Whether he’s making documentaries or dramas, director Kevin Macdonald has an eye for the bleak moments in our history, and a dynamic way of recreating them, from the Oscar-winning doc Four Days in September, about the Munich massacre, to the fictionalised account of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, which at times played like a horror film.Compared to those, The Mauritanian feels pretty conventional, a tale of righteous lawyers and their ill-treated client, amid the well-trod US malfeasance in its War on Terror. Yet there’s no denying the almost Read more ...

Like the sun-happy LA of this film’s setting, there’s a hard-to-pinpoint sham quality to Wander Darkly. It feels like too much phoney dialogue crept in to the final script of this “serious” film by writer-director Tara Miele. Sienna Miller is a formidable centrepiece in the drama about a couple forced to review their relationship history after a car crash. But she is held down by a story that feels like it was clipped together in a rush.Adrienne (Miller) and Matteo (Diego Luna) are in an unmarried relationship with a young child, and they’re struggling. Adrienne is in and out of creative jobs Read more ...

Hot on the heels of her 2019 triumph Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma’s fifth feature continues a perfect track record; this is yet another gorgeous and perceptive film, told from a determinedly female perspective but with a wisdom that is all-embracing. Having started her career with films about children (Water Lilies, Tomboy), before moving to teenagers (Girlhood) and then adults (Portrait), Sciamma now takes on three generations at once – a girl, her mother and grandmother – to consider the threads of memory, personality and time that connect them. Her approach is Read more ...

One of the sadnesses of covid is that films like Judas and the Black Messiah have been held over for release in the hope that cinemas will reopen. Immersive, intense features like this deserve to be seen in a darkened theatre with no distractions. But as the pandemic drags on in the UK, distributors are forced to debut big films on the small screen and it’s a real shame in this instance. Writer-director Shaka King tells the true story of two young men whose fates intertwined in the civil rights movement in Chicago in 1969. Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, the charismatic Read more ...

Do you want to spend 105 minutes trapped in a house with two people arguing, or do you already feel that your life under lockdown is quite quarrelsome and claustrophobic enough? If your answer is the former, then Malcolm & Marie is the perfect movie for you. Everyone else might be happier escaping elsewhere (I’d recommend Call My Agent if you want to enjoy actors talking about their trade. At least you get some exterior Paris scenes and lashings of wit). But let’s get back to the matter in hand. Forced to put their TV series Euphoria on hold because of Read more ...

The Sutton Hoo burial site in Suffolk has proved to be one of the most valuable archaeological finds ever made in Britain, shedding priceless light on the Anglo-Saxon period of the 6th and 7th Centuries. Simon Stone’s drama (adapted from John Preston’s novel, with a screenplay by Moira Buffini) artfully uses the story of its excavation as a rumination on time and timelessness, a sort of cosmic clock against which to contrast the brief candle of a human life.The Dig works because it knows exactly where it wants to go and how to get there. It gets a huge leg up from Mike Eley’s Read more ...

This is an odd film, made even odder by a caption near the beginning, which claims it is "inspired by true events" but doesn’t elaborate. Produced in Belarus, it’s a Holocaust drama based on a novella by the veteran East German screenwriter/director Wolfgang Kohlhaase but made by the Ukrainian director Vadim Perelman. Perelman had quite a success in 2003 with House of Sand and Fog, but since then seems to have mainly worked in television.Persian Lessons tells the far-fetched story of a young Jewish man from Belgium, who when captured in France in 1942, manages to survive by Read more ...

In 1964, Cassius Clay, NFL superstar Jim Nathaniel Brown, soul legend Sam Cooke and political firebrand Malcolm X gathered for one night in a dingy room at the Hampton Motel. It was a meeting that became a symbol of hope for black Americans. A photo, taken by Malcolm X would make the moment iconic, marking a shift away from the horrors of Jim Crow America to the passing of the Civil Rights Act. The events of that evening became the basis of Kemp Powers' 2013 play, and now form the directorial debut for Oscar-winning actress Regina King, who most recently played Sister Night in HBO’s Read more ...

It all started so promisingly. Parasite's triumph at the Oscars was a resounding response to 2019's saccharine and problematic Green Book. Art house was in and here to stay. And in some ways, this came to pass - with cinemas caught in a cycle of opening and closing, the blockbusters were nowhere to be seen. Instead, it's been the indies and the streamers keeping us entertained through these days of isolation.This year's Best Of selection reflects the strange and diverse release calendar of 2020. Film has proved to be resilient, and a sparser schedule allowed for some hidden gems to shine Read more ...

There was always bound to be a hint of melancholy watching George Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Try as you might to focus on the film, you can never quite shake the fact that you’re watching the final performance of Chadwick Boseman, whose life was cut tragically short this year from bowel cancer. This adaptation of Wilson’s play is the second in a ten-part cycle that chronicles the Black experience throughout the course of the 20th century. It’s produced by Denzel Washington, who himself starred in Fences, another Wilson play, back in 2016. This chapter focuses on the life of Ma Read more ...

How do you create a secular version of the Nine Lessons and Carols? The original can feel like a formulaic trot through tunes and stories as stale as fossilised mince-pies. Yet it helps to remember that in essence it reflects on the story of a world suddenly turned upside down; a story of refugees, single motherhood, the kindness and cruelty of strangers, and the eternal curveballs that life can throw.It's completely fitting then that Rebecca Frecknall’s swiftly constructed response to the year of Covid derives its spiky power from the fact that it too portrays a world suddenly turned upside Read more ...

The last time George Clooney was in a space movie, Gravity, he and Sandra Bullock were marooned above Earth and desperate to get home. The Midnight Sky has the opposite dynamic: here Clooney is Earthbound, urgently trying to warn incomers to stay the hell away. As science-fiction premises go, it feels rather apt. With Clooney both sides of the camera, the film itself alternates between the Arctic and deep space, human drama and special effects spectacle, a certain novelty but with doses of sci-fi cliché. It’s quietly proficient rather than awe-inspiring, yet Read more ...