Our latest movie reviews

Filmmaking dads and their actress daughters are having a moment, and this fabulous filmmaking odyssey from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen is an even richer affair than this year’s Oscar-winner Sentimental Value. As movies about movies go, The Beloved is darker than Truffaut’s Day for Night and as self-scouring as Godard’s Le Mépris, two masterpieces to which comparisons don’t feel entirely outlandish. It’s complex material handled with elegance by Sorogoyen (The Beasts) and supercharged by Bardem, whose meatiest Spanish-language role in years, playing a volatile filmmaker who uses his new project as a chance to reconnect with his estranged daughter, is a real sidewinder of a performance. All easy charm and coiled, Bond-villain menace, he’s a complex, self-regarding man whose moods change with the weather and whose motivations are fatally at loggerheads. Bardem is Spanish director Esteban Martínez, once an enfant terrible of indie cinema in the manner of a Quentin Tarantino or David O Russell, and famous for punching his own leading actor during his tearaway days. He’s supposedly mellowed enough to take on his most ambitious project yet: a period drama called ‘Desert’ about Spain’s Western Sahara colony set in 1932 and filmed in the baking heat of the Canary Islands. Even his wary producer isn’t so sure.  A 20-minute opening scene reunites him with daughter Emilia (Bitter Christmas’s Victoria Luengo) in a Madrid restaurant. One of two extraordinary set pieces that turn...

Japanese humanist Hirokazu Koreeda is known for packing a sentimental wallop into shrewdly-observed melodramas about families and children. So, it’s curious that he returns to the sci-fi genre 28 years on from After Life (1998) – one of his most wistful and probing films to date – with a concept this loaded, yet he focuses on everything but its core emotions. Likewise, anyone looking for his sweeping manifesto on generative AI best keep those expectations in their box. Instead, we are treated to a shallow chronicle of the continuing adventures of Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke Komoto (Japanese comedian Daigo) and their adopted humanoid child Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki). This adorable seven-year-old comes with an off button and a charging chair. Kakeru is a robot doppelganger for their flesh-and-blood child who died two years previously in circumstances not broached until the midpoint.  Koreeda doesn’t waste time wrestling with a ‘should they/shouldn’t they adopt a humanoid’ line of questioning. We are in a near-future world that seems to have put ethical arguments around AI in the past and where big companies send adverts via insect holograms. One propaganda butterfly from tech company REBirth is all it takes for Otone to feel the rush of temptation. Kensuke is sceptical enough to keep his distance, but doesn’t feel strongly enough to fight with his wife over her impulse purchase of luxury goods. The story ambles on from here in a sunny, anecdotal fashion with lots of things...

Being a dad to grown-up children can be a challenging business. How do you express all that love, all that frustration, to someone who is a bit, well, past hearing about all that? How do you let go of the expectation, the sense of entitlement to some kind of gratitude for the sacrifices along the way. The truth, as DIY auteur Quentin Dupieux’s personal and typically gonzo parenthood parable reveals, is ‘with difficulty’.  The French surrealist is at his most Buñuelian in Full Phil, a chamber piece set mainly in an opulent Parisian hotel suite that cuts back and forth to a B-movie-within-a-movie, a stiff-limbed ’50s Creature from the Black Lagoon-style flick starring Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (aka comedy duo Tim and Eric) as scientists who rashly reanimate a voracious swamp creature. Our offspring will destroy us, is the combined message – and we’ll probably deserve it.  Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart are chalk-and-cheese single-dad-and-daughter pair Phil and Madeleine Doom, a wealthy industrialist and his 32-year-old offspring on a trip to the City of Light to ‘reconnect’. And it’s not going well: personal boundaries are being trampled – she’s left something unflushable in his loo – and his aggressive vibes have drawn the attention of a hotel staff member (The White Lotus’s Charlotte Le Bon) who decides to stay in the suite for safeguarding reasons. Phil’s complaints to management fall on death ears. ‘She has excellent instincts,’ he learns. ‘She caught a...

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s first foray into foreign-language filmmaking, a French-language drama, might appear daunting, what with the subtitles, the 196-minute running time, and much of the action taking place in an old people’s home. Not exactly date-night fodder. Yet you would be remiss to pass it by. The opening scene sets the tone: Paris care home manager Marie-Lou (Benedetta’s Virginie Efira) is napping in the bucolic grounds while one of her patients enjoys a smoke. The home is called the Garden of Freedom, an apt name for a place that aspires to be more than just a stopping-off point before death for its residents. Marie-Lou aims to provide the best care to her patients, but is up against budget restrictions, corporate managers and staff resistant to her innovative regime. The home was once a psychiatric hospital, which is of relevance later, when Marie-Lou encounters Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), a youth with learning difficulties who has escaped his wards and is running free through the streets of Paris. As luck would have it, Marie-Lou speaks fluent Japanese – what were the chances?! Tomoki’s uncle is an acclaimed actor Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka), starring in a play directed by Mari (Tao Okamoto). They invite Marie-Lou to their show about Franco Basaglia, a psychiatrist instrumental in dismantling mental hospitals throughout Italy. Hamaguchi returns to Basaglia’s fundamental question: ‘Are healthy people truly alive?’ throughout the film. Where Evil Does Not Exist was a...

Isabelle Huppert plays a voyeurist author in this intriguing saga from Asghar Farhadi (The Past; A Separation) that’s loosely based on Dekalog VI from Krzysztof Kieslowski. The Paris-set film from the Iranian director brings together multiple characters in two separate stories: one is the tawdry novel that Sylvie (Huppert) is writing, inspired by the strangers who work across the street from her: sound recordists who in real life are called Nita (Virginie Efira), Nicolas (Vincent Cassel) and Theo (Pierre Niney). While she imagines a sordid love triangle, a parallel narrative shows what they are really up to, which is less dramatic – initially, at least.  With strong performances from the cast, it’s an interesting take on curiosity and artistry, somewhat overcomplicated by the introduction of Adam (Adam Bessa), who is hired to work for Sylvie after helping her niece on the subway. In a risky move, he decides to share Sylvie’s discarded manuscript with the very person she’s been spying on: Nita. Keen to impress her, he pretends it’s his own work, but it is clear she’s the very subject of the story. When the book is also read by her colleagues, they react to the unsettling flight of fancy on the page, and life begins to imitate art.  Huppert is delightfully rude to everyone It’s here that the film falls victim to the very problem pointed out by Sylvie’s publisher (an amusing cameo from Catherine Deneuve): she feels that Sylvie’s characters behave in a way that isn’t...

How much does anyone really know about their parents? What can we know? And what does that knowledge leave unanswered about ourselves?  Such questions are not uncommon in cinema, or life, but for Spanish director Carla Simón (Summer of 1993, Alcarràs), they’re particularly personal. Orphaned at a young age, she’s now made three films exploring families and the secrets they keep. Her latest is perhaps the most autobiographical: the story of an aspiring filmmaker on a journey to discover who she is, where she came from and whether she can trust her estranged relatives to tell her the truth.  It’s a journey Simón has been on herself. Like her avatar, an 18-year-old Barcelona film student named Marina (Llúcia Garcia), the director lost both her parents to AIDS before she was old enough to form lasting memories of them, and much later connected with the extended family she’d never met. In the film, the details are more fraught: discovering, to her shock, that she’s unnamed on her late father’s death certificate, and thus unable to apply for a scholarship, Marina travels to the port city of Vigo to correct the matter, where she finds her wealthy paternal grandparents want little to do with a reminder of the dead son they regard with shame. It’s a bold tilt into magical realism As painful as the emotions are, Romería – the Galician word for ‘pilgrimage’ - never erupts into shouting matches or tearful monologues. (The most aggressive act involves a trash bag full of leaves...

When your granddad was the first man to fly a balloon into the stratosphere and your other ancestors were so intrepid, they had Star Trek’s lead character named after them, you’re probably not going to end up as a chartered surveyor. Sure enough, Swiss explorer Bertrand Piccard, the protagonist in this high-altitude adventure, had one goal in 1999: to be the first person to travel 26,000km across all the 360 meridians without touching down, dangling beneath the only thing bigger than his ego. ‘At the time, I realised that it was his duty to be famous,’ dryly notes an ex-teammate. A great central figure for a documentary, in other words. Part-hero, part-villain, the robustly confident Piccard is owning up to his polarising nature one minute, comparing himself with Neil Armstrong the next. This enthralling but breathless doc slowly falls for him, as he and his unfussy British co-pilot Brian Jones set off in the Breitling Orbiter 3 from Switzerland to Egypt. Also on the flightplan? To beat two other teams, one led by madcap entrepreneur-adventurer Richard Branson. Documentarian John Dower has long been drawn to superstars, enthusiasts and obsessives. His career has taken in Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie, Muhammad Ali doc Thriller in Manila, and another film about people getting high, Britpop oral history Live Forever. He’s great at drawing the story from Piccard, Jones and others in talking head interviews that break up the period footage. Piccard yearns to be worthy...

Three feature films deep and it’s safe to say that Jane Schoenbrun has created a brand new subgenre of cinema. It is cine-literate and self-referential without the ironic detachment associated with meta storytelling. Their films are vividly emotional – and so innovative in finding playful forms to express these emotions – that they deepen the meaning of having a relationship with cinema.  Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is both a continuation of the preoccupations of their first two features and a leap into more vulnerable territory, accompanied by a dazzling step up in the sophistication of the world-within-a-world building. Schoenbrun has form in creating additional media to sit within their films as a source of nurture for protagonists wrestling with secret shames and desires.  Lonely teen Casey in We’re All Going the World’s Fair (2021) communes with a spooky viral internet game; lonely teen Owen in I Saw the TV Glow (2024) lives vicariously through a TV show called ‘The Pink Opaque’. Here, grown-up intellectual queer filmmaker Kris (Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder) is obsessed with an ’80s slasher franchise that she is now remaking for a modern audience. Schoenbrun shot 20 minutes of the fictional ‘Camp Miasma’ and some actors on the cast list, Eva Victor, for example, exist solely within this film-within-a-film. Kris (whose past credits include ‘Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain’), believes she was hired to launder the franchise’s transphobic origins,...

There’s nothing quite like being a preteen, stuck between childhood and coming of age, hung in emotional turbulence. It’s a universal feeling, a tender bruise many of us still carry – and László Nemes knows exactly where to press. His third film follows Andor (Bojtorján Barábas), a frustrated, isolated boy navigating the aftermath of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Like Son of Saul, Nemes’ Oscar-winning debut, Orphan traces a hazy memory of a father-son bond. Andor idolises his missing father and longs for his uncertain return. It’s a heartbreaking watch, although where the final scenes should be rife with emotion, they fall a bit flat. This film bites off a bit more emotional weight than it can chew.  The film opens through Andor’s eyes. He’s taken from the orphanage as a young child in a disorienting blur, reunited with his mother, who’s essentially a stranger. Andor’s shallow breaths bleed into the sound, and Nemes puts us in the shoes of this small, bewildered human being, seeing the world as he does. Nemes paints a film of ugly truths bathed in stunning cinematography What follows is a testament to unbelonging. Andor isn’t necessarily an orphan – his mother is very much alive – but he’s kept at arm’s length, effectively orphaned, and set to find his footing alone. Scenes flit by in quick succession: a door closed, a back turned, and a mother fiercely guarding her past. Andor is constantly running to some other place, from his school to the grocery store where his mother...

If you like your arthouse cinema thematically rich yet concise enough that you’re at the bar discussing it over a glass or two in short order, Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida) has made another of his 80-minute opuses for you. Like a conjurer with a bottomless top hat, the Polish filmmaker packs more into this short-yet-stately monochrome historical drama than others manage in twice the time.  Brevity, of course, is not a virtue in itself, but when Fatherland reaches its beautiful, pin-drop final scene, your mind will be spinning with ideas of home, grief, art, war guilt, memory, ideological conflict, and family bonds and traumas. Pawlikowski finds common ground with Bergman’s Wild Strawberries in his ageing artist’s road-trip ruminations on a life as full of frustration as fulfilment.  As with his romance Cold War, initially set in the same year, the Polish filmmaker identifies 1949 as a malleable moment before the post-war European order calcifies. Risking falling through the cracks in this unreliable new East-West divide is Nobel-winning writer Thomas Mann (Kings of the Road’s Hanns Zischler). The great German author of Death in Venice (1912) and The Magic Mountain (1924) is returning home from American exile for the first time since before World War II, his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) in tow as interpreter and chauffeur. Louche, disillusioned son Klaus (A Hidden Life’s August Diehl) is due to join them as they travel to Frankfurt in the American zone and then on to...