Shades of Ken Loach in this involving and complex realist Maltese drama. Jesmark (Scicluna) is a fisherman struggling to support his wife Denise (Farrugia) and their new-born son. In the opening scene his boat ( or ‘luzzu’) springs a leak meaning expensiv…
This sequel to the iconic but flimsy Reagan-era adventure is superior to the original in every respect. Tom Cruise playing ‘Tom Cruise’ returns as top navy pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell. Still feeling the need for speed, Mitchell has avoided promotions s…
Mooted as a hipper alterative to ‘Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness’ this sci-fi comedy, from the directing duo behind the endearingly oddball ‘Swiss Army Man’, is ingenious but exhausting. Yeoh, is Evelyn Wang, a put upon Chinese immigrant run…
This second solo outing for Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme, and the third feature-length sojourn into the Marvel multiverse following the superior Spidey outings, ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ and ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’, is alas, a muddled disappointm…
Based on a short story by Claire Keegan, the feature debut from writer-director Bairéad, is part coming-of-age tale and part soulful rumination on family bonds and grieving. It’s summer 1981 and withdrawn nine-year-old Cáit (Clinch) is living in a rundown…
Writer-director Emil Vogt’s second feature is a slow-burning and genuinely unsettling sic-fi horror. Seven-year-old Norwegian girl Ida (Fløttum) has just moved with her family, mum (Petersen), dad (Svartveit) and severely autistic older sister Anna (Ramst…
In 2016 Joe Corré, the son of shop assistant turned couture designer Vivienne Westwood and the late provocateur and Svengali Malcolm McLaren, announced he was going to burn millions of pounds worth of punk memorabilia as a statement against the commodific…
Heartfelt and elegiac but hugely disappointing, Terence Davies’ portrait of War Poet Siegfried Sassoon and his social circle of wits, artist and aristos, surprisingly the director’s first with an openly queer character, is a dramatically inert and poorly-…
Stunning photography, unsurprisingly, is the best reason to see this, at times, overly verbose nature documentary, a massive hit in France, from wildlife filmmaker Marie Amiguet and wildlife photographer Vincent Munier. On a frozen Tibetan plateau, Munier…
What this flawed Morocco-set picture musical drama lacks in originality it just about makes up for with youthful energy. Anas (Basbousi) a former rapper, now reduced to living out of his car, gets a job as a teacher working at a cultural centre on the out…
Documentary opuses are rarely as magnum as Guiseppe ‘Cinema Paradiso’ Tornatore’s exhaustive, and at three hours, pretty exhausting chronicle of the recently departed Italian movie music maestro’s career. Morricone himself, interviewed at home, and spor…
Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage in this ambitious but disappointing Meta comedy adventure. When we meet this particularly self-absorbed version of the actor, he is feeling creatively uninspired and is beset by money problems. He’s also struggling to conne…
Following his debut, the dread-imbued portrayal of religious hysteria ‘The Witch’, and heart of darkness-plumbing nightmare ‘The Lighthouse’, writer-director Robert Eggers goes full-on sensory maximalist with this intense and bloody Viking saga. It was co…
That increasingly rare thing, the Star Vehicle returns with this aggressively adequate adventure comedy in the ‘Romancing the Stone’ mould. Bullock is Loretta Sage, a writer of romances in which her heroine is paired up with hunky hero Dash McMahon. We me…
The third instalment of the Fantastic Beasts series is the bleakest chapter of the ‘wizarding world’ since 2010’s ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Pt 1’. The dark mood is established in an opening sequence, easily the film’s best, as Professor Albus…
There’s more than a whiff of déjà vu in this passable, if rote stiff upper lip WW2 yarn, based on true events. In 1943 British forces hatch an elaborate plan to fool the Nazis into thinking that the Allies are going to invade Greece, rather than the antic…
DreamWorks’ latest animation is a fun and frantic, if a little too narratively busy, crime caper, adapted by Etan Cohen from the graphic novel by Australian author, Aaron Blabey. The titular band are a quintet of notorious anthropomorphic criminals. They …
This audacious attempt to update Léo Delibes’s Nineteenth Century comic fairy-tale ballet to a sci-fi, social media-satirising fable is, alas, a kitsch misfire. A doll maker in the original, Dr Coppelia (Italian dancer Mazzeo) is a now an evil Rotwang-sty…
The second big screen outing for the popular Sega video game character sticks to the first’s recipe of caffeinated brash mayhem with lachrymose interludes. A prologue has evil scientist Dr Robotnik (Carrey) breaking out of his exile on the Mushroom plan…
This blistering debut from Belgian writer-director Laura Wandel is a wholly immersive and riveting depiction of a child’s first few days at school. When we first meet seven-year-old Nora (the remarkable Vanderbeque) she is hanging on to the leg of her fat…
The moving and visually striking fiction feature debut from documentary filmmaker Tatania Huezo is a disturbing but eerily beautiful portrait of a group of young girls in a mountain community in a small mountain village in Mexico. Eight-year-old Ana (Gonz…
This reality-bending portrait of an intensely competitive rower marks a fantastic debut for writer-director Hadaway. Isabelle ‘Orphan’ Fuhrman is Alex Dall, a queer young woman who, on starting at the foreboding-looking Wellington College, signs up for th…
This bewitching fable-like tale traces a young woman’s desperate odyssey through early 20th century Italy. Agata (Cescutti) lives in a small coastal town in North Eastern Italy. She is distraught when she gives birth to a stillborn baby and no comfort is …
Paul Verhoeven brings his usual lurid, subtlety-phobic approach to this story of a nun’s sexual awakening, an adaption of Judith Brown’s admittedly already lurid-sounding book ‘Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy’. A prologue sho…
Adapting from a 2011 novel, Finnish co-writer-director Kuosmanen imbues a rugged energy into a familiar odd couple narrative. Laura (Haarla) is a lovelorn Finnish archaeology student leaving Moscow after an affair with one of her lecturers, and taking a t…
This supremely assured feature debut from Croatian-born director/co-writer Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic works as a psychological thriller and a feminist coming-of-age tale. Filipović is Julija, a teenage girl living with her mother Nela (Curcic) and domine…
Committed performances from a top-flight cast aren’t enough to rescue this uncharacteristically soapy drama from Italian writer-director Nanni Moretti. Split into three parts that are separated by five years, it chronicles the travails of three neighbouri…
Director: Craig Roberts Another week, another Britfilm about an eccentric underdog, based on a true story. Rylance is Maurice Flitcroft a forty-six-year-old crane driver from Barrow-in-Furness. When it looks like redundancy is pending, Flitcroft decides,…
Shades of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Mirror’ in this, the feature debut of writer-director Catarina Vasconcelos, an affecting and lyrical memoir of a Portuguese family’s history. Henrique, the director’s grandfather married Beatriz or ‘Triz’ on her 21st birthday…
Few would have expected this, the Dark Knight’s first standalone picture in ten years, to revisit the spooky whimsy of the Tim Burton era, or the camp maximalist onslaught of Joel Schumacher’s run, but this latest incarnation so is so relentlessly grim an…
Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier’s third instalment of his loose ‘Oslo trilogy’ is a masterful character study that is likely to strike a rich chord with millennials – and everyone else. We first encounter Julie (Reinsve), a twenty-nine-year-old si…
This bittersweet look at the lives, loves and ambitions of three Parisian twentysomethings, adapted by Céline Sciamma from the graphic novels of US cartoonist Adrian Tomine, signals a slight change of gear for the normally intense drama-inclined Audiard. …
This rousing debut feature from writer-director Blerta Basholli skilfully melds an inspirational feminist tale, based on a true story, to a realistically knotty depiction of the aftermath of war. During the 1998-1999 Kosovo war many women lost their husba…
Based on real accounts and mainly captured in severe, immediate close-ups with minimal dialogue, this gripping, harrowing and all-too timely picture charts a young Iraqi refugee's fraught journey on the 'Balkan route' to Europe. Introductory title cards s…
Writer-director Barnard sticks to the council estate setting of previous films, experimental debut ‘The Arbor’ and the poetic realist ‘The Selfish Giant’, for this comparatively mainstream Bradford-set story of two disparate souls finding common ground. T…
Unfolding over three time periods, this deftly-executed drama revolves around the relationship between an imprisoned, unapologetically gay man, and a fellow con. It start with whirring projector footage of some gay men cottaging in a German bathroom. It i…
A washed-out porn star tries to rebuild his life in Sean Baker’s fantastic and cheekily subversive satire. Covered in bruises and with seemingly no possessions, Mikey Saber (Baker) is riding the bus back to his Texas Gulf Coast hometown after an absence o…
A transgender New Zealander attempts to re-establish relationships with his widowed father and friends after a decade away in this eloquent, affecting and timely examination of identity, acceptance and forgiveness. Caz (Carrad) is the Trans activist retur…
Writer-director Russell Owen’s feature debut, now out on DVD and Blu-ray, is a flawed but strikingly-mounted horror. Tom Hughes is the portentously named Eric Black, a recent widower who, determined to be alone, takes a job as a shepherd on a remote islan…
This thematically-rich fantasy from Japanese writer-director Mamoru ‘Mirai’ Hosoda mixes an awe-inspiring array of anime styles to often beautiful effect. Suzu (voiced by Nakamura) is an awkward seventeen-year-old high-schooler living in a rural village w…
This bold and original animation documents the refugee experience via the experience of one Afghan immigrant. It’s based on (and features in voiceover) recorded interviews the Danish director Rasmussen conducted with an academic called Amin (the name has …
The simple fable-like story and brief running time belie a complex and thematically rich portrait of a mother and daughter in contemporary Chad. Amina (Souleymane) is a practicing Muslim and single mother living on the outskirts of the Chad capital N’Djam…
The second part of writer-director Joanna Hogg’s cinematic bildungsroman picks up where the last one left off. Film student Julie (Swinton Byrne), still numbed after the death of her upper-class junkie boyfriend, Anthony, is staying with her upper-middle …
So extraordinary are the details of this wildly enjoyable Benwell-set tale, based on real events, it seems unbelievable it is not better know. It’s 1961 and the magnificently-named Kempton Bunton (Broadbent) is a sixty-something working class bloke of no …
While there may not be too much that is new here to fans, this documentary about the comedic polymath, one of the major figures of the first half of the 20th century, is exceptionally-well assembled and features a range of fascinating archive footage. Cha…
Swiss writer-director Fred Baillif’s vérité-style Swiss drama is an unvarnished but empathetic portrait of the residents and social workers in a residential care home for teenage girls in Geneva - La Mif means ‘the fam’ or ‘the family’. The narrative is b…
Part one of Dennis Villeneuve’s long-anticipated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi opus Dune, the second version of the ‘unfilmable’ book to make it to the screen, doesn’t quite do justice to the classic novel, but it comes pretty close, and unlike Dav…
Tilda Swinton in airy, slightly distracted mode proves the perfect vessel for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s brand of wryly surreal, haunting and meditative cinema in this, his first picture outside his native Thailand. She is Jessica, an English botanist …
Director: Romola Garai Stars: Alec Secăreanu, Carla Juri, Imelda Staunton Actor Romala Garai’s debut directorial feature is an ambitious and technically accomplished but flawed horror picture. Tomas (Secăreanu from ‘God’s Own Country’) i…
Iranian writer-director Asghar 'The Separation' Farhadi's latest is another richly complex and quietly engrossing moral fable in which a small deception snowballs into a full-blown social media-enabled crisis. Amiable, soft spoken sign maker Rahim (Jadidi…
A middle-class family in meltdown (in New York) might not sound like the most promisingly original proposition, but director Karam’s adaptation of his own play distinguishes itself via fine performances and some unsettling atmospherics. Young couple Brigi…
Guillermo del Toro’s strengths often feel like weaknesses in this immaculately-realised but fussy and overlong remake of the classic 1947 film noir picture. Cooper is Stan Carlisle, a lowlife leading an itinerant lifestyle after torching a house in myster…
Shades of John Boorman’s wartime memoir ‘Hope and Glory’ and Woody Allen’s paean to family life ‘Radio Days’ in Kenneth Branagh’s shamelessly crowd-pleasing, but genuinely charming, funny and poignant semi-autobiographical tale of growing up in the titula…
Penélope Cruz always does her best work with Pedro Almodóvar, and her performance here, as a woman coming to terms with life-changing revelations, is possibly her best to date. She is Janis, a Madrid-based photographer having an affair with a married man,…
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