Film Reviews
All Happy Families review - unhappy in their own waySaturday, 15 March 2025
Director Haroula Rose’s gentle, good-hearted new comedy-drama All Happy Families takes its title from the famous first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Read more... |
Black Bag review - lies, spies and unpleasant surprisesFriday, 14 March 2025
Michael Fassbender recently starred in Paramount+’s rather laborious spy drama The Agency, but here he finds himself at the centre of a much more sly and streamlined operation. Read more... |
Sister Midnight review - the runaway bridegroomThursday, 13 March 2025
Marriage is not often presented in cinema as a bowl of mangoes, but it’s rarely shown as so morbidly strange as in this reckless corker of a debut feature written and directed by Karan Kandhari, and backed by Film4. |
Bonhoeffer review - flawed biopic of a saintly man of courageSaturday, 08 March 2025
The German theologian, pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a saintly, courageous figure, of major historical significance. Those are good reasons to ensure that his story gets told and becomes better known. At a time when fanatical violent nationalism is on the rise and religion has been commandeered to support it, Bonhoeffer's work and his contribution to ideas have a renewed relevance. Read more... |
Twiggy review - portrait of a supermodel who branched outSaturday, 08 March 2025
When Twiggy burst on to the scene in 1966, she was a beacon of hope for all flat-chested, short-haired, skinny girls. Of course we couldn’t look as fabulous as she did, with her enormous eyes and high forehead and long legs, but we could try. Read more... |
On Falling review - human cogs in a merciless machineFriday, 07 March 2025
Alienation, isolation, and instability are the fruits of working as a “picker” in the chilling labour drama On Falling. The first feature written and directed by the Porto-born, Edinburgh-based filmmaker Laura Carreira presents post-industrial gig economy work as a dystopia. Read more... |
The Last Showgirl review - Pamela Anderson stars as a middle-aged Vegas dancerFriday, 28 February 2025
Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is a dancer. She’s been with Le Razzle Dazzle, an outdated Las Vegas show that’s full of “breasts, rhinestones and joy”, in her words, for 30 years. And now it’s closing. Where can she go, at the age of 57? Read more... |
The Monkey review - a grisly wind-upSaturday, 22 February 2025
Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess. Read more... |
I'm Still Here review - powerful tale of repression and resistanceFriday, 21 February 2025
Just like Britain’s ‘stiff upper lip’, that indominable spirit in the face of adversity, Brazil has a dominant personality trait – open-hearted, ebullient – that tends to obscure the reality of its many social, economic and political travails. Read more... |
Captain America: Brave New World review - talking loud, saying nothingFriday, 14 February 2025
In his first weeks in office, Harrison Ford’s US president survives an assassination attempt inside the White House, goes to war with Japan and mutates into Red Hulk when he gets mad, trashing said White House with a Stars and Stripes flag-holder. How unrealistically reasonable this looks, you may wistfully think. If only Ford, or a 10-foot monster, was in charge. Read more... |
To a Land Unknown review - the migrant hustleFriday, 14 February 2025
The Refugee Movie is rapidly becoming a genre unto itself, with elements of suspense and humanism woven together into something that’s very properly cinematic. |
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy review - older, sadder Bridget has started ditching the ditzThursday, 13 February 2025
Bridget Jones has grown up: v.v.g. Our heroine is still prone to daft pratfalls and gaffes and bursts of sensational idiot dancing. But passing time has lent her an enhanced self-awareness that has nothing to do with calories consumed. This Bridget can bring the pinprick of tears to the eyes as well as make you laugh. Read more... |
Bring Them Down review - ramming it home in the west of IrelandFriday, 07 February 2025
“You know what they say: where there’s livestock, there’s dead stock,” says Jack (a brilliant Barry Keoghan). Never a truer word. There’s an awful lot of dead and maimed stock – sheep, to be precise – in Christopher Andrews’ gory, gloom-ridden directorial debut. Animal lovers will want to avert their eyes. The film is undeniably powerful, with fine performances, but the unremitting violence ends up feeling cartoonish and empty. Read more... |
September 5 review - gripping real-life thrillerThursday, 06 February 2025
There’s a common understanding about journalists, especially ones at the top of their game, that they’re flying by the seat of their pants – propelled by adrenalin, deadlines, ambition and, just occasionally, righteousness. Read more... |
Hard Truths review - a bravura, hyperreal performance from Marianne Jean-BaptisteFriday, 31 January 2025
A colleague once told me that I shouldn’t take Mike Leigh’s films with contemporary settings as slices of everyday life. He was right: they’re hyperreal. Especially Hard Truths, in which his take on a woman both depressed and angry – it’s possible to be both more or less simultaneously – packs years of grievances and unacceptable verbal abuse into a very short period of time. Read more... |
Saturday Night review - a dizzying 90-minute trip to a landmark TV eventFriday, 31 January 2025
“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975. To capture the anarchic birth of this TV institution, Jason Reitman has made a stylish film that initially seems as wayward as the show. But it gradually comes to seem like the obvious way to handle the material. Read more... |
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