Our latest movie reviews

First, a primer. Shot, scored and test-screened, Coyote Vs Acme was set for release in 2023 – only for studio overlord David Zaslav to bury the film as a tax write-off. Exhumed by distributor Ketchup three years later (and Altitude in the UK), the assumption is the indie outfit have bought a total stinker. Not so. Not even close. Slamming the funny bone with the force of a plunging piano, this berserk comedy is like swallowing a sausage-string of TNT. In other words, it’s an absolute blast.  There’s a satisfying irony to this David vs Goliath backstory, because Coyote Vs Acme is about a literal underdog triumphing against a toxic megacorp. Inspired by Ian Frazier’s New Yorker article, the movie asks an irresistible ‘what-if?’: after a lifetime of being crushed, blown up and eviscerated in his pursuit of meal-on-wheels Road Runner, what would happen if Wile E Coyote sued Acme for its defective products?  Enter Will Forte’s personal injury lawyer Kevin Avery, hired by Coyote to take on Acme: a monolith of innovation selling magic tunnel paint, canned lions and dehydrated boulders like a psychopathic Temu. Convinced Coyote only wants Road Runner on the witness stand so he can BBQ him, and wary of taking on Acme’s blowhard lawyer (a very game John Cena), Avery uncovers a hideous cartoon vivisection conspiracy known as Project Sisyphus.  Forte is crucial here: his hangdog, faintly exhausted performance a counterbalance to the film’s dizzying vortex of lunacy. Forget...

Just when you thought there was nowhere new left for hungry dinosaurs to rampage, here come producer JJ Abrams and writer-director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows, Under the Silver Lake) with a fresh, fun spin on stompy saurian carnage. The wheeze here is that, thanks to a blissfully unexplained space-time hiccup, a sizeable chunk of 1982 middle-American suburbia is suddenly dumped in the distant prehistoric past, taking the residents on an overnight plummet several links down the food chain. Interestingly, despite the full-on B-movie concept and the John Williams-style Amblin-adventure ebullience of the score (courtesy of Abrams regular Michael Giacchino), this is not some wisecracking romp. As you might expect from Mitchell’s previous outings, there are dark seams to mine, even before the residents of Flowervale (not to be confused with Cloverfield) hear the shrieks and screams outside their pointlessly locked doors. This is harsh, brutal and, at times, traumatic stuff The focus here is on a single nuclear family, the Platts. Dad Greg (Ewan McGregor, on good form) is struggling to make ends meet and keep it all together; mom Denise (Anne Hathaway, relishing the material) yearns to be an author and, well, anywhere but Flowervale. Divorce may be on the cards, though Greg’s in denial. Of course, their relationship (and their poor kids, ably played by Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) gets stress-tested in an impossible way when they wake up in 200 million BC. And while...

After the release of Grey Gardens, the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary, the filmmakers were challenged. Their film followed an eccentric mother-daughter duo in their dilapidated East Hampton mansion, but some felt it was iffy to put two seemingly mentally unwell women on display. In 2014, Albert Maysles defended their motives and subjects, saying: ‘Their behaviour was just their way of asserting themselves. And what could be a better way to assert themselves than a film about them asserting themselves?’ That enthusiastic spirit has been channelled in Samuel Abrahams' feature debut Lady, an evocatively weird mockumentary with Fleabag's Siân Clifford throwing herself into the bonkers lead role. Yet, her Lady Isabella, a lonely, self-absorbed member of the English aristocracy, takes the reins. She employs up-and-coming director Sam (Laurie Kynaston) to film the aristocrat gallivanting around her far more pristine estate than Grey Gardens – you might recognise Somerleyton Hall from The Crown – in a delectably exuberant wardrobe styled by costume designer Terri Higgins.  Lady Isabella is a product of immense wealth, privilege and a narcissistic social media culture that believes their every move is worth documenting, so she dupes Sam into thinking Netflix is backing the project about her ‘journey of artistic discovery’. This mainly involves submitting herself into the manor's annual ‘Stately Stars’ talent contest; never mind that it's for children.  Fleabag's Siân Clifford...

There are numerous Green Day tribute acts – Green Daze, Green Haze, Green182, American Idiotz to name a few – but Nimrods represents the first tribute film. With the story based on and co-penned by the group, who also appear in bookending cameos, Lee Kirk’s amiable road movie uses Green Day’s spirit to fashion a formulaic but fun and scrappy love song to youthful dreamers, big aspirations, and the thrill of rocking out with your best friends.  Nimrods follows three teens – normie Tommy (Mason Thames), comedian (Kylr Coffman), nebbish Chad (Ryan Foust) – who have their own band, Analogue Dogs (often mispronounced ‘Anal Dogs’). After Green Day arrive in town for a signing and the boys slip them a demo tape, the friends are pranked by Tommy’s brother Wayne (Keen Ruffalo, son of Mark) who tells them their heroes have asked Analogue Dogs to open for them in California on New Year’s Eve. Somehow with no car, driving licences or money, a road trip begins.  It’s a familiar set-up that becomes a flimsy throughline to hang a series of escapades. So, the boys play in a rowdy biker bar (shades of The Blues Brothers), detour to a drug-fuelled party and spend a night in a scary motel. En route, there are fallings out, reconciliations, a thin but winning romance with a rock chick (McKenna Grace), all interspersed with grainy home video footage to amp up the punky, DIY vibes. It’s that kind of movie: obvious but sweet-natured and enjoyable It’s hokey (kids sneaking into gigs rarely rings...

One Night Only is so brazenly flirtatious, so determined to seduce, you’ll barely even notice how empty and cheap it feels – until the end, when you’re left alone again. Who wouldn’t, after all, enjoy a date with a movie that’s shiny and bright and brilliantly packaged? And who wouldn’t want to spend a couple of hours with Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, as they fall in and out of low-stakes love? There are some clever ideas in One Night Only, beginning with the intrigue of its central plot: with the United States now run by ultra-conservatives, single Americans are forbidden from sex 364 days a year. The movie opens on the 365th, as everyone in New York is prepping for the Big Event. Owen (Turner) is about to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke), while Allie (Barbaro) is hoping to find romance, or at least a memorable hook-up, in a downtown bar. It is no spoiler – unless you’ve never seen a romcom, in which case surely don’t start here – to say that things go awry, leaving our leads about ten hours to find their way to each other. The journey is, in fairness, pretty entertaining. Director Will Gluck has stuffed the story with so many cameos, he comes dangerously close to name-dropping. But it’s fun to see how much Molly Ringwald, LeVar Burton, Mike Birbiglia, Pete Davidson, Bobby Cannavale, Julia Fox, etc. can make of their minutes onscreen. (FWIW, Burton wins.) Who wants dystopian realities to ruin a feel-good comedy? But eventually, as Owen and Allie bicker and...

‘God, that’s cool,’ sighs Tom Holland’s Spider-Man as a bunch of ninjas descend on him in Marvel’s well-established slo-mo, camera-wheeling style. At this delicate stage in the Marvelverse – somewhere between the lumpen offerings of Phase 5 and the promised team-up bonanza of Avengers: Doomsday – the question needs to be asked: is it, though? Still?In the summer of The Odyssey, Backrooms and Obsession, a new Marvel movie was always going to be in danger of feeling old hat, even with Spidey, the studio’s A-list character, headlining it. Holland, now 30 but as fresh-faced as ever, remains the most likeable and exuberant of the on-screen Spider-Men, but he suffers in a movie that opts to sideline the web slinger in favour of a storyline that involves another character that could have been borrowed from Stranger Things. A whole chunk of the final act plays like a tribute act to the Netflix hit.  Like its hero, leading a solitary New York existence after 2021’s No Way Home erased his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and best friend Ned’s (Jacob Batalon) memories of him, Brand New Day runs the gamut of moods: at times, dark; at others, brooding. This is not the most fun of the recent Spidey outings, even with his gruff old pal The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) turning up to rampage unhelpfully about and grumble about life, Florence Pugh gleefully hamming it up as Thunderbolts*’s Yelena Belova, and the dependable Mark Ruffalo back as Bruce Banner/The Hulk. The trio’s scenes together are a...

Historians will claim that Richard Nixon opened China, but as this knotty, celebratory and rather moving doc makes pretty clear, it was actually a pair of big-haired Brits singing ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ that got the whole Sino-Western rapprochement thing going.   When they were flown into communist China in April 1985, part of a PR wheeze cooked up by their manager Simon Napier-Bell, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley were the fresh faces behind one of the world’s biggest pop bands, Wham!. They were there, perversely, to help launch them in the US, where their two showcase gigs – in Beijing and Guangzhou – and a host of awkward formal engagements and photo opps would propel them onto American TV news. That was the theory, at least. But as director Mike Christie’s fascinating documentary reveals, there was a much richer, stranger and more complicated reality in the week-and-a-bit the two confused celebrities spent behind the Bamboo Curtain. At first, Michael, looking barely more than a teenager and struggling to find a foil for his flamboyant persona amid all the dour-faced dignitaries, seems amused by the procession of functions and photocalls at the Great Wall. Ridgeley cuts a more circumspect figure, at odds with the hacks from the British tabloids who follow the band everywhere. It’s like watching a man on a pub crawl with a bunch of people he really hates, and no alcohol.  Ridgeley gamely revisits the highs and lows of the trip as one of the talking head...

If you’re a mother, do you get to be a person too? A separated woman who comes out as a lesbian is torn between motherhood and selfhood, duty and freedom, in Anna Cazenave Cambet’s brutal custody drama.  Love Me Tender is based on the bestselling novel by Constance Debré and inspired by Debré’s own life. Vicky Krieps plays Clémence, a make-up free, short-haired, scooter-riding ex-lawyer with a carabiner hooked through her belt loops. Clémence has left her highly paid legal job to become a writer. She has an amicable relationship with her ex-husband Laurent (Antoine Reinartz) who she left three years ago, and the pair share joint custody of their eight-year-old son Paul. But when Clémence tells Laurent she now dates women, he files for sole custody. What ensues is a bitter years-long custody battle fueled by Laurent’s infuriating, and borderline evil, determination to take Paul away from Clémence entirely.  Cazenave Cambet lucidly lays out the impossible expectations and ridiculous hypocrisy mothers face. Clémence is completely at home in her new queer life – her days without Paul are marked by discipline, as she spends them writing in her modest flat, swimming at the pool and occasionally meeting friends at cafés and bars. At the same time she embraces her erotic life with women with full abandon, organising rendezvous in the pool changing rooms, effortlessly picking up women in queer bars and dancing until sunrise at techno clubs. And why shouldn’t she? None of this makes...

In a world where adolescence is so often reduced to doomscrolling, six-sevens and brainrot, debut director Imran Perretta’s tender coming-of-age drama puts forward a strong case that children today are still capable of feeling deeply. Rather than retread London’s streets, co-writers Perretta and playwright Enda Walsh (I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning) take us a smidge north to Luton. The town’s unkempt woodlands make the perfect playground for 12-year-old friends, Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and Maram (Yahya Kitana). There we find the Muslim boys roughhousing, stuffing their faces with unidentified berries and building forts with stray mattresses. Like the planes that fly overhead from the local airport, there’s a sense of weightlessness to their imagination. But like the contrails trailing behind them, it’s fleeting. Their tiny frames already bear adult struggles. For Ish, it’s the loss of his mother; for Maram, who is of Palestinian descent, it’s the conflict in Gaza, leaving him convinced the ‘war is coming’. Back in Luton’s urban centre, the sound of sirens should be unnerving, but neither of them even flinches. Police sirens have already become part of the soundtrack of their childhood, a familiar reality for many Brown and Black communities in the UK. An artist and composer too, Perretta’s musical ear is evident in the film’s devastating sound design. The clipped chatter of police radios referring to Muslim passersby as ‘suspects’ and ‘targets’, and discussions about...

Homer’s The Odyssey first engaged Christopher Nolan when he was attached to direct Troy, 20-odd years ago, and he’s been stealth-adapting Western literature’s foundational text ever since. Interstellar puts a time-bending spin on the story of a man trying to make it home; Inception, beyond its mille-feuille of dreamscapes, is about trauma and homecoming; and The Dark Knight Rises sends Batman into the underworld to find his way home. Dunkirk… well, you get the point. So maybe The Odyssey has been the British filmmaker’s real odyssey all along. It’s a movie he could only make at this point in his career, with the full array of tools and treasure at his disposal. It may or may not be his best film – a lot of Greek island dust needs to settle before that debate kicks off – but it’s definitely Nolan at his most formidable. The ending, one of his very best, is even stronger than that of its main rivals for the crown, Inception and The Dark Knight. And who else would even try to bring this madly ambitious vision to the screen? Least of all entirely in 70mm IMAX, right down to the quiet bits. Albeit, there’s about two of those. The thunderous near-three-hours of storm-tossed seas, clashing steel, vengeful dei ex machina, awe-inspiring monsters, and Oscar-bound A-listers takes unpacking – and maybe a motion sickness tablet. Nolan and his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema pat a seat aboard Odysseus’s (a never-better Matt Damon) ill-fated longboat and invite you to follow the...