sun 27/07/2025

Film Reviews

The Campaign

Jasper Rees

Mostly thanks to Armando Iannucci, we are currently spoilt for political satire. Between the two of them Veep and The Thick of It have Westminster and Washington running for cover: to use that gratingly pious phrase, they speak truth to power. One behemoth that Iannucci has yet to bring down is the befuddling, clusterfucked idiocy of the American electoral machine.

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Holy Motors

Emma Simmonds

Stop me if you know this one. What do you get if you combine Gallic absurdity with a pristine, pouting Eva Mendes and Kylie as a suicidal chanteuse? The answer, it turns out, is gloriously unpredictable entertainment – by turns satirical, melancholy and effervescently eccentric.

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Looper

Emma Simmonds

Rian Johnson’s spunky debut Brick (2005) fused the past with the present, the old with the young, as high-school kids inhabited the archetypal characters and played out scenarios from 1940s noir. It worked beautifully. His third film Looper - whilst sharing Brick’s love of posturing dialogue and shadowy villainy - looks forward and then forward again and finds that the future is far from bright.

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Barbara

james Woodall

For a remarkable BBC Radio Four half-hour programme broadcast on 14 September, The Stasi Jigsaw Puzzle, Chris Bowlby pieced together tales of treachery in the former German Democratic Republic. At one point a 1950s recording of a trial of a woman was played. Her cries above the rasping sound of the judge, if that’s what he was, sentencing her to death was one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever heard.

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Killing Them Softly

Emma Simmonds

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray.

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Santa Sangre

Tom Birchenough

Circus and church, and a whole lot of other extremes, come up against each other in bewildering opposition in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s re-released 1989 Santa Sangre, a cult film of which it could truly be said, “They don’t make them like this any more.” It’s practically a one-off, visually spectacular and musically vibrant; if you’re looking for equivalents, Buñuel, Ken Russell at his most hysterical, and the Italian horror-and-gore genre of the Seventies (think Berberian Sound...

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Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel

Karen Krizanovich

It is said of many people, but for Diana Vreeland it was true: she remains fashion’s once and future queen. An enduring legend of a notoriously vicious and ephemeral world, the Paris-loving Anglo-American had a magical life as a heralded columnist and editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not blessed with what one may call traditional beauty, Vreeland understood style - proportion, colour, flair, flow and accent.

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Hysteria

alexandra Coghlan

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is a truth less universally acknowledged that a married woman in possession of a rich Victorian husband must be in want of a vibrator.

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Premium Rush

Karen Krizanovich

It's not like we don't already love him, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt couldn't possibly get more adorable than he is as the fearsomely skilled bike-riding good guy in Premium Rush - a film that may remind older moviegoers of a 1986 bike messenger film Quicksilver.

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Hope Springs

Matt Wolf

Even Meryl Streep, bless her, is allowed the odd dud, and Hope Springs is a snore. Much has been made of the film shifting Hollywood’s attention toward the middle-aged – meaning, in their terms, anyone 20 or older.

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To Rome With Love

Matt Wolf

Woody Allen plays tour operator (yet again) in the excruciating To Rome With Love, and the result is not a pretty sight. Oh, sure, the Eternal City looks great, in the manner of one of those vibrant, come-hither videos that one might expect at a travel convention.

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The Sweeney

Adam Sweeting

If you saw previous Nick Love efforts like The Football Factory or Outlaw, you'll know he likes nothing better than a lairy swagger down Geezer Street while slaughtering innocent bystanders. He's at it again here, with this glaringly unnecessary remake of  Seventies cop show The Sweeney, a TV institution that very nearly justifies the use of the crassly abused-to-death term "iconic".

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Tabu

Graham Fuller

A wondrous antidote to digital movies’ colonisation of the darkening continent of cinema, Miguel Gomes’s luminously black-and-white Tabu is a tripartite paean to the past: to the perils of Portuguese imperialism in Africa; to Hollywood silent movies as they transitioned to sound; to an adulterous affair that trapped its enraptured lovers for the remaining 50 years of their lives.

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Anna Karenina: The Rave

Matt Wolf

A curtain rises at the start of Joe Wright’s thrilling film version of Anna Karenina only for the finish several hours later to be accompanied in time-honoured fashion by the words “the end”.

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Anna Karenina: The Pan

alexandra Coghlan

“You can’t ask why about love,” Aaron Johnson’s Count Vronsky croons tenderly to his beloved, pink lips peeking indecently out through his flasher’s mac of a moustache. Maybe you can’t, but you certainly can ask why you’d take a thousand-page realist novel and choke it in the grip of meta-theatrical conceptualising and Brechtian by-play. Anna Karenina feels as though its director just discovered the fourth wall and felt the need to graffiti all over it: “Joe Wright woz ere.”

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Shut Up and Play the Hits

Lisa-Marie Ferla

According to US television anchor Stephen Colbert, there are only three ways to end your career as a rock star: overdose, overstay your welcome or write Spiderman: The Musical.

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