Our latest movie reviews

Charli xcx is having a moment on the big screen. Pivoting from Brat summer, the multi-hyphenate has written music for Mother Mary and Wuthering Heights, produced and starred in a mockumentary about her own career, and signed up for further quirky cinematic projects.  With a lick of the French New Wave, a nip of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy and a dash of the playful end of the Polish Film School, Erupcja is the latest. Writer, director, editor and cinematographer Pete Ohs’ shot-on-the-hop, playfully wistful deconstruction of the romcom, co-written with his cast, presents Charli as restless soul, Bethany. A return visitor to Poland’s capital city, Warsaw, this time she’s brought her live-in boyfriend, Rob, played by fellow musician-turned-actor Will Madden. Her glazed looks, as they endure the frustrating mundanity of self-checking-in to an Airbnb, suggest she’s already checked out of their relationship. Erupcja (the Polish word for eruption) opens with footage of Mount Etna going up, with Rob and Bethany’s planned flight home cancelled due to the volcanic ash cloud. This real-life event doesn’t foreshadow a big blow-up between them. Leaning into the great cinematic tradition of foreigners finding (and losing) themselves abroad, their slow death is a mostly amicable fizzer. When Rob snoozes on arrival, Bethany scoots to the apartment of Nel (Lena Góra), a Berlin techno-loving florist she first met here 16 years ago when they were teenagers. Strangely, Bethany silently...

‘By the power of Grayskull!’ If those words shoot a lightning bolt of nostalgia straight through your soul, then this is the Masters of the Universe movie you’ve been waiting for.   Faithfully capturing the simple joys and craziness of the beloved 1980s TV cartoon, the story starts in Eternia, a beautiful, blossom-laden land that’s a boggling mix of fairytale fantasy (castles, medieval weaponry) and sci-fi (jet rockets and cyborgs with laser blasters). Here, sensitive little Prince Adam is told to ‘be a man’ by his father (James Purefoy) who forces him into combat training because ‘the world is no place for the weak’. When the family are attacked by the evil Skeletor (Jared Leto hidden under blue latex), Adam is sent to Earth via an inter-galactic rainbow highway (very Thor).  A mild-mannered Adam (now an adorable Nicholas Galitzine) grows up and gets a Clark Kent-type job in HR where his ‘he/him’ nameplate (as revealed in a trailer) triggered instant anti-woke controversy online (it is a joke, guys). But unlike the franchise-destroying 1987 movie (nice cameo by its star Dolph Lundgren), this doesn’t waste too much time on Earth before Adam retrieves his magical sword, rips his shirt off and goes back to fight for Eternia.  After decades in development hell, Masters of the Universe finally fell into the right hands with Bumblebee director Travis Knight. Where other reboots lean into dour origin stories, his is as brightly coloured as a bowl of e-numbered breakfast cereal....

If he hadn’t been France’s defining 20th century statesman, Charles de Gaulle might have made a great comedy straight man. Played by a ramrod straight and poker-faced Simon Abkarian in the first instalment of this two-part, bilingual French epic, he carries the air of a man who knows that, yes, that ladder is about to crash to the ground and someone is getting covered in paint.  For the majority of writer-director Antonin Baudry’s (The Wolf’s Call) stirring and big-scale biopic, it looks likely to be an exasperated Winston Churchill on the end of such a pratfall. As both friend and, at least in a political sense, foe to the exiled leader of the Free French government, Churchill (Simon Russell Beale returning to his Operation Mincemeat role) puffs his cheeks at de Gaulle’s gumption in trying to steer his foreign policy decisions. The pair’s fiery face-offs are a rollicking highlight of a film that occasionally feels stilted and orthodox.Adapted from Julian T Jackson’s 900-page 2018 biography 'A Certain idea of France', De Gaulle: Résistance is about how the French President-to-be worked himself up through the cracks of history. He’s a captivating and paradoxical figure: a home-front soldier and an unelected democrat who conjures an unofficial mandate for himself through bulldozing force of will and an unwavering belief in himself and his country. He speaks of France in spiritual terms as he tries to coax Churchill and Roosevelt (Campbell Scott) into taking on the...

‘Victorian governesses can be psychopaths, too’ isn’t quite the radical spin on a period costume drama this off-kilter romp seems to think it is – after all, every other gothic novel seems to boast a deranged tutor you’d shepherd your bonnet-wearing offspring across a country lane to avoid. Still, Maika Monroe’s unhinged young educator Winifred Notty takes the trope into gory new terrain in critic-turned-director Zachary Wigon’s (Sanctuary) playful but punchless period horror.   Temporarily done with scream-queen duties after a pair of slam-dunk horrors in It Follows and Longlegs, Monroe now seems fully settled into her cuckoo-in-the-nest era. Unlike 2025’s remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, there’s no pretending that Winifred is anything other than stark-raving mad when she arrives at the household of Jason Isaacs’ sleazy and sclerotic old buffer Mr Pound and his wife (Ruth Wilson) with a letter of recommendation and a trail of mysteriously disappeared families behind her. Their two children (Jacobi Jupe and Evie Templeton) are about to get an education they hadn’t bargained for.  As the on-the-nose title of screenwriter Virginia Feito’s source novel hints, you’re not getting the elegant filleting of aristocratic mores of a Peter Greenaway film here. Instead, it’s the slash-and-hack energy of a pulpy horror with a powdered wig on. That’s not to decry Victorian Psycho’s headrush pleasures, mostly delivered by the excellent Monroe – albeit boasting an accent of no...

‘Surreal’ is a word that, through a century of overuse, has lost most of its original meaning to the point where it’s just become a synonym for ‘weird’. Sci-fi horror Backrooms is certainly weird, and deeply so. But it is also, in a very accurate sense, utterly surreal. Its landscape is a vast, labyrinthine interior of harshly lit, mustard-tinted rooms and corridors, where furniture and unexpected objects meld disturbingly with the floors, walls and low ceilings. The film mirrors the way our subconscious slightly misremembers mundane architecture in dreams, with its masterful production design weaving a netherworld of soulless, sunless office spaces in which horrible things could lurk around any of its infinite blind corners. Think Stranger Things’ Upside Down by way of Severance. All of this will ring a bell for anybody aware of the recent online obsession with liminal urban spaces, specifically the Backrooms web series. And fans of this skewed digital phenomenon (which, by the way, partly inspired the look of Severance) may be pleased to hear that its A24-backed cinematic incarnation comes direct from the Backrooms boy himself. Namely, VFX-wrangling enfant terrible Kane Parsons, who was only 16 when he made the original YouTube short and now, at the still crazily tender age of 20, has been given a budget, a quality cast (Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor) and some serious studio space, which allows him to build this nightmare for real rather than in pixel-form. ...

Be warned: you will almost certainly leave Power Ballad unable to get the title song and its catchy chorus out of your head. In fact, this cheerful earworm could be the movie’s most memorable element. That said, there’s always space for an easygoing comedy-drama like this one. Who wouldn’t want to spend a couple of hours with Paul Rudd in melting-down mode? Rudd’s Rick Power looks like the ageing rock star he always assumed he’d become, but he actually works as an unabashedly embittered wedding singer. He had a moment, a couple decades back, when he’s sure he could have made it big. Instead, he fell in love, settled down in Dublin with Rachel (Marcella Plunkett), and became a doting parent to Aja (Beth Fallon). He’s happy, at home. But at work… well, every gig feels just like the last, and there’s nothing more depressing than singing other people’s hits. Or so he assumes, until he meets one-time boy band star Danny (Nick Jonas). As a childhood friend of this week’s groom, Danny turns another faceless job into a thrilling all-night jam session in which he and Rick drunkenly write a song together. They part ways the next morning as friends, and so they remain until Danny releases the song, it becomes a global hit, and he takes full credit. For Rick, the experience is literally maddening. The more he hears the song, the crazier he becomes, until he’s risking the life he’s already got by obsessing over the one he might have had. This is a crowd-pleasing wedding band of a movie...

Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont (Girl) brings his delicate, gauzy touch to the muddy hell of World War I with his third film, a gay love story about a young recruit who finds horror and hope in the trenches. It doesn’t hit the heights of Close, his quiet elegy to young friendship, but it’s another gently moving exploration of young men clutching onto their sense of self in traumatic circumstances. Inspired by a photo of a Great War soldier in women’s clothing, Dhont introduces his young Belgian recruit, Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia), to a troupe of performers led by the exuberant Francis (Valentin Campagne). The pair couldn’t be more dissimilar: a farmer so taciturn his comrades call him ‘Quiet Mouse’, and the flamboyant, livewire tailor’s son, who is assembling a theatrical performance behind the lines from the meagrest of elements: an old barn, some set decoration and a cast of support troops who call themselves the ‘band of rejects’. Love blossoms between them in snatched moments, captured with gentle grace by Dhont.  The strain of war is always there. With cinematographer Frank van den Eeden’s up-close camera slogging through the mud alongside Pierre, you can feel the brutalising effect of this blackened landscape – of lugging shells to the front and hauling bodies to mass graves. And you can sense how the corpse-burying truces in No Man’s Land might leave a man contemplating self-harm with a borrowed bayonet. The film sometimes moves like it’s wading through the Flanders...

Director László Nemes (Son of Saul) returns to World War II to force two real-life foes – French Resistance chief Jean Moulin and Nazi interrogator Klaus Barbie – into a grim dance macabre in this elegant and viscerally intense wartime thriller.  As with his 2016 Holocaust drama, the Hungarian filmmaker gets up close with a man trying to hold out against inescapable terrors. Moulin, codenamed ‘Max’, is the real-life head of the French Resistance. Charged with uniting a rival network of underground cells under the nose of the Gestapo, he parachutes into occupied France in 1943 and gets to work. Played by Gilles Lellouche, the Gauloise-puffing Moulin is straight out of a film noir. He meets his agents in cafés and coolly conveys his orders even as Nazi soldiers walk in. At a soirée, he captivates the beautiful French countess (Adèle Blanc-Sec’s Louise Bourgoin) who will unwittingly provide his cover as an interior designer. But before he can get to work wallpapering her apartment, the walls cave in. A member of the network has been picked up by the Nazis. How much has he spilled under interrogation? A covert meeting reveals the answer. Like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Resistance masterpiece Army of Shadows, a touchstone here, Nemes and his screenwriter Olivier Demangel dip into a world where liberty is tenuous, the risks are profound and not every Frenchman is on board with the cause. The first act plays out in that paranoid register. But the meat of the film happens inside the...

Immortality sucks: that’s the message of this arty sci-fi with a bold turn from Rebecca Hall. Her character, an artist called Claire, lives in a future world that’s superficially like our own – the main difference being that all ailing organs and limbs can be replaced, and death is postponed indefinitely. The only way to die is to make the controversial choice to do so.  After celebrating her 250th birthday with the same group of gorgeous, vacuous friends that come every year, Claire makes that choice. Everyone is baffled, including her husband (Gael García Bernal). But the decision lights a fire within Claire. As she approaches her death day, she begins to live freely and embrace the provocative art she was once known for, choosing to stage her death as a confronting performance, attracting fascination and an expanded fan base. It’s a striking debut from writer-director Maria Martinez Bayona with a fearless performance from Hall, as Claire rebels against convention and reflects on her life. She’s a fish out of water, the only one who can see the absurdity around her. While it’s very much its own film, The End of It calls to mind sci-fis such as Logan’s Run (1976), in which society decrees its citizens must die at the age of 30. It might sound like the reverse of that, but Claire’s world is still controlling, suffocating and mind-numbing.  If you’re after a smart take on AI, you’ve got it While it’s tempting to compare this to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, it’s perhaps...

No one is pining for the fjords by the end of this slow-boiling cauldron of a moral drama. Shot with a subdued palette and set in a small waterside community in rural Norway, Cristian Mungiu’s (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) film has Renate Reinsve and unrecognisable Marvel star Sebastian Stan as a Norwegian mum and her Romanian engineer husband, who discover that the warm welcome of their new home town doesn’t extend past a slice or two of cake and a tour of the high school. Mungiu quickly sets up his inciting incident: Lisbet (Reinsve) and Mihai Gheorghiu’s (Stan) teenage daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban), one of their five children, is spotted with unexplained bruises by her new teacher. Worried these were inflicted by her parents’ corporal punishment, the teacher reports this to the local child protection agency. It escalates when Elia admits that her dad has ‘slapped’ them. And he has – albeit without velocity. Mihai is a stern but loving dad guided by his family’s strict faith. The old ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ ideology is intact in his culture, but in his new homeland, it’s a crime. The stakes are existential: prison and the loss of their kids. Even their next-door neighbours, the school’s pompous headmaster and his sympathetic lawyer wife, initially so welcoming, back away. Only their own tearaway teenager Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) stands by the family, and especially Elia, on whom she harbours a crush. That, in turn, will come to inform the homophobic Mihai’s...