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At one point in this character-led drama, the protagonist is described as ‘Rain Man’ because he has a disability that is halfway to a superpower. Given that Dustin Hoffman is in a supporting role, it’s a distracting nod, but not inaccurate. Like Marvel’s Daredevil, piano tuner Nikki White (Leo Woodall) has exceptionally sensitive hearing, which has stymied his hopes of a career as a professional musician but comes in really handy for some off-the-books safecracking work. But can he maintain the criminal side hustle in the long term or will conscience, or circumstances, bring him down? Director and co-writer Daniel Roher takes his sweet time in figuring it out. Roher was, until now, a documentarian; he won the Oscar for 2022’s Navalny. Perhaps that’s why he’s more interested in letting Nikki’s increasingly risky choices play out, and finding nuance and colour in his supporting characters. There’s Hoffman’s Harry Horowitz, an old-school craftsman with a bone-deep love of music, and his devoted but shrewd wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh, always smart casting). Havana Rose Liu plays gifted musician Ruthie, who’s working on her masterpiece and has no time for a boyfriend (she thinks). And there is Uri (Lior Raz), the criminally-minded security consultant who tempts Nikki to stray from the straight and narrow. He’s a thug and possibly a psycho, but Roher never treats him like a simple villain. He’s a businessman, as are those he preys upon. Leo Woodall demonstrates real movie-star...

It’s amazing to think that even 10 years ago a hit Super Mario Bros film would have seemed like an improbable idea. Even setting aside the debacle that was the moustachioed plumber’s live action 1993 outing, the truism was that videogame movies were never going to be embraced by mainstream cinemagoers. But now, after just a single film, the Mario franchise is one of the most bankable in modern cinema. The Super Mario Bros Movie (2023) is the ninth highest grossing movie of the decade. This sequel is as surefire as hits get.  Clearly advances in animation are key to this. But also it’s just the case that filmmakers have absolutely nailed the tone of This Sort Of Thing. It was The Lego Movie that paved the way for Mario (and Sonic, and Minecraft), proving that any IP can be a hit so long as it looks nice and you freight it with meta humour, celebrity voices and easter eggs for the nerds. And The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is another fine example of This Sort Of Thing. It just about has a plot, although it’s the same as the first film: faintly inexplicable warrior plumber siblings Mario and Luigi (voiced by Chris Pratt and Charlie Day) must save the princess from Bowser. Okay, it’s a different princess to the first film (Brie Larson’s Rosalina). And also a different Bowser (Benny Safdie’s Bowser Jr). But the point is the story is negligible – the brothers plus various eccentric hangers-on traverse a galaxy composed of small, weird planets in an effort to rescue the abducted...

French actor Denis Lavant (Holy Motors) has a face filmmakers love. Creased and pockmarked, with a bulbous nose and prominent ears, it’s the sort of visage that’s compelling to watch do practically anything. It serves Swedish director John Skoog’s oddly mesmerising monochrome folk tale particularly well, considering it’s essentially 90 minutes of watching one man’s massive DIY home renovation project. Call it ‘This Old Fortress’. Inspired by true events, it’s a story of fruitless obsession ​that Werner Herzog must be kicking himself for not discovering first. At the peak of the Cold War, Karl-Göran Persson, a farmhand in rural Sweden, dedicated his twilight years to transforming his modest cottage into a communal fallout shelter, or ‘redoubt.’ (In Swedish: ‘värn.’) Harvesting scrap metal, wood and whatever other junk he could get his hands on, then blowing his pension on concrete, he successfully constructed a fortification for a war that never came. Persson’s single-minded devotion is reflected in the filmmaking. Spinning off from his own award-winning art installation, Skoog and his crew rebuilt the shelter from scratch, and much of the runtime is given to observing Lavant, as Persson, gather and lay the materials. He jerryrigs a system to haul a pair of weighty railroad ties on his bike. He nearly saws down his favourite shade tree all by himself. He walks home swaddled in old t​yres, begrudgingly donated by a nearby garage. In his brief moments of leisure, he jams...

Like John Wick, just without all the calmness and restraint, this blackly funny action-horror doesn’t come off the rails, but only because it’s barely on them in the first place. There’s a dedication to spraying blood around here that would shame an abattoir, with decapitations, severings, crawling eyeballs and something interesting involving a pig’s head all featuring. There’s absolutely no half-arsing in They Will Kill You’s relentless barrage on the senses.    Seemingly working from a brief of ‘The Raid meets Get Out, only more Looney Tunes’, Russian director Kirill Sokolov and his co-writer Alex Litvak manage to cram together a load of disparate elements – social horror, Satanic panic and nutso exploitation flick – into a muscular and surprisingly coherent whole.  Zazie Beetz’s ex-con Asia Reaves is on the hunt for the younger sister (Myha'la) she lost when she fled their abusive dad. In prison, she’s learnt how to fight like a superhero – just go with it – and emerges determined to make good with her bitter and estranged sibling. The trail has led to a Manhattan tower block adorned, worryingly, with Satanic hieroglyphs where she’s landed a job as a maid. This is cover for her snooping, an intro in a world of white privilege that’s run by unsmiling Irish superintendent Lilith Woodhouse (Patricia Arquette doing several Irish accents at once). Heather Graham and Tom Felton are among the permanent guests at this creepy Hotel California where phones are confiscated and the...

There is a double meaning behind the title Kim Novak’s Vertigo. While, of course, it alludes to the actor’s pivotal role in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, it also suggests the swirl and disorientation of being at the centre of the Hollywood dream machine. Swiss filmmaker Alexandre O Philippe has previously made deep dives into the minutiae of Alien (Memory: The Origins of Alien), David Lynch’s relationship with The Wizard Of Oz (Lynch/Oz) and Psycho’s shower scene (78/52), but he takes a wider perspective here than just Novak’s iconic dual role as Judy and Madeleine for Hitch. Using film clips, objects from the actor’s archive, and an intimate in-depth interview with the star in her home, Kim Novak’s Vertigo emerges as a brisk (76 minutes) but warm and appealing profile of a survivor of the studio system and all the glamour, madness and misogyny that suggests. The film opens with a voice note from Novak, here 92, in gloomy reflective mood (‘I’m feeling very close to the end’). This is a cheeky misdirect as the person we subsequently meet emerges as vibrant, intelligent and curious. The story kicks off in bog-standard bio fashion – the early years detailed by photos, home movies and voiceover – but details an upbringing that is anything but average.  A warm profile of a survivor of the studio system – and all its glamour, madness and misogyny Her father kept the miscarried foetus of her brother in a jar in her garage; her mother tried first to abort her and then, as...

‘When you are on a sinking ship,’ George Orwell wrote in 1948, ‘your thoughts will be about sinking ships’. He was describing the way fascism occupies the thoughts of those under its thumb, muting all other concerns, whether personal, political or trivial. Members of the Way-Too-Online Generation can certainly relate. After all, we now all carry tiny anxiety machines around in our pockets, creating a sense of hyper-awareness to the world’s atrocities that allows precious little room for comforting distractions.  In his documentary-cum-video essay Orwell: 2+2=5, director Raoul Peck juxtaposes the British writer’s words with a flood of the same distressing images inundating our social media feeds, from Ukraine to Gaza, South America to the United States. The film’s anti-mathematical title refers to a concept explored in Orwell’s most famous book, the dystopian sci-fi milestone 1984, of how despotic regimes reshape objective truth to their whims. It could just as easily be called Doomscroll: The Movie. The point, of course, is that the ship has been sinking for a long time, and Orwell saw the iceberg coming from a century away. Born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903, the author grew up in colonial India as part of what he called a ‘lower-upper-middle class’ family, spent a regrettable stretch participating in ‘the actual machinery of despotism’ as a member of the imperial police in Burma, then dedicated his career to not just critiquing totalitarianism but outlining its playbook....

Every wondered what’s going on beneath your feet? Not in a fretful ‘is the Northern Line on the blink again?’ way but in the awestruck, Jules Verne-ish sense. To marvel at the thought of the planet’s crust extending 40-odd miles straight down. Acolytes of Robert Macfarlane’s acclaimed 2019 travelogue, Underland, will have. Viewers of this ghostly, lyrical documentary adaptation will share that wonder.  ‘Why do we seek the void?’ is the treatise spelt out early by British filmmaker Robert Petit (Upstream). His camera seeks answers in some of the planet’s loneliest, most inaccessible corners. Accompanied by Hannah Peel’s ethereal score and haunting sound design, his brisk journey to the centre of the Earth is a film of transcendent moments that never quite coalesces, like volcanic rock, into a unified whole. The answers to that question – science, poverty, thrill-seeking, anthropology, survival – are uncovered by following people who seek the same answers: an archaeologist exploring Mayan culture in the caves of Yucatán; a theoretical physicist trying to isolate dark matter in a lab at the bottom of a Canadian mine shaft; and an urban explorer risking drowning in a Las Vegas storm drain.  Sandra Hüller (Project Hail Mary) narrates the Mayan section, which has the mythic, claustrophobic quality of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Across the American landmass, meanwhile, the quest for dark matter spins into existential angst as American scientist Mariangela Lisanti on a lifelong...

Weird things happen up the Magic Faraway Tree. Zany characters reside in its branches, a big slide careers down the trunk with no obvious structural implications, and at the top, a long ladder leads up to a revolving carousel of equally magical kingdoms. A sugary confection for a wartime generation deprived of goodies (and their parents) during the early 1940s, it’s Enid Blyton at her most escapist, a colourful caper that makes The Famous Five look like one of the grittier episodes of Columbo.  Transplanting all the hippy-dippy goodness from a three-book series into a movie is a challenge that Simon Farnaby’s adaptation half-overcomes. With a game cast and good vibes throughout, it’s a smart update of the Blyton stories for the smartphone era, but with the plot hinging on some small-batch pomodoro sauce, the stakes never match the eccentricity levels.  Hold on to your pearls, Blyton purists, because the three children are no longer Jo, Bessie and Fanny but too-cool-for-school Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), shy Fran (Billie Gadsdon) and sweet-natured Joe (Phoenix Laroche). And they’re not wartime evacuees but the distracted, tech-absorbed offspring of inventor Polly (Claire Foy) and cheery stay-at-home dad Tim (Andrew Garfield), a self-professed pasta sauce pioneer. The trio are whisked off for a reset in bucolic, wifi-free rural England when Polly loses her job.  It’s a jukebox of British comedy styles – for better or worse ‘Boredom trauma’ takes minutes to set in until...

Translated into English, ‘La Grazia’ can mean either ‘grace’ or ‘pardon’. Both words are key to understanding Italian President Mariano De Santis (Toni Servillo) as he prepares for his term’s end, grieves his beloved wife and weighs up his legacy. On his desk is unsigned legislation that will legalise euthanasia. On his conscience are two prisoners up for clemency after murdering their partners under mitigating circumstances. Finding grace and forgiveness is a journey that writer-director Paolo Sorrentino’s terrific film charts in touching style.  La Grazia sees Sorrentino at his most sober and sincere, and his doleful muse, Servillo, at his formidable best. The Great Beauty and Loro star is fabulous here. De Santis is a man weighed down by mourning, and the solitude and burden of leadership. Clad in finely cut black suits and drawing on the cigarette with his loyal adjutant (Orlando Cinque) on the presidential palace roof, Servillo cuts through the solemnity with his trademark wry amusement.  De Santis is a more serious-minded Roman than The Great Beauty’s jaded hedonist Jep Gambardella – a romantic with a forensic mind, forever trapped between head and heart. Only the briefest flashbacks show Aurora, his lost love, but her presence is everywhere, a ghost in the grand palatial corridors through which Sorrentino’s weightless dolly shots glide. He’s a man who can’t let go because he has nothing new to grab onto. Even his dying horse must linger on in this purgatory.  He’s...

How often does the best romantic comedy of the year also contain the year’s best fight scene? Probably as often as any romcom starts with a man standing over a dead stranger on the side of the highway, his penis unknowingly dangling from his shorts. Splitsville is full of surprises. Written by co-stars Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, and directed by Covino, the duo’s second feature is a screwball sex farce for an age when even the most buttoned-down couples are exploring ‘ethical non-monogamy’. Marvin is a cuddly schlub in the Jason Segel mold. Covino is his wealthier, hairier, more dickish best friend. Both are punching above their weight when it comes to their wives: the former is married to Andor’s Adria Arjona, the latter to Dakota Johnson. In a desperate bid to keep them from coming to their senses, both husbands propose opening their respective marriages — the ramifications of which neither is prepared to deal with. Of course, movies about normies awkwardly dabbling in polyamory go back at least as far as 1969’s Bob & Carole & Ted & Alice, and there are endless comedies involving dumb guys undone by their own insecurities. What makes Splitsville stand out? Simply put, it’s goddamn hilarious.  What makes Splitsville stand out? Simply put, it’s goddamn hilarious With 2019’s The Climb, another film about friends overstepping the boundaries of fidelity, Covino and Marvin placed themselves in the bromantic lineage of Judd Apatow, only with a greater penchant for...