most common in people closely related, who live in intimate proximity, and has been lengthily dissected by academics. There is no defined cause for the condition, but factors suc...