thu 10/07/2025

Film Reviews

Endurance review - the greatest escape, AI-assisted

Hugh Barnes

Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1914 only to be marooned until August 1916, was a failure but a “glorious failure”, in the words of one crew member, the meteorologist Leonard Hussey. It is also perhaps the greatest survival story ever told.

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Salem’s Lot review - listless King remake

Nick Hasted

A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of their skins.

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London Film Festival 2024 - the Vatican, the Blitz, a trip to Poland and a surfin' nightmare

Adam Sweeting

Conclave

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The Last of the Sea Women review - a moving tale of feisty traditional divers

Sarah Kent

“The ocean is our home… Even in my next life I will dive again,” says Geum Ok, one of a band of female divers from Jeju, a volcanic island 60 miles south of the Korean peninsular.

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Timestalker review – she's lost control again

Hugh Barnes

Unlike the controversial Netflix show Baby Reindeer, which challenges many of the same attitudes towards sexual harassment, self-delusion, and stalking’s gender bias, Alice Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star does not bill itself as a true story.

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Portraits of Dangerous Women review - quirky indie comedy

Markie Robson-Scott

“I like laws and rules,” Steph (Jeany Spark), a jaded primary school teacher, tells a pet-shop employee – she’s adopting a cat, though that venture is doomed to failure - defensively. “They’re what separate us from the monkeys and chaos.”

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Things Will Be Different review - lost in the past

Nick Hasted

Time-travel is a trap in debutante Michael Felker’s tender sf two-hander, whose title’s grim irony becomes gradually apparent.

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Joker: Folie à Deux review - supervillainy laid low

James Saynor

“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps why not everyone in Hollywood has agreed with the hotcake thing. 

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The Battle for Lakipia review - why post-colonial Kenya is a land of unease

Saskia Baron

The Battle for Lakipia is a beautifully filmed and thoughtfully directed documentary that was made over a two-year period. Its focus is the conflicting claim to Kenyan land made by white ranch owners of English descent and the indigenous pastoralist people.

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The Old Man and the Land review - dark secrets of a farming family

Graham Fuller

The Old Man and the Land depicts a worn-out sheep farmer going about his dreary business as the seasons pass, darkly and dankly. He does it because he’s always done it, and because he doesn’t trust his 42-year-old daughter, Laura, despite her farming skills, or his 40-year-old son, David, the farm’s heir but an alcoholic and drug user who is unsuited to the work, to take it over.

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Megalopolis review - magic from cinema's dawn

Nick Hasted

“What happens if you’ve overstepped your mandate?” aristocrat-architect Cesar Catalin (Adam Driver) is asked. “I’ll apologise,” he smirks. Francis Ford Coppola’s forty years in the making, self-financed epic is studded with such self-implicating bravado, including a wish to “escape into the ranks of the insane” rather than accept conventional thinking, as if at 85 he is not only Cesar but Kurtz, plunging chaotically upriver again, inviting career termination.

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The Teacher review - tense West Bank drama

Hugh Barnes

It’s hard not to review the Israeli occupation of Palestine when writing about The Teacher. The political context of this first feature by British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi, who also wrote the screenplay, is so thoroughly appalling that it sometimes overshadows the TV-style melodrama onscreen.

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The Outrun review - Saoirse Ronan is astonishing as an alcoholic fighting for recovery

Helen Hawkins

In 2016, Amy Liptrot made a fine publishing debut with a memoir about her alcoholism, The Outrun. Now she has co-written a film based on her book that is a significant achievement in its own right. It’s also the promising debut of Saoirse Ronan and her husband actor Jack Lowden as producers. 

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Notes from Sheepland review - her farm is her canvas

Justine Elias

Orla Barry laughed when she was advised to take up sheep farming, and not just because she had no experience. “Orla with the sheep eyes,” she calls herself and, indeed, in a stylized self-portrait, she does seem to have the placid, watchful gaze of a ewe.

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The Substance review - Demi Moore as an ageing Hollywood celeb with body issues

Markie Robson-Scott

If you like a body-horror movie to retain a semblance of logic in its plot line, then The Substance – grotesque, gory and finally insubstantial – may not be for you.

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Strange Darling review - love really hurts

Harry Thorfinn-

“Are you a serial killer?” asks a woman sitting in a pick up truck with a man she just met at a bar. The neon sign from the motel they are parked outside bathes the couple in cool, blue light. “Do you have any idea of the risks a woman like me takes every time she agrees to have a bit of fun?”

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