Our latest movie reviews

In the 1960s and ’70s, a tide of eccentrically-dressed Westerners flowed East along the hippie trail, hunting for enlightenment as they trundled through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to India and beyond (before the Russian invasion put a violent end to all that peace and love). Far fewer people looked for spiritual fulfilment in the opposite direction. But this beautifully imaginative hybrid documentary, executive-produced by Priyanka Chopra, is dedicated to telling the story of one of them: PK, an Indian portrait artist who fell in love with a Swedish tourist, and set off on an impossible journey to find his destiny. British director Orlando von Einsiedel (The White Helmets) foregrounds interviews with this story’s central couple: PK himself, who revisits his impetuous youth over chai from a Delhi roadside seller, and Lotta, who recalls their passionate affair with enjoyably Nordic understatement in the muted Swedish countryside. When PK was born, a soothsayer foretold that he would meet a woman from over the sea – a Taurus, with musical flair. So when he sketches Lotta’s portrait one day, and discovers that she is all those things, the future seems to be written in the stars. She heads home – and, too broke to buy a train ticket, he follows her by bicycle, with no map, and only $80, art materials, and some dried fruit to sustain him on this treacherous pedal-powered journey through inhospitable deserts and snowy mountains.  Clearly, he survived. But von Einsiedel...

An extreme sports doc so pummelling, you may need a huff of oxygen (or a hug) afterwards, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s follow-up to Free Solo is not the Everest climbing documentary you’re expecting. It left me gasping at points, as its protagonists dice with death in ways us sea-level folk can only gaze up at in awe and bafflement. Of course, people have been (successfully) scaling Everest since 1953. Nothing new there, right? But only five of them have done it from the Chinese side of the mountain rather than the commonly used southeast ridge in Nepal – the formidable North Face route that looks like something you wouldn’t want to fly over, much less climb. Much, much less ski back down. Yet that is the task real-life partners and elite mountain skiers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson set for themselves in 2022. Chin, not only the co-director here but a friend of the couple and their fellow climber, is on hand with a dual-purpose climbing/filmmaking crew to help them achieve their dream of conquering ‘the ultimate ski run on Planet Earth’. Ahead of them are sudden avalanches, treacherous ice fields, high winds and fatally fickle weather – all captured with stunning cinematography via drone footage, helicopter shots and GoPro cameras. A sudden avalanche yields footage from inside the snow, like some terrifying new virtual reality experience. Widescreen shots of Everest beg the obvious question: how the hell do you begin to ski down that?  Ahead of them are...

Five years in the making, Ed Sayers’ feature debut brings together 40 people across 25 countries, each armed with a Super 8 camera to film the natural world on their doorstep. The result is like a lo-fi remix of Godfrey Reggio’s epic Koyaanisqatsi – both a celebration of nature and environmental omen, albeit minus the tribal warbling. Thanks to those goliath, bombastic BBC productions, nowadays we consume nature as a hyperreal hi-def event, so obsessed with spectacle there’s little space for reflection. There’s no to-the-death battles here or exotic mating rituals. Accompanied by Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres’s spectral score, this is nature, up close and often very personal. The spark for Sayers’ experiment was French filmmaker Roger Batteault, whose footage of flamingos included an eerie shot of a lone bird flying to catch up with the flock, like a broken spear gliding through a wide expanse of sky. Inspiring him to film grey seals near his Norfolk home, Sayers rallied a community of Super 8 enthusiasts and conservationists to share the world around them.The sheer variety of life is astounding. We see octopus in Patagonia; silkworms in London; water buffalo in Assam; reindeer in the Arctic Circle; fin whales in Thailand; rattlesnakes in the Mojave Desert; the puffins of Skomer Island in Wales… Inevitably, man’s impact crashes the party with footage of glaciers reduced to puddles, Kenya’s two last surviving northern white rhinos and a haunting vignette in the sunken human...

Remember the pandemic, when everyone had time to Netflix and chill? TV shows that might otherwise have come and gone became global hits, and in between the Tiger Kings and the Queen’s Gambits there was a Parisian acting agency called ASK that became a global sensation. But by the time Call My Agent became a hit, the show’s creator, Fanny Herrero, had quit, citing burnout. Despite the clamour for a season five, it never happened, partly because the show’s stars – Camille Cottin, Laure Calamy, et al – were now top of every casting director's list. (Basically the plot of one of the episodes.) Fans of the format and its self-spoofing celebrity cameos – Cécile de France, Isabelle Huppert, Jean Dujardin among the most recognisable – were left to cry over the diminishing returns of copycat shows in the UK, India, Italy, Korea, Turkey and elsewhere. Five years on and this movie is the satisfying compromise the stars and Herrero, who returns to write the script, agreed to. And it says everything about the enduring standing of Call My Agent! that George Clooney has a monumental scene-stealing cameo. Eva Longoria, Laetitia Casta and Vincent Macaigne round off the celebrity involvement. But they are the bubbles, not the champagne. Despite a hokey fourth-wall-breaking pre-credits recap of the demise of the ASK agency – jobbing actor Hervé (Nicolas Maury) fills us in on where everyone is five years later – fans will be happy that the movie doesn't take the easy route of installing...

Six years after our own very real pandemic, Hollywood’s first Covid-inspired blockbuster manifests what many of us fantasised about during the darkest moments of the first lockdown – a broken world emptied of human life. Influenza is to blame in Ridley Scott’s film, which technically makes it an a-cough-alypse, and while there are bursts of Mad Max berserking, The Dog Stars is a surprisingly sensitive meditation on what we could have lost. It’s May, 2035. On a deserted Colorado airfield, we meet two men and a dog clinging onto existence. Josh Brolin’s shoot-’em-burn-’em ex-Marine Bangley is hellbent on defending the compound from scavengers. Jacob Elordi’s pilot Hig can’t wait to escape, flying the Rockies for signs of civilisation with his faithful Belgian Malinois. A glitchy radio message appears to promise a new life, but when Hig crash-lands his battered Cessna near a remote ranch, he gets a shotgun welcome from its owner (Guy Pearce) and curiosity from his daughter (Margaret Qualley).  From Blade Runner’s neon dystopia to Gladiator’s barbaric Rome, when it comes to immersive world-building, Scott is one of cinema’s great architects. But in The Dog Stars, we’re transported to a wasteland we’ve walked countless times before: tomb-like skyscrapers, overgrown freeways, feral packs of savages. In the ironically overpopulated genre of post-apocalyptic cinema, what makes The Dog Stars stand out from the pack?  Superficially, Scott offers a few novel twists – notably, a bison...

If you’ve fallen under the spell of House of the Dragon’s determined-to-marry-well witch, Alys Rivers, you’ll surely be drawn to Gayle Rankin’s wild turn in Scottish filmmaker Louis Paxton’s beguilingly debut, The Incomer. Rankin plays Isla, one half of an exceedingly strange, semi-feral sibling duo completed by Outlander star Grant O’Rourke as her softer, jollier-in-spirit brother, Sandy. They’ve been isolated on a remote island somewhere off the northeastern coast of Scotland, with their parents little but unreliable memories. Marrying the dark anarchy of Lord of the Flies with a dash of Limbo’s kooky, bruised heart, Paxton delivers a furiously funny piece of folklore. He’s aided in by animation director Selina Wagner’s charcoal-drawn animated sequences, which reveal that the island once teemed with locals. They were apparently betrayed by the wily mainlanders. An unrecognisable Four Weddings and a Funeral star John Hannah’s tricksy, Gollum-like selkie who lingers in the rocky shallows is another danger, wheedling at Isla and Sandy to join him in the murky depths. Hannah is marvellously menacing, with make-up and prosthetics designer Siobhán Harper-Ryan giving him a sharp-toothed smile and blubbery skin. The siblings’ dad went into the sea to keep these creatures at bay. He also taught his bizarre kids to defend the isle, insisting the only good mainlanders are those bludgeoned with a cudgel or hoiked off the cliffs. Isla and Sandy ceremonially adopt the likeness of...

A lamp-lit street’s gleam, punctuating the inky blot of night in a remote Normandy village enveloped by forest, looks for all the world like the Milky Way brought low. It’s the first sign that Eden star Félix de Givry’s beguiling debut directorial feature, Goodbye Cruel World, will lend a mystical element to this story of a lost boy finding his way. That ‘boy’ is teenager Otto Vidal, played by Milo Machado-Graner, best known for his turn as the visually impaired kid, Daniel, in Justine Triet’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall.  We hear Otto before we see him, racing through gloomy streets pursued by the bullies who’ve driven him to feel like life’s not worth living. A passing comment about the rigidity of his Catholic schooling and the nuns who stroll by his hiding spot, oblivious to his presence, illustrate his outsider status. A narrator (Françoise Lebrun) underlines his predicament with gentle grace, amplifying the almost fairy-tale nature of this melancholy story.  Otto posts an accusatory suicide note to all of his classmates, escusing only two kind girls and another boy (‘at a push’) from causing his death. He’s been pushed to his limit, as we witness him all alone on a high bridge over a roaring river that’s captured in gorgeously textured 16mm by cinematographer Tara-Jay Bangalter. Except that his desperate plunge isn’t as final as the husband’s in Anatomy of a Fall. A love song for the lonely that glows like starlight Surviving, bedraggled and ghostly, a bruised...

That high-altitude action sequence in Where Eagles Dare has sudden new competition for the most knuckle-whitening cable-car moment in cinema.  In August 2023, in the Pakistan province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a group of teenagers, travelling to school by cable car across a valley in the Himalayan foothills, were left dangling 900 feet up when two of the three cables above them abruptly snapped. The obstacles facing would-be rescuers were formidable: swirling cross winds, desperate family members, choking crowds of locals on either side of the ravine. Oh, and the prospect that the third cable could give way at any moment. Directed by Pakistani filmmaker Mohammed Ali Naqvi, this terrifically tense documentary tells the story of that nightmare commute, using a wealth of media and cameraphone footage, plus interviews and reenactments with the people involved, to piece together the 12 or so hours of bedlam that followed.The cable car, hanging at a canted angle like a frame from a horror movie, is a heart-in-mouth sight that Naqvi never cuts away from for long. Alerted to the unfolding story, the Pakistani media and then international networks arrived to capture the rescue efforts. Drone footage zooms in on the calm-looking boys inside the gondola and you wonder how they seem so cool when their lives are hanging in the balance.  The ticking-clock tension will leave you breathless Naqvi assembles all the key figures, from the determined police chief and broadcast journalist who...

How you relate to It Ends will depend, in large part, on how you relate to It Ends. To make things even simpler: if circular logic alone is enough to irritate you, this definitely isn’t your movie. What this is, in fact, is a movie in which four friends literally drive around in circles… forever. Soon after Tyler (Mitchell Cole) picks up James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) for a night out, they realise they’ve misread the GPS and missed their turn. Then they discover that there is no turn. And finally, it dawns on them that there is no exit at all. They’re just stuck on an unfamiliar two-lane country road, surrounded by forest on both sides, indefinitely.  This unusual development alone would, obviously, be concerning. But it gets worse when they stretch their legs, and are almost immediately beset upon by zombies. Or are they zombies? Maybe they’re just other people who eventually went crazy driving down the same road forever. Either way, things are not looking great. Being culture-savvy members of Gen-Z, though, they’re pretty good at figuring out what they can figure out. Each relies, ultimately, on their own strengths: ambitious James sets about defining the scenario (Purgatory? Hell? A communal nightmare?) so he can best conquer it. The thoughtful Day times the arrival of the zombies, and discovers that it’s always safe to leave the car for exactly 90 seconds. Anxious Fisher plans games, conversations, and other daily structures, so they...

Mud baths, seaweed scrubs and… strippers. The writers of The Hangover have thrown off their sunglasses and slipped on their dressing gowns for this new friendship comedy that laughs in the face of Goop, guided meditations and yoga classes.  Jane (Leslie Mann), Sophie (Anna Faris) and Coco (Michelle Buteau) have been best friends since childhood. Now firmly in middle age, all three of them are harried and worn down, each with their own cross to bear: single motherhood, a sick parent, a divorce, an overbearing man-baby boss. To celebrate Jane’s birthday, the trio decide to do something for themselves for a change, and book an indulgent spa weekend.  So far, so relaxing. The hotel is beautiful, they got an amazing discount, and there’s a particularly hot yoga instructor. But uh-oh, here comes the maniacal and preposterously idiotic Mel – played by Isla Fisher dressed like she’s an extra in Mamma Mia!, in a blaze of neon flares and oversized sunglasses – gyrating and yelling at her fellow ‘middle-aged sluts’ across the pool. Mel is the loose cannon of the group who wasn’t supposed to be invited. What could possibly go wrong?A lot, it transpires. The ensuing hijinks are a melange of pleasingly satirical takedowns of woo-woo wellness culture (goat yoga, anyone?), relatable friendship dynamics, and some downright ridiculous stuff that feels a bit forced (a Police Interceptors-style golf cart chase? I don’t think so).  Spa Weekend is as formulaic as a sauna followed by a cold...