The sequels to 2001’s frothy and fun ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’, adapted from Helen Fielding’s columns/novel, failed to capture the sparkle of the original. The follow up, 2004’s ‘Bridget Jones: The End of Reason’ shuffled the characters around aimlessly wit…

The latest from Dreamworks, adapted from Dav Pilkey’s popular series of graphic novels is an unexpected, if occasionally over frantic, treat. The titular hero’s origin is outlined in the opening sequence as the famed but dim policeman, Officer Knight, rep…

Reuniting with Mike Leigh nearly three decades after her star-making turn in ‘Secrets and Lies’ Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers a barnstorming performance as a disappointed and bitter woman raging at the world in this complex and empathetic character stud…

Filmed in secret in Iran, shortly before the director was forced to flee, Rasoulof’s sprawling drama is a disturbing psychological depiction of life under a theocratic regime. Family man Iman (Zahre) has been appointed investigator to the Islamic Revoluti…

Films about putting bands together tend to be rambunctious affairs as they chronicle disparate misfits joining forces to make a joyous, cathartic racket. This Japanese animation is a more reflective, melancholy, but ultimately life-affirming, affair. Tots…

The influence of Wes Anderson hangs heavy over this misfiring Indian comedy horror, which is almost redeemed by a great turn from Radhika Apte. Following her arranged marriage to heavy-drinking schlub, Pathak (Gopal), Uma (Apte)…

Adapted from Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s 2015 memoir of the same name, Walter Salles’ latest is a stirring study of resistance and forbearance. It begins in 1970 as former politician Rubens Paiva returns to Rio de Janeiro, after years of s…

Australian animator Adam Elliott has chronicled the lives of troubled outsiders in oddball and heartfelt pictures such as ‘Mary and Max’ and short ‘Harvie Krumpet’. His latest is a darkly whimsical study of a socially awkward woman who, despite her beleag…

Based on a true story, cinematographer turned director Morrison’s feature debut, a biopic of boxer Claressa Shields, scripted by Barry ‘Moonlight’ Jenkins, begins as a standard inspirational sports tale, before switching to something more…

The austere titles of ‘The Brutalist’ self-consciously announce this as a work of high seriousness and gravitas. Director Brady Corbet makes good on this promise though, with a sprawling, novelistic and allegorically rich study of the immigrant experience…

Dutch writer-director Reijn looks to 80s erotic thrillers such as Indecent Proposal and Basic Instinct for inspiration for this bold drama. Kidman is Romy Mathis, the high-powered CEO of a teasingly unspecified ‘robot business’ Tensile. Her husband Jacob …

With his penchant for folklore, intense visuals and depictions of delirium exhibited in such films as ‘The Witch’, ‘The Northman’ and ‘The Lighthouse’, Robert Eggers would seem an ideal candidate to remake F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent impressionist masterpie…

This contrived, chronology-juggling romcom with a twist is an ill-fitting combination of tweeness and heavy drama. Middle-aged Weetabix representative (twee!) Tobias (Garfield) is on his way to buy a pen to sign his divorce papers when he is knocked over …

Based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, RaMell Ross's supremely tactile and lyrical picture feels worlds removed from the usual mannered and lifeless book adaptations. Elwood Curtis (Herisse) is an African American teen living in the Jim Crow South 60s. R…

Following his biopics ‘Jackie’ and ‘Spencer’, Chilean filmmaker Larrain rounds off his ‘Lady in Heels’ trilogy with this elegiac study of the last days of opera diva Maria Callas. Scripted by Brit Steven Knight, the picture broadly focuses on the life of …

Writer-director-star Jesse Eisenberg’s second directorial effort is an affecting, amusing and thematically rich two-hander. Eisenberg is David, a middle-aged Jewish New Yorker travelling to Poland, along with his cousin Benji (Culkin) so they can pay thei…

Writer-director Kapadia’s deeply empathetic depiction of urban and rural life in India profiles a trio of working class women in Mumbai. Prabha (Kusruti) is a hardworking nurse in a shabby hospital. She had an arranged marriage some years earlier, but her…

Despite a game performance from Amy Adams, this adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 darkly comic book, a feminist portrait of motherhood with a lycanthropic edge, feels disappointingly toothless. Adams is ‘Mother’ a painter and curator who gave up her caree…

The game’s the thing in this strikingly amusing and original documentary. During January 2021, the grimmest moment of the COVID lockdown, two jobless actors, Sam Crane, who had been due to start as the lead in ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and his m…

Zambian-Welsh writer-director Nyoni’s striking follow up to her supremely confident debut feature ‘I am Not a Witch’ is a brooding, darkly comic examination of contemporary Zambian society with surreal touches. We first encounter middle-class woman Shula …

'All Quiet on the Western Front' director Edward Berger narrows his canvas to a single setting for this enjoyably pulpy picture based on Robert Harris’s 2006 book. The Pope has died and it is up to the quietly authoritative Cardinal Lawrence (Fiennes), th…

British Sri Lankan director Chloe Abrahams’ harrowing, but clear-eyed and lyrical documentary, is both a cinematic therapy session and a feminist exhumation of family history told via three generations of women. The title was inspired by Chloe’s memories …

Shades of Buñuel in this absurdist political satire as G7 leaders assemble for a meeting in a manor house in the German countryside to draft a joint statement about the latest global crisis. Cate Blanchett’s Mutti Merkel-like Chancellor Hilda Orlmann is t…

Following the kinetic thrill of ‘Challengers’ Guadagnino shifts to something more languid with this adaptation of William Burroughs’ novella. It is Mexico in the 1940s and louche writer Lee (Craig), having evaded police during a drugs bust, spends his day…

Director Morgan Neville has already tackled a music documentary with unsung soul performers in film ‘20 Feet from Stardom’. His latest profiles the superstar producer-singer-songwriter Pharrell Williams, boldly, through the medium of LEGO animation. Given…

This unsubtle but amiable enough Britfilm charts the efforts of the trio behind IVF treatment over a ten-year period and the obstacles they encounter along the way. Northern scientist Robert Edwards (Norton) has already managed to fertilise animal eggs in…

This impressively propulsive documentary essay from Belgian director Johan Grimonprez is a shocking expose of political interference that skips along to a syncopated jazz beat. Which shouldn’t work but somehow does. It follows the events following the pos…

Andrea Arnold exhibits her usual keen, empathetic eye for council estate life in this slightly overstuffed drama. Impressive newcomer Adams is Bailey, a biracial girl growing up in a squat in Gravesend. Her reckless wannabe drug dealer dad Bug (Keoghan), …

This documentary about the late Superman star eschews hagiography to give a satisfyingly rounded view of the ill-fated actor. It begins with news footage of the tragic accident in 1995 in which Reeve was thrown from a horse during a competition, leaving h…

Steve McQueen’s wartime set drama is a surprisingly mainstream and conservative effort. Ronan is Rita, a young single mother working in a munitions factory and living with her dad Gerald (a winningly humble and understated acting debut from Paul Weller) a…

In pictures such as ‘Tangerine’ and ‘The Florida Project’ writer-director Sean Baker has chronicled in a non-judgemental and empathetic way characters trying every which way to live their lives in hardscrabble circumstances. ‘Anora’, his cheeky twist on C…

Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s ‘What Are You Going Through’, Almodóvar’s first feature length English language film is an immaculately orchestrated, sensitively played and clearheaded study of friendship, mortality and fate. Moore is Ingrid, a best-selling n…

Director: Mati Diop French-Senegalese director Diop's documentary clocks in at a mere seventy minutes but contains multitudes. In 2021 it was announced that a handful of treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey, located in what is now Benin, plundered …

Given the prescience of the subject matter, this is a disappointingly middlebrow Palestine-set drama from British-Palestinian writer-director Farah Nabulsi. ‘The Blue Kaftan’s’ Saleh Bakri is Basem an English teacher in occupied Palestine. Two of his pupi…

Writer-director-star Alice Lowe’s absurdist sci-fi comedy has its moments but does not really add up to a satisfying whole. She is Agnes, a woman living through a number of periods in history, in 1680s Scotland, in 1790s England, in 1840s Britain and in 1…

Investigative journalist turned director Shiro Ito takes audiences through her painstaking efforts to bring to light her sexual assault at the hands of a media executive in this harrowing but vital documentary. In 2015 Ito, then a 26-year-old intern at Th…

François Ozon's latest is a frothy but fun comedy noir loosely adapted from the 1934 play ‘My Crime’ by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil. Madeline (Tereszkiewicz, recently seen in bearded lady biopic ‘Rosalie’), is a struggling actress in Paris who shares …

This thrilling tale of exploration, derring-do and awe from the makers of ‘Free Solo’ charts the 1915 voyage of Ernest Shackleton’s ‘The Endurance’ to the South Pole, alongside the ‘Endurance 22’ expedition on the South African Icebreaker ‘S.A. Agulhas II…

Canadian actor-turned-writer-director Park’s comedy drama sports a clever conceit that it only partially takes advantage of. Elliott Labrant (Stella) is a queer eighteen-year-old just finished high school and about to set off to college. During a mushroom…

The biggest hit of the year in its native Japan, this manga adaption chronicles the adventures of a high school detective who, as the intro informs us, was turned into a child by a mysterious organisation. Adopting the identity Sherlock Holmes-evoking mon…

Folk horror ahoy in this handsome but inert and derivative adaption of Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel, co-adapted by the author. Matt Smith is Richard Willoughby, an archaeologist who has moved back to his grim rural Yorkshire village with his obviously re…

British writer-director Rizwan’s feature debut is both a reality bending psychological thriller and showbiz satire. Rizwan is Aden, a struggling young British-Asian actor whose life is a round of dehumanising thankless auditions relieved by the occasional…

Europe’s turbulent 70 milieu is effectively evoked in a single setting in French director’s Kahn’s vivid recreation of the 1976 Goldman trial at which Jewish leftwing activist and revolutionary turned robber Pierre Goldman (Worhalter), imprisoned for alle…

Normally foreign directors can be relied upon to bring something new to the staid period drama genre. Sadly, this adaptation of Elizabeth Freemantle’s ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ from director Karim Aïnouz fails to break the trappings, despite a promising premis…

Shades of Hirokazu Koreeda’s ‘Nobody Knows’, albeit slightly lighter ones, in this tale of a trio of children left to fend for themselves on a Swedish housing estate. After their mother quits the house and fails to return, wily sixteen-year-old Laura (Del…

Chinese director-co-writer Guan Hu’s picture is a laidback but arresting combo of Western, road movie, redemption tale and deadpan absurdism. A surreal opening sequence sees a small bus making its way along the outskirts of the Gobi Desert before it is at…

Shades of late 90s Canadian cinema at its most clinical and unsettling, a la Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, in this involving psychological horror. Gariepy is Kelly-Anne, a model who specialises in edgy photoshoots with a lucrative sideline in playing …

A strong whiff of déjà vu hangs over this brash cinematic sequel to Crockett Johnson’s 1955 illustrated book. A charming hand drawn intro, based on the book’s illustrations and narrated by Alfred Molina, shows how four-year-old how boy Harold, who lives w…

Shades of Gregg Araki but with a grainy video aesthetic in writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s impressively mounted 90s-set teen drama. Owen (Smith) is a seventh grade loner in high school, obsessed with the supernatural ‘Buffy’-style YA TV show ‘The Pink O…

Less a feature film, more pandering panto this occasionally amusing but ultimately tiresome sequel should hopefully put an end to the anything-goes, multiverse-straddling superhero pics. After a short prologue in which Wade Wilson/Deadpool (Reynold…

London-based Croatian director Pusić’s film is a tonally uncertain allegorical look at mortality. Lola Petticrew is Tuesday, a fifteen-year-old-teen with a terminal illness who lives in London with her American mum Zora (Louis-Dreyfuss). We first encounte…

Scripted by Frank Cottrell Boyce, this animated adaptation of the Micheal Morpurgo novel is a slow burning but stirring tale of universalism as well as a plea to conserve the ecology. Michael (voiced by McGregor) is a pre-teen boy who, along with his elde…

Writer-director Sean Wang brings an appealing freshness to the familiar coming-of-age tale. Chris Wang (Wang), nicknamed Didi, is in his final year of middle school in 2008 Freemont California. His dad is mostly away, and his mother Chunsing (Chen) is str…

British director Hussain’s feature debut is a moody and oblique study of identity and alienation. Adam (Ayub) is an unassuming young man working at a fast food restaurant in the Sky Peals Green motorway service station. Adam is mixed race: his mother (Rus…