The Death of Robin Hood is a painterly film, but a melancholy rather than a merry one. A key descriptor in the rhymes and ballads, “merry” meant “many”, in any case, not cheerful. Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlett, and the Sheriff of Nottingham do not appear in this telling, nor do men in tights and feathers in their caps. In lieu of Sherwood Forest, there’s a dreary wood where Robin (Hugh Jackman) shows a little girl, Margaret (Faith Delaney), how to use a bow and a meagre orchard that an ailing leper (Murray Bartlett) bids Robin to tend in his absence.A welcome revisionist take on the Read more ...

Bogart’s 1950s filmography reads like an X-ray of Golden Age Hollywood’s bipolar soul. That uneasy marriage of art and commerce delivered wildly varying results. Nobody could predict what would plop out next time they cranked the handle of the ailing Studio System: could be a classic, might be a turkey. For every In a Lonely Place, there was always another Left Hand of God.Bogart spent years battling studio boss Jack Warner over the quality of roles on offer. He’d sulk on his yacht with Sinatra or David Niven (not Bacall, who disliked the ocean because it lacked a branch of Tiffany’s) and Read more ...

It’s hardly surprising that director Grant Gee, one of the most outstanding documentarians around – with acclaimed films about Joy Division and Radiohead, as well as inventive explorations of writers WG Sebald and Orhan Pamuk, should make a first fiction feature that escapes the tropes and clichés of genre. His anti-biopic of pianist Bill Evans, winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival, is anything but predictable, although the theme of jazz and heroin has been a recurring topic in the movies, as if the music could not exist without the drug – think Read more ...

When Terminator 2: Judgement Day was released in 1991, it was the first film to have exceeded a $100m budget. The opening nuclear holocaust scene cost more to put on screen than the entire sum that James Cameron had had to spend back in 1984 on his first Terminator film. All that investment paid off for its backers as T2 went on to make over $520m at the box office worldwide. Four Academy awards and 35 years later, it’s still paying its backers handsomely.Given its venerable age and popularity, it doesn’t seem too big a spoiler to mention the twist that Cameron kept quiet before the initial Read more ...

Here’s something you don’t see every day at the cinema: a filmmaker tells a boring story, then makes the whole point of the film about telling a boring story. Pedro Almodóvar is known for busy, gymnastic storytelling that can sometimes be so heightened it borders, in his own words, on “hysteria”. So maybe it’s logical that, here, he’s come round to the reverse of that – a kind of anti-story featuring storytellers who are not that good at stories.One of Almodóvar’s many projects, when he’s not mixing together his favourite, fervid elements (sordidness, mothers, love, death, ruthlessness, Read more ...

Queer Cinema provocateur Gregg Araki’s first feature in 12 years, after the atypical White Bird in a Blizzard, sees him return to his signature themes – sex and sexuality – and trademark comedic style: raunchy, frantic, candy-coloured, surreal and provocative. I Want Your Sex may not feel as scintillating as Nowhere or The Doom Generation, but there’s something endearing about the fact that the director, now in his Sixties, still has something to say about young people in society. And he remains a gleefully, and refreshingly unrestrained filmmaker. It starts Read more ...

Joan Littlewood’s stage production of Oh! What a Lovely War was a huge success when premiered at Stratford East in 1963. Loosely based on a documentary-style BBC radio musical, it showed the key events of World War I portrayed by a commedia dell'arte troupe taking on multiple roles, the score based on popular songs of the time. A film adaptation seemed inevitable, though Richard Attenborough’s 1969 widescreen epic (his debut as a director) was made without any input from Littlewood, understandably worried about how her pithy, low-budget creation would survive its transition to celluloid. Read more ...

Anyone who’s ever been to a movie set can’t help but struggle to reconcile the utter dismembered chaos of these workplaces with the smooth joined-up pseudo reality of the finished screen product. This jaunty, knowing third feature from Jane Schoenbrun – in which the teen slasher genre more or less eats itself – half-wants us to believe that the tortured film production process flows backwards. That is, the movie comes first. Then it sets out to assemble itself in the real world, torturing everyone all the more.It tells of a 29-year-old cultish filmmaker called Kris (Hannah Einbinder) with a Read more ...

This is a barrel of fun, an adrenalised, old-school monster movie made with ferocious commitment by It Follows’ David Robert Mitchell. Setting dinosaurs loose in Eighties suburbia stress-tests the marriage of Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), and proves prehistoric predators can still scare deliciously.We open in a platonic American suburban ideal, filmed with home movie dreaminess. It’s a deliberately Spielbergian scene, reinforced by Michael Giacchino’s sweeping pastiche John Williams/Jerry Goldsmith score; the director and his dark side Stephen King’s fondly recalled Read more ...

Vicky Krieps is a guarantor of female integrity, whose characters rail against or ride roughshod over gender restrictions. Star turns from Phantom Thread’s steely ingenue to Corsage’s empress fighting to breathe share a searching, nonconformist intelligence and sensual warmth sometimes sheathed for survival. Love Me Tender’s Clémence seems a defining role. Fighting for custody of her child and expression of her queer, artistic identity when society expects more conservative motherhood, she’s a warrior in an unwinnable war.Director Anna Cazenave Cambet’s adaptation of Constance Debré’s Read more ...

The strongest element in Tony is the performance that Antonio Banderas gives as ‘Chef’, the owner of a seafood restaurant in the holiday resort of Provincetown in the late Seventies. It’s a subtle, nuanced delivery despite a script which doesn't give the actor much to work with.  He could have just drifted into playing a saintly mentor, but somehow Banderas finds complexity in the role.If only the same could be said of Dominic Sessa, who repurposes his debut performance as  a surly youth, a cocktail of ego and insecurity, from The Holdovers. It’s easy to see why Sessa would be Read more ...

“How many cancer patients does it take to change a lightbulb? One and then 12 to say, ‘How inspiring.’” Bad taste jokes are all the rage among the kids at the summer camp for teenage cancer survivors in this quirky, uneven, coming-of-age rom-com directed and written by George Jacques, who is an ambassador for the Teenage Cancer Trust and whose mother had breast cancer for long stretches of his childhood. There’s something rather contrived about his project though the cast is impressive and the film is well meaning and sometimes uplifting.Seventeen-year-old Ivy (an expressive Bella Ramsey) has Read more ...