thu 17/07/2025

Film Reviews

Nocturnes review - the sounds of the rainforest transport you a remote region of the Himalayas

Sarah Kent

If you suffer from lepidopterophobia, this film will either cure your fear of moths or push you over the edge. Warning: the screen is often filled with moths of every shape, size, colour and pattern while the sound of flapping, fluttering and girating wings fills the air to the point where you feel bombarded by the flying, furry creatures.

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Merchant Ivory review - fascinating documentary about the director and producer's long partnership

Markie Robson-Scott

“Shoot, Jim, shooot!” Simon Callow does a fine impression of producer Ismail Merchant desperately trying to get director James Ivory to bring urgency to the proceedings.

The received wisdom was that Ismael thought Jim was going to bankrupt Merchant Ivory Productions commercially by insisting on perfection, while Jim was sure that Ismael would bankrupt it artistically by insisting on every possible economy.

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Grand Theft Hamlet review - intriguing documentary about Shakespeare as multi-player shooter game

Helen Hawkins

On July 4, 2022, one of the most unusual performances in Hamlet’s lengthy and much travelled CV took place: an in-game stream for players of the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

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Nightbitch review - Mother's life as a dog

Adam Sweeting

Rachel Yoder says she wrote her debut novel Nightbitch as a reaction to Donald Trump’s first term as President, with what she saw as its consequent mood-shift in America towards “traditional values and women staying home, taking care of the kids.”

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Rumours review - pallid satire on geopolitics

Saskia Baron

It must have seemed such a delicious premise – a Buñuel-esque comedy about world leaders trapped at a luxury retreat as the apocalypse looms. With cult director and installation artist Guy Maddin directing alongside his regular collaborators Galen and Evan Johnson, one can understand why Cate Blanchett, Charles Dance, and the rest of the starry cast signed up for Rumours.

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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl review - mordant seriocomedy about buried abuse

Helen Hawkins

The writer-director of 2017’s I Am Not a Witch, Rungano Nyoni, has come up with another scorcher, this time taking aim at Zambia’s social structures, in which women’s power can become petty tyranny. Nyoni’s Zambian scenarios are populated with “aunties” and “uncles” and the occasional “grandma”. These titles designate the elders of the kinship group, the leaders who speak for the rest.

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Conclave review - secrets and lies in the Vatican's inner sanctum

Adam Sweeting

“You either got faith or you got unbelief, and there ain’t no neutral ground,” as Bob Dylan sang, but Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) isn’t finding it quite that simple.

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All We Imagine as Light review - tender portrait of three women struggling to survive in modern Mumbai

Helen Hawkins

The Indian writer-director Payal Kapadia scored this year’s Cannes Grand Prix with her first fiction film, All We Imagine as Light, which follows three women trying to make a living in modern Mumbai. It’s a deserving winner, both exquisitely delicate and formally bold.

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Witches review - beyond the broomstick, the cat, and the pointy hat

Justine Elias

From James I’s campaign to wipe out witchery to the feuding sister sorceresses of The Wizard of Oz and the new film musical Wicked, spellcasting by supposedly wayward women has never been able to avoid persecution and misunderstanding.

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Wicked review - overly busy if beautifully sung cliffhanger

Matt Wolf

"No one mourns the wicked," we're told during the immediately arresting beginning to Wicked, which concludes two hours 40 minutes later with the words, "to be continued" flashed up on the screen. Will filmgoers mourn that they have to wait an entire year to see the second part of this supercharged screen adaptation of the stage musical blockbuster that London and New York audiences can currently absorb in a single sitting?

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Snow Leopard review - clunky visual effects mar a director's swansong

Sarah Kent

Pema Tseden's final film Snow Leopard is a Chinese Tibetan-language drama that addresses wild animal preservation. It serves as a kind of allegory for the circumstances that preceded the 53-year-old director's death from a heart attack last year. In 2016, Tseden was hospitalised after being roughed up by police when trying to retrieve his luggage at Xining Caojiapu International Airport. A diabetic, he was unable to take his pills while being held by the police.

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Mediha review - a brutalised Yazidi teen comes of age with a camera

Saskia Baron

The plight of persecuted minority groups around the world seems to be growing worse. As one form of response, a non-fiction film like Mediha works to make vivid the individual stories of people who might otherwise be reduced to statistics from places that are scarcely on the west's radar.

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Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat review - jazz-themed documentary on the 1960s Congo Crisis

Sebastian Scotney

The British writer and Africa specialist Michela Wrong recently wrote a whistle-stop summary of the upheavals that afflicted Congo in the early 1960s:

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Gladiator II review - can lightning strike twice?

Adam Sweeting

It has been nearly 25 years since Russell Crowe enjoyed his Oscar-winning finest hour as Maximus in Ridley Scott’s thunderous epic, Gladiator, and now Sir Ridley has brought us the next generation. Stepping up to the plate is Paul Mescal as Lucius (now known as Hanno), who finds himself an enslaved gladiator in Rome after an Imperial fleet has conquered his homeland of Numidia (Algeria, more or less).

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ARK: United States V by Laurie Anderson, Aviva Studios, Manchester review - a vessel for the thoughts and imaginings of a lifetime

Sarah Kent

Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.

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Joy review - the birth pangs of in vitro fertilisation

Justine Elias

Marie Curie excepted, movies about female scientists remain scarce, not just because STEM careers and Nobel Prizes still favour men. Now comes the British-made Joy, which explores women’s contributions to a decades-long quest to cure infertility.

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