Our latest movie reviews

Baltasar Kormákur’s Netflix action flick is not going to change the world. In fact, if you’ve already seen any number of other wilderness survival movies – Cliffhanger, The River Wild, Deliverance, and yes, Up – it’ll already feel like a familiar world, despite its spectacular array of Australian torrents, precipices, ravines and menacing bogans in pick-up trucks. But it’ll pass a taut, tightly-wound 90 minutes on the sofa in suitably blood-pumping style, and has two leads in Charlize Theron and Joel Egerton willing to get down and dirty – and very wet.  In a traumatic opening borrowed from that high-altitude Stallone action movie, Theron’s adrenaline junkie Sasha is introduced halfway up a Norwegian cliff face trying to stop her partner (Eric Bana) slipping from her grasp. Cut to six months later and she’s in the Australian outback, cradling his beloved compass and looking to channel her guilt and grief into a gruelling kayak-and-climbing adventure. In a real good-news/bad-news story for Tourism Australia, what awaits her are spectacular landscapes and spectacularly awful men. For every Kangaroo or Crocodile Dundee, there’s been a dozen more films depicting rural Aussies as a loose collection of sunburnt psychopaths, and The Purge screenwriter Jeremy Robbins does nothing to rehabilitate their rep here. Egerton’s shaven-headed outback thrill-seeker initially steps in to save her from the attention of gurning Outbackers, before revealing that he’s 10 times worse than any of...

There’s nothing quite like teenage friendships. In adolescence, our best buddies are the most important thing in the world; they can make us feel invincible and unstoppable. Often, we can’t imagine life without them. Wild Foxes, the debut feature film from Belgian director Valéry Carnoy beautifully, and sometimes painfully, unpacks the complexity of those friendships with deep acuity.  In a specialist sports boarding school in rural France, two promising young boxers, Camille (Samuel Kircher) and Matteo (Faycal Anaflous), are inseparable. But just as Camille – the school’s rising boxing star – is on the verge of greatness, he has an almost fatal accident, narrowly surviving thanks to the help of Matteo. The doctors say he is healed but he starts feeling phantom pains, leaving him navigating his discomfort, trauma and the pressure to perform in an environment where giving up is not an option.  Kircher is dazzling at the tortured and laconic Camille. He swings effortlessly from coy and bashful to anguished and panic-stricken. Matteo is more brazen, easily influenced by the group. Both characters are convincing. Most of the other boys, apart from the arrogant, spiky-haired antagonist Pierre (Jef Jacobs), fade into the background, acting as a mob who follow Pierre’s lead. There’s a hint of a romance with the tomboyish musician Yas (Anna Heckel), whose elegiac trumpet playing offers a tender foil to the brashness of the boys’ locker room antics. But that storyline peters out,...

Are fans being phased out of modern football, with its eye-watering ticket prices, greedy owners, inconvenient kick-off times and corporatised stadia? Has the prawn sandwich brigade won the war for the soul of the game? Not according to this raucous deep dive into the fan culture of the hardcore ‘ultras’. Outside of England’s sanitised Premier League bubble, at least, there’s plenty of flare-lighting, choreographed-chanting life in it yet.   Director Ragnhild Ekner, an ultra of Swedish club IFK Götenborg, sets out her treatise on ‘the world’s most popular subculture’ early doors. ‘I see it as an act of resistance,’ she says in voiceover, ‘...an uprising against loneliness’. None of her interviewees are seen on screen because, she notes, it’s the collective, not the individual that matters. Opening with Italian disco-meme energy, Ekner traces the phenomenon back to Italy’s calcio in 1970s and ’80s. Travelling the globe to film fans across three continents and get beyond the hooligan stereotypes of football fans – without neglecting the violent, fascistic side of extreme fandom – she explores its various manifestations: as a political movement, a source of collective healing, even a surrogate family. People take their babies onto the terraces, elaborate tifos are unfurled, flares drown the players in red smoke, call-and-response chants thunder the stands. Watching the game feels like a minor piece of this mad tapestry.  Turning the cameras away from the pitch, Ultras...

Visiting the wilds of Ireland to scatter his parent’s ashes, Adam Scott’s cantankerous horror novelist Ohm Bauman checks into the Bilberry Weeds Hotel. An arrogant, insufferable tool, Bauman’s dark cloud pisses on everyone he meets – from the hotel bellhop to the local crank, who warns him dark forces lurk in the woods. When a hotel employee goes missing, convinced her body’s in the honeymoon suite, Bauman breaks into the forbidden room – a dismal, fetid pit of mildewed wood, creaking doors, a ragged four-poster bed and an undrained jacuzzi just waiting for Bauman to get sheep-dipped in. It’s also rumoured to house a witch.  It’s here where auteur Damian Mc Carthy launches a sustained assault of nerve-jangling horrorcraft. Alone, trapped, his own demons surfacing as his mind unravels, Bauman’s only way out appears to be a dumbwaiter down to the hotel’s basement. Descending into a bricked-up catacomb, slow zooms grope through unlit corridors and unseen horrors lurk in the cackling dark… Tempting as it is to tag this the Irish Shining, Hokum’s horror hotel draws heavily on the spirit of Barton Fink – the tortured writer, the decrepit interiors, the clanking caged elevators and chirpy bellboy. But this is very much a Mc Carthy movie, and those familiar with Caveat and Oddity will note all of his signatures are present – the eerie figurines, sharp tinging bells, his deeply peculiar rabbit fetish. Punctured with jump scares to puncture the unease, it’s also his most mainstream...

A content creator, a disruptor, a beekeeper and a teacher walk into a bar. Sounds like the set-up for the most 21st century gag – and in a roundabout way, it is. The punchline, as spun in Cédric Klapisch’s (The Spanish Apartment, Call My Agent!) amiable time-leaping comedy, is that these four people are cousins. Their family tree has sent its branches shooting off in the maddest directions. Like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, we’re off time-travelling to a more colourful era in French history to understand their common dominator: a young Norman woman, Adèle Vermillard (a wide-eyed Suzanne Lindon), who sets off to find her own mother in Belle Époque Paris and ends up intersecting with the Impressionist masters. The four distant relatives have been appointed by their wider family to help decide what to do with their great-great-grandmothers’ broken-down Normandy cottage. A supermarket chain wants to buy the land and they must decide what to do with her legacy of art and portraits – in the process learning about her and themselves. (Entertainingly, the wider family gathers on a conference call in which an older relative has a kitten filter on – an unexpected homage to the Zoom Cat Lawyer meme, perhaps.) It’s a great excuse to revisit this gilded age in French history Klapisch is a French director who treats his characters with the care of a Frank Capra, and Colours of Time is as accessible and generous as any of his work – a family dramedy with the sprightly spirit of a...

Welcome to the snowbound flatlands of Normal, Minnesota. Population 1,890 – although you might want to downgrade that come the end of this unapologetic blast of old-school mayhem.Bob Odenkirk is caretaker sheriff Ulysses Richardson, shipped into Normal after the previous lawman perished in a whiteout. ‘Good people, small problems’ is Ulysses’ appraisal after calming a petty local dispute, but something isn’t quite right. The nice lady in the yarn shop has a police radio scanner. Shotguns deck the walls of the local diner. And the cop shop armoury has enough C4 to blow up Luxembourg. A botched bank heist by two bungling drifters exposes Normal’s dirty secret: gold bullion stashed by the townsfolk in return for a cut from the Japanese mafia. The Yakuza money is Normal’s lifeblood – and now Ulysses knows, everyone in town, from the postie to the doctor, wants him dead.     Normal is a film of two halves. The first, a smalltown mystery populated with eccentric western stock: Lena Headey’s grungy barfly, Billy MacLellan’s doofus deputy, Henry Winkler’s dodgy mayor, face like a haunted flannel. And the second? The pneumatic chakka-chak of gunfire is absolutely relentless. A throwback to the B-movie thriller that packed the shelves of your local Blockbuster Exploding cop cars. Exploding heads. Ninety minute runtime. No CG. Who makes these films any more? Director Ben Wheatley, whose warehouse shoot-‘em-up Free Fire showed a fluency in the grammar of action cinema, piles on the...

Lee Cronin’s last film was Evil Dead Rise, an effective and often grotesque sequel to Sam Raimi’s low-budget classic. There was immediate talk of sequels and spin-offs but, given a little more road following its success, the Irish director has chosen an ostensibly different path. He breathes life – or death, more accurately – into another classic horror monster, with a spin on Egyptian mummies that's distinctly Raimi-esque in its goo and gore. Midsommar’s Jack Reynor stars as Charlie Cannon, a rising star journalist on assignment in Egypt for several months with his two children and pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa). But when his young daughter, Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted from their garden, their lives are overturned. The police, with the possible exception of idealistic young detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), suspect him of the crime, and no sign of Katie is found. It's quite some time before a strange accident returns her (now played by Natalie Grace) to the bosom of her family. Or at least, something that looks a lot like her. Cue some impressively horrible experiences for the largely blameless Cannons. Cronin, who writes as well as directs, punctuates some slow-burn scenes with regular visceral scares; visceral in the literal sense that bodily organs do not always remain on the inside here. As well as the world’s most upsetting pedicure scene and frequent moments of body horror, Cronin dabbles in the supernatural, social awkwardness, food repugnance,...

Faking it ‘til you make it is all well and good, but what happens when you actually make it? How do you keep the wolf from the door, the pretense alive, the lie a reality?  James McAvoy’s likeable directorial debut explores the dark side of that story, speeding off like a souped-up boy racer before wrapping around a lamp post in a moody final stretch that reveals the cost of it all. As charted in 2013 documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax and faithfully recorded in the former’s memoir, Gavin Bain (Seamus McLean Ross) and Billy Boyd (Samuel Bottomley) were a couple of Dundee wannabe B-boys and bedroom hip hop heads for whom rap music was both an inspiration and a way out. Bonding over skateboarding and a shared loved of Tupac, American street culture was an exit sign from their Scottish council estate. Problem? No one wanted a pair of Scottish rappers. Solution? Reinvent themselves as a Californian rap double act called Silibil N' Brains and hope no one asks too many questions. And as recreated in this twisty rags-to-riches tale, no one did. Not their wolfish record label boss (McAvoy), who sees the dollar signs in a pair of rapping white guys in the era of Eminem and D12; not the UK media types who are take happy to take the pair’s vague Californian back story at face value – even if their professed home town, ‘San Diangeles’, sounds a bit suspicious. Only their mate Mary (The Testaments’ Lucy Halliday) is on hand to remind them that, actually, they’re full of shite.  ...

A contemplative mood piece, Christian Petzold’s Mirrors No. 3 reflects on grief as a moment of transformation, a chance for a new beginning. Petzold centres the story on the mysterious ambiguity of Paula Beer, now his most frequent collaborator, a partnership that defines his cinema as surely as Nina Hoss did in Barbara, Phoenix and Transit. With Beer, he has moved away from the weight of history and politics, turning inward toward intimate gestures and the quiet drama of people failing to bond. The story brings together two women at very different points of loss. Beer's Laura is in a car that almost hits Betty (Barbara Auer) on a country road, a brief, loaded exchange of glances that takes on greater meaning when moments later her boyfriend Jakob is dead and she wakes up in a stranger's house. Betty, by contrast, carries an older, more diffuse grief, a family tragedy that has hollowed out her relationship with her husband and son. One loss is raw, the other long settled into the bones. What binds them is the mystery that connects not only them, but all of us. Not grief, but loss.  Almost the entire film takes place at Betty’s rundown countryside house, with an unusual porch that faces the street like something from the American midwest, a spot stuck between two spaces, as if it has been waiting for something to fill it. Betty seems to recognise something in Laura, though neither woman fully understands what the other needs. It is this mysterious glue that Petzold wants to...

‘Jesus Christ… She’s back.’ Imagine these words in a broad Cornish accent, with a very long pause in between, as a local discovers a little fishing boat washed up on a quiet harbour. Picture this shot on 16mm film, in director Mark Jenkin’s signature analogue style. And so the scene is set for a time-twisting fishing village mystery: one that may never be solved, but remains atmospheric and intriguing throughout.  The Rose of Nevada was lost at sea 30 years ago, along with its small crew, in the days when the fishing village prospered. Now, its scant population includes those still deep in mourning, and those struggling to provide for their families, such as Nick (an excellent George MacKay). When Nick agrees to join a fishing trip on the newly-return trawler, an ominous, superstitious sense prevails. But rather than not coming home at all, Nick returns in a different year: 1993, a few years before he was even born. With him in this time loop is his crew mate Liam (Callum Turner). Rather than being greeted as strangers, they are each welcomed back as a former crew member of the Rose. While the opportunistic Liam accepts being taken for the partner of a local (Rosalind Eleazar), Nick is understandably freaked out to be mistaken for the son of his neighbours: a man he knows to be long dead in the present day. Unlike Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap, who ‘leapt’ willingly into the bodies of strangers to solve their problems, Nick didn’t sign up for this, and challenges Liam’s...