There's something unsatisfying about the fact that Asif Kapadia's new documentary on the controversial 1980s sporting legend Diego Maradona has a two-word title. It would have created a neat synchronicity with his previous two films (Amy and Senna), but we soon learn why this is the case.Kapadia's central thrust is the dichotomy of the public and private lives of a superstar, whose legend even the uninitiated are familiar with. The private figure is Diego – a sweet (self-described) mummy's boy from the slums of Argentina who rose through the sporting ranks to become the greatest football Read more ...

The best joke in Men in Black: International happens before the film starts, when the iconic Columbia Pictures lady in a toga whips out a pair of familiar dark glasses. It’s a nifty, witty gag that doesn’t outstay its welcome, which is more than can be said for the feature that follows. The original stars are absent and there’s an absence too of the screwball humour that made the first film, back in 1997 such a hit. Gone is Agent Tommy Lee Jones with his dry wit (or his simulacrum in Men in Black 3, Josh Brolin) and gone is Agent Will Smith with his gleeful energy. Instead we have two Read more ...

A starring role for Scrabble is one of the things that sets this small-scale but deceptively affecting film apart. Writer Frank Cottrell Boyce (a regular collaborator with Michael Winterbottom) based his script on his own short story, Triple Word Score, and with director Carl Hunter has developed it into a beautifully crafted meditation on loss and learning to live with your mistakes.The fastidiously-dressed Alan (Bill Nighy, doing a nicely underplayed Liverpool accent) is a tailor by trade and a Scrabble obsessive by choice. He’s also a bit of a con-man, as we learn when he hustles Arthur ( Read more ...

“When we were brothers we wanted more: more volume, more muscles, us three, us kings.” So begins documentary-maker Jeremiah Zagar’s faithful but watered-down adaptation of Justin Torres’s autobiographical coming-out novel, set in the 1990s.Zagar's first feature film, it stars sweet-faced Evan Rosado as Jonah, the 10-year-old narrator and youngest of the three brothers, all first-time actors giving stand-out performances. The movie lacks the book’s ferocious impact (best not to read it before watching) but, shot on 16mm film, it has a dreamy, lyrical beauty. Zagar cites Ken Loach's early films Read more ...

Tomorrow, Martin Scorsese delivers, via Netflix, two hours and 22 minutes of screen time devoted to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, following on from the release last week of the latest Bootleg Series boxed set, 14 CDs covering five full concerts from November and December 1975, as well as rehearsals and sundry soundboard cuts from other shows. Casual fans may be content with the excellent 2 CD Rolling Thunder set issued back in the Noughties; collectors, however, will be clearing shelf room to set it alongside the rest of an increasingly cyclopean Bootleg Series. The rehearsals, Read more ...

Revisiting Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career for the first time since I saw it in its year of release, 1979, is a mixed experience. I was close in age to its heroine and it was one of the first mainstream feature films I’d ever seen directed by a woman. At the time, it seemed incredibly exciting and inspiring and while the film is still impressive and enjoyable, it’s somewhat less radical than I remembered. The film’s glorious costumes, ornate interiors and repetitive piano score threaten to obliterate its relatively subtle feminist message: I remembered it as more Read more ...

With the continued prevalence of acid attacks in the UK, it was only a matter of time before they became the subject of a film. Thank goodness, then, it's handled with such unflinching care as it is in Dirty God. Director and writer Sacha Polak makes her English-language debut in this deliberate and well-paced drama.Jade (Vicky Knight) is trying to settle back into life after being attacked by her ex-partner. Much of her face and torso have been scarred, but she’s ready to move on. Sadly, the public is not as ready as she is; strangers call her names, eyes constantly stare, and even her own Read more ...

Eating Animals begins as a David and Goliath tale of independent farmers versus industrial farming. Frank Reese specialises in rare-breed turkeys and chickens. He calls his farm the "Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch" because, for him, his traditional way of farming is akin to a religious experience. And when asked which of his birds matters most, the thought of having to choose almost reduces him to tears.Paul Willis has a similarly passionate commitment to the pigs roaming freely on his ranch; his pork is delicious, but while he sends 3,000 pigs a week for slaughter, a factory farm can produce 4, Read more ...

This debut feature from Mark Gillis is a film of real anger and considerable tenderness. The anger is both at the general situation it depicts, and reveals itself in the particular when his protagonist Micky Mason (Martin Herdman) repeatedly has to restrain himself from acts of violence – a punch thrown, a brick through a windscreen – that would tip him over the edge. For a crucial few seconds he manages to hold himself back, but we sense the desperate effort involved.Sink is an East London film, its location defined by close proximity to the towers of the City, their insistent presence Read more ...

One day, when superhero films are as rare as westerns, we will appreciate the brilliant talent applied to the best of them. X-Men: Dark Phoenix moves with a classic’s smooth conviction from its very first scenes. The simple changing of a family’s car radio station on a sunny Seventies day gives mutant Jean Grey a taste of her power’s tragic potential, then we slam into the film’s Nineties present, where the adult Grey (Sophie Turner) is part of the X-Men’s rescue of a space shuttle crew, a desperate mission of seat-clenching excitement which ends with her absorbing a cosmic storm. The queasy Read more ...

“Get me rewrite!”: That’s likely to be a common reaction to Late Night, the well-meaning but surprisingly slipshod star vehicle for Emma Thompson set in and among the writing world of a New York late-night chat show that is hitting the skids. Thompson brings a peppery command (and some seriously stylish hair) to the role of Katherine Newbury, a disdainful small-screen personality who refers to her writing staff not by their names but by numbers.And yet time and again, Mindy Kaling’s script seems itself in need of doctoring from one of Katherine’s put-upon scribes. You applaud the film’s Read more ...

With Gloria (2013), A Fantastic Woman (2017) and Disobedience (2018), Chile’s Sebastián Lelio has earned a deserved reputation as a sympathetic director of women. It may seem a strange move for him to remake Gloria only a few years after the Spanish-language original, but Lelio claims he was inspired to do it by a meeting with Julianne Moore, who said she’d do it if he would direct.The action has been transplanted to Los Angeles from Santiago, with both the English script and many of the camera shots closely following the 2013 version. It’s the story of a 50-something divorcée determined to Read more ...