Our latest movie reviews

Coming out more than three decades after the Jean-Claude Van Damme stinker Street Fighter, this all-kicking, all-punching action movie reboots the Capcom video game franchise with more positive results. Plotwise, Street Fighter sticks close to the heightened camp of its source material, opening with laughably expository but well-crafted anime flashbacks. Best mates Ken (Noah Centino) and Ryu (Andrew Koji) fight and train together in the ’90s, eventually falling out after the lazily-named World Warrior Tournament. Meanwhile, Interpol agent Chun Li (Callina Liang) is set on reuniting the duo to seek revenge from the tournament’s fascist, power-hungry organiser M. Bison (David Dastmalchian). Any semblance of a proper storyline stops here as it’s just one battle after another from here on. Director Kitao Sakurai zooms in on the character details, sticking to fighting styles and finishing styles of the games (‘Yoga fire!’ etc). But unlike this year’s dud Mortal Kombat II, Street Fighter extends its gaming influences with hypersaturated neon colours and a sense of silliness to deliver an entertaining, if somewhat exhausting gladiatorial tournament. Centino is a bratty, insecure Ken, coming across as ’90s Logan Paul. His frat-bro swagger is contrasts nicely with the Bruce Lee stylings of Koji, a dedicated martial artist in real life. Sakurai’s penchant for gross-out comedy (he previously directed Eric Andre’s Bad Trip) can be off-putting, from characters referring to Chun Li as a...

If you’ve ever had impure thoughts about a basket – or simply wanted to date a man who asks you questions about your life – then the wonderful Wicker should get you all hot and bothered. Based on a 2008 short story by Ursula Wills-Jones, this fantasyland comedy-drama also might be the first time anyone has ever attempted to meld a bawdy 1970s sex comedy with Lord of the Rings.  As gender allegories go, Wicker’s premise might be sledgehammeringly obvious, but the execution is immaculate. Olivia Colman is resplendent as a nonchalant fisherwoman who commissions a basketmaker to weave her a husband. Played with creaky restraint by Alexander Skarsgård in a full body woven suit and facial prosthetics, it turns out that he’s a keeper. The handsome willow husband immediately outshines the local menfolk due to his gentle nature, willingness to help around the house and massive cock.  Feminism hasn’t yet arrived at this pleasingly grubby medieval-era village, where women are named only in relation to the men they associate with (the doctor’s daughter, the tailor’s wife and so on). Though every one of these men is absolutely bloody useless and none of the women are happy in their marriages, the fisherwoman is mocked for being single – as well as for stinking of the daily catch. Cue a quick visit to Peter Dinklage’s theatrical wood weaver, who, like Dr Frankenstein after a trip to Travis Perkins, delivers the goods in the form of an intricately woven hunk that looks like a cross...

Jasmine Jobson’s terrific depiction of British-Somali boxer Ramla Ali brings to life the struggle, resilience and determination of those who have crossed oceans and started over. Director Anthony Wonke’s dramatisation of her life, written by Ursula Rani Sarma, captures all patriarchal barriers and unhealed traumas that needed overcoming on her path to Olympic glory in 2021. As refugee Muslims from Somalia, Ramla’s family considers the honour and safety of its women non-negotiable. So her ambitions to box at the Olympics are haram and cannot be approved. She has to train in secret after work, all the while fighting her mother’s (Hodan Yusuf) persistent attempts at matchmaking her with Somali men. She meets and marries a white man (Peaky Blinders’ Finn Cole), who converts to Islam out of love for her – a string of choices the family is much less resistant to than Ramla’s athletic dreams.  But this resistance comes from a deep-seated fear around Ramla’s physical safety, with roots in an old death. Ramla lost one of her elder brothers as a child during the civil war in Somalia, which was immediately followed by their move to London. This unaddressed wound, which came to dictate all future concerns within the family, appears in recurring flashbacks. However, the frequency of the flashback feels superfluous and the film suffers from beating the point home too much. Jasmine Jobson is fiercely moving Jobson is fiercely moving, especially in her scenes with her hesitant mother and...

The studio behind Madagascar, How To Train Your Dragon and Shrek, DreamWorks Animation has an unerring knack for launching animated franchises that run… and run. But the studio’s latest effort is unlikely to add to that illustrious roster, flopping in the US despite straining every sinew to dazzle. There’s plenty to like in its punky mash-up of 3D and hand-drawn animation styles – the spirit of the Spider-Verse and the most recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies is writ large here – and the sweet story of two teenage besties fixing their fraying relationship on a fantastical island. And there’s a very rare and refreshing use of the Philippines as the setting for a big Hollywood movie. But this mythological adventure is an exhausting watch, a fantasy adventure paced like a panic attack. Filipino-American animator Januel Mercado and his co-writer/director Joel Crawford, the filmmaking pair behind Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, give us two BFFs who meet at their Manila high-school and bond over trips to the principal’s office, viewings of Predator and hangouts at the beach. They have their own catchphrase (‘Waboosh!!’) and friendship bracelets that will take on a powerful symbolism. Raissa (voiced by Liza Soberano) is the studious one, who dreams of moving to California for a career at Caltech; the punkier Jo (H.E.R.) is all imagination and impulse, upset that her friend is thinking of flying the nest. Jo’s kindly grandma, Lola (Dolly de Leon), tells them stories of...

Based on a novel by Daniel Kraus, this bananas-sounding but sweatily effective survival thriller sees Resident Evil and Weapons’ disaster-magnet Austin Abrams facing his most luckless scenario yet: getting interned within the belly of a sperm whale. Replete with flesh-burning digestive juices and oozing gunk, it’s the kind of noxious environment that would put even HP Lovecraft off his dinner. And it’s a 4DX screening that only the truly bold will want to book in for.  Abrams is Jay Gardiner, a twentysomething Californian who has decamped to the Midwest, mainly to avoid his dad Mitt (Josh Brolin giving his best Nick Nolte), an alpha type who seems to love the ocean a lot more than his son. The movie opens with the terminally ill Mitt committing himself to the deep, off his favourite beach. But Jay, his mum (Elisabeth Shue) and older sisters (Jane Levy, Emily Rudd) won’t find peace without a body to bury. With something still to prove to his old man, the scuba-diving Jay tanks-up and slips beneath the waves to find him.  Accepting that no marine biologist is going to stand what happens next, director Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You) still manages to make the moment of truth convincing – with the help of some inky depths and a giant squid that the whale is pursuing. By the time Abrams’ panicking Jay wraps his head around his Jonah-esque predicament, the oxygen in his tank is already beginning to run out and the clock starts ticking. Claustrophobics are going to need a...

Brad Bird is one of the biggest names in animation, responsible for all-time classics like The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille. In the early ’90s, before any of these films existed, Bird first imagined Ray Gunn. It’s taken more than 30 years for Bird’s passion project to become a reality. It was worth the wait. Ray Gunn throws us into a stunning retro-futuristic world of Metropia, full of impossibly sky-high buildings and flying cars, where aliens live alongside humans. Ray (Sam Rockwell) works as a private eye, specialising in ‘discreet investigations’ with his partner Eye-Ra (a brilliant Tom Waits, whose gravelly voice lends perfectly to his characters weariness). Despite Eyera’s warning that ‘we’re months away from being able to afford ethics’, Ray’s stringent moral code makes staying afloat in the city a challenge. That commitment to doing what’s right gives him a job that could change everything: protecting ultra-popular pop star Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson). It’s a job that proves to be no small feat, especially as the bodies start piling up. Ray Gunn is a super satisfying gumshoe caper, moving along at breakneck pace. The characters, especially Eyera, are winsome. Ray makes a fun detective, Venus delivers a slick twist on the femme fatale, while the villainous Francis (Matt Berry) is like a combination of Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon and Jabba the Hutt. Bird’s sense of adventure is on display here, and his script (co-written with Matthew...

By turns inspiring and bleak, 14th uses a constitutional amendment to dissect the American experiment. Spoiler alert: things are not going great. But while it may seem as though the country is unraveling in real time, this upheaval is not, as it turns out, anything new. 14th does feel like a natural follow-up to 13th, DuVernay's 2016 documentary about how the 13th Amendment’s exception clause paved the way for mass incarceration. Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment was a cornerstone of post-Civil War reconstruction, guaranteeing birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection under the law, and barring officials who engage in insurrection from holding office again. As DuVernay expertly illustrates, every one of those provisions is under pressure, at minimum, today.   DuVernay is clearly aware that the very notions of civics lessons and constitutional amendments are likely to put people to sleep. So she emphasises visual flair and narrative momentum, to keep her audience engaged as we're learning. It works: due credit to everybody on her graphics, archival, score, and soundtrack teams, who have juxtaposed past and present with considerable insight. 150 years of striking archival material shares the screen with biting comedy from the likes of George Carlin and Paul Mooney, backed by music from James Brown, Kendrick Lamar and even Fleetwood Mac. Rarely has a documentary felt so thoughtfully constructed. Her longtime editor, Spencer Averick, deserves extra praise...

Harry Lehman (John Turturro), a New Yorker pushing 70, is facing a dystopian scenario in Noah Segan’s poignantly nostalgic drama: planned obsolescence.  He still diligently shines his wingtips every morning, gets excited about ‘renting a tape from the library’ (Barbara Stanwyck is his favourite), and treats people with gentlemanly courtesy. True, he also happens to be a pickpocket. But once he’s taken what he needs, he throws the wallets in a mailbox so his victims can get everything else back. Unfortunately, as the title suggests, Harry is increasingly a man out of time. And the clock really starts running when he lifts a bag from Dylan (After the Hunt’s Will Price), the spoiled scion of a New York crime family. As it happens, Dylan has been hiding a USB drive holding a non-fungible token worth nearly $1 million in that bag. Harry, of course, has no idea what the drive is, and casually tosses it to someone else. He also doesn’t realise that there are cameras on every corner of the city. So it’s not long before Dylan tracks him down, and gives him an ultimatum: either Harry finds the drive, or his entire world implodes. It’s Dylan who brings up obsolescence, but – as a wry pawnbroker (Steve Buscemi) notes – it’s Harry who’s facing it. Harry’s most important relationship is with New York itself Turturro is impeccable as an old-fashioned man who has always lived by his own code of ethics, for good and ill. Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito, who plays a retiring detective, are...

‘I’m in an Eleanor Coppola film!’ Marianne Faithfull coos down the lens, the gilded walls of Versailles behind her cluttered with lighting rigs and crew prepping the next shot. It's the first time a filmmaker has been granted access to the palace on this scale. Marie Antoinette was Sofia Coppola’s third feature, following The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, and marked a serious step up in scale, with a 250-strong credited cast and crew.  Twenty years on, this documentary celebrates both the film and Eleanor, who spent her life among filmmakers before releasing her first feature, Paris Can Wait, at 80 in 2016. Sofia has explained that her mother’s 80-odd hours of footage were first trimmed into a DVD extra. Lockdown prompted the pair to revisit it, and Sofia completed the project following Eleanor's death in 2024. The film itself initially divided critics with its anachronistic style, but it’s since become a cult classic, thanks to its thumping indie soundtrack, punk-pastel palette and dry wit. It’s also a clear expression of Sofia’s empathy for troubled young women (Marie was just 14 when she married Louis XVI, and 18 when she became queen), a pattern in her films that her mother clocks, at one point asking why she always has an ‘isolated main girl’ in her pictures. On screen, Sofia has just 57 days, 20 of them at Versailles, to rebuild interiors including the Queen’s Grand Chamber, dress the cast in Milena Canonero’s elaborate, Oscar-winning costumes, and battle...

The year is 1381. Plague has killed half the population, grief and hardship engulf the survivors, and it’s only halfway through the Hundred Years’ War, which has bankrupted the state. Afraid of angering the wealthy, the crooked council of boy king Richard II tax the common people, stealing from the poor to prop up the rich.  The peasants are stretched to breaking point – and when a grieving ploughman (Andrew Garfield) snaps, he sparks an uprising that unites the peasantry, joining rabble-rousers John Ball (Jamie Bell) and Wat Tyler (Shōgun’s Cosmo Jarvis) to march on London and demand a new deal from the king. ‘All will be well once the poison of wealth is removed,’ one of the marchers tells the man known only as ‘the Ploughman’, a kind of outlaw who wears a hooded tabard in the sort of green you might find in Lincoln… now wait a second? Yes, as revealed extremely late into the US marketing campaign, The Uprising is kind of a Robin Hood origin story, and subtitling it (as the US did) ‘The Rise of Robin Hood’ is a little like subtitling the original Planet of the Apes ‘Rise of the Statue of Liberty from the Wasteland of Post-Apocalyptic Earth’. But since they’ve spoiled it already, we can set that aside – for now – and see how the director of ripped-from-the-headlines dramas United 93 and Captain Phillips does tackling the six-centuries-old story of the Peasants’ Revolt. Why not mix in a bit of the Robin Hood myth – you know, for kids? The answer is a resounding ‘not bad’....