Our latest movie reviews

Three moons are shining bright in the sky over the castle. Fearsome guards in eerie gold masks are standing by. And in the secrecy of the grand bedchamber, breathy lady of the manor Cherry (Maika Monroe) is being seduced by her phlegmatic maid Hero (Emma Corrin). The world of director Julia Jackman's queer fable (based on Isabel Greenberg's feminist graphic novel on the same name) is extravagant and strange, blending misty-lensed period drama cliché with surreal Derek Jarman-esque aesthetics and eccentric cameos, including Charli xcx as a witch strumming a vaginal guitar. Still, there's something oddly restrained about her storytelling, which sucks the passion out of this fantastical tale. Greenberg's original illustrations depicted the weird old world she's dreamt up with a scrappiness and affectionate wit that's often missing here. Instead, Jackman focuses on heightening the moody grimness and eccentric details of this patriarchal dystopia. We open with tyrannical deity Birdman (Richard E Grant) stomping around, insisting that women know their place – which is looking pretty, having babies, and certainly not developing any ideas of their own. This doesn't bode well for Cherry. Her new husband Jerome (Amir El-Masry) refuses to sleep with her, even though she'll be put to death by the powers that be if she fails to get pregnant. Then, this charming chap decides to make a bet with his Mills and Boon cover-worthy guy friend Manfred (The Idea of You’s Nicholas Galitzine). If...

‘I’m getting a divorce. What tipped me off is that I’m living in an apartment on my own and my wife and kids don’t live there.’ With that droll line, delivered in the spotlight of a hushed Manhattan comedy club after half a space cake, Will Arnett’s jaded executive stumbles upon the best – and cheapest – form of therapy available to a broken-up dad struggling amid the ruins of his marriage. Yes, it looks horrifying from a distance, but Alex, it turns out, is built differently. Based loosely on the experiences of arena-filling UK comic John Bishop, a divorcee-to-be who once walked on stage at a stand-up club to swerve paying the cover charge and never looked back, it shifts the story from Liverpool to Manhattan and the New York ’burbs. Arnett is Bishop surrogate Alex Novak and the Arrested Development actor is a revelation. Opposite is Laura Dern, who has previous in this terrain via a turn as Marriage Story’s hotshot divorce lawyer. She brings her A-game to a very different vision of marital ruin.  Obviously, divorce sucks at levels that are dizzying – especially when, like Alex and Tess (Dern), there are kids to shelter from the fallout. Props, then, to director and co-writer Bradley Cooper for finding a sense of renewal from this often painful snapshot of marital breakdown, with its forced smiles in front of friends, wrestling over the dogs and the children asking if ‘you’re fighting again’. ‘We need to call this, right?’ Alex asks Tess before moving out of the family...

When eight-year-old Josephine (Mason Reeves) witnesses a rape in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park early one Sunday morning, the horrifying event – depicted fully on screen at a slight distance – has understandable repercussions. In writer-director Beth de Araujo’s devasting second film, the man who committed the vile act is almost immediately apprehended, partly thanks to Josephine’s quick-thinking and fast-running father Damien (Channing Tatum). The impact on victim Sandra and Josephine, however, is only beginning and, excluding short moments which bookend the story, the focus is on the latter. Josephine, played by Reeves with a commitment and poise rarely seen in such a young actor in their first role, is justifiably troubled. She imagines the rapist lurking in her bedroom, all around her home and in the streets. With the encouragement of her dad she toughens up with self-defence classes and wins an arm-wrestle with a boy in her class, only to strangle him with a carrier bag after he pushes her ungraciously following his defeat. Josephine’s mother Claire (Gemma Chan) and Damien struggle to keep a lid on their daughter’s outbursts and sadness but show love, patience and care in a horrible situation which all three probably realise will traumatise her for life.  As Josephine and her parents try to live with what she has witnessed and its consequences on her mental wellbeing and behaviour, the machinations of the American legal system grind frustratingly away in the...

Most film versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet come from an essentially stagey place, and are almost invariably made by theatre people (the ultimate example being Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour 1996 version). But in the play’s latest screen outing, star Riz Ahmed and director Aneil Karia – neither of whom have any background in theatre – have essentially made a film about grief and depression that uses Shakespeare’s words and story in a way that is cinematic first and foremost.  I could bore on about how screenwriter Michael Lesslie has done stuff like cut out Horatio, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and the entire Yorick bit. But discussing this version as if it was just a stage take with some novel ideas is to miss the point of how wholly Shakespeare has been swallowed by the cinema here – even if in the end there are a couple of plot beats it struggles to surmount. Ahmed’s Hamlet is a traumatised man from a wealthy British Indian family, stumbling in a daze through suburban London after the death of his father. Cinematographer Stuart Bentley’s shaky camera cinematography is lush and neon streaked as it soaks up blingy nightclubs, a lavish Hindu wedding and a bathetic funeral, and lots and lots of outer London at night. There’s never a sense that the need to cram in Shakespeare’s words ever gets in the way of the business of cinema. And while the iambic pentameter isn’t exactly deployed sparingly, it feels like the pruned text is used with great purpose: the fact these very modern...

Aside from 2009’s Drag Me to Hell (one of the horror movies of the century so far,) and a stint spicing up the Marvelverse with some dark and freaky touches, Sam Raimi has been largely AWOL from the genre that made his name.  Happily, Send Help is both a return to the world of horror and a major return to form for the Evil Dead man, who’s been waylaid with bland franchise fare in recent years. There’s nothing bland in his queasy funhouse ride, a table-turning death match set on a remote island. Or in the wild performances of Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. The pair plugs into Raimi’s wavelength with increasingly unhinged commitment.  McAdams, a comic actress gifted enough to count as Canada’s Olivia Colman, plays hard-working, unsung professional Linda Liddle. She’s been overlooked for promotion at her anycorp employer because she isn’t one of the boys, doesn’t ‘golf’, and in a case of especially bad timing, meets the company’s disgusted new nepo-baby CEO, Bradley (O’Brien), with her lunch on her face.  But when the company’s private jet flight to Bangkok goes down in a tropical storm, boss and underling are forced to team up on a remote island. Except, she’s a Survivor superfan able to whip up a shelter and handy enough with a knife to turn the local marine life into a sashimi platter – and he’s injured and next to useless. Being a sexist dinosaur, he believes that office hierarchies still apply, even on a desert island. It plays out like a violent mix of Cast Away,...

Kangaroos have had a rough time in Australian cinema. But if the likes of Snowtown and Wake in Fright showed the perils of being pouched and hoppy in God’s own country, here’s a feel-warm-inside family roo-mance to finally celebrate the humble marsupial. Kangaroo is based on the true story of Chris Barns, an Aussie who discovered his purpose setting up a kangaroo sanctuary in Alice Springs. He found fame via social media and earned the nickname ‘Kangaroo Dundee’. The fact that his journey began with him running over a roo and adopting the surviving joey gave the story the kind of twist that’s absolute bait for screenwriters.  House of the Dragon’s Ryan Corr plays ambitious TV weatherman Chris Masterman, a very loose version of Barns, who boasts all the urbanite traits that get right up the noses of rural Australians. He’s conceited, he’s on the telly, he drives a fancy car and he uses moisturiser.Disgraced and sacked when a career-enhancing attempt to save a dolphin at Bondi ends in disaster, he’s on his way to Broome when he runs over a roo and is left cradling her joey. The locals in the local Northern Territory community don’t want to know – kangaroos are a dime a dozen here – except for Charlie (Lily Whiteley), a young roo-loving loner channelling her grief for her dad into nurturing young joeys. She’s even willing to overlook his ‘fish killer’ rep. It’s not doing anything wildly different, but it’ll put a smile on your face Will the pair bond? Obviously, yes. But not...

Sometimes you’re just in the mood for a bit of gunge. Sure, cinema can move us, teach us, thrill us and inspire us, but every now and then you just want to watch people spewing green slime before their heads explode. You know, like in a straight-to-VHS horror/sci-fi/comedy from the ’80s or ’90s. Or, indeed, in Cold Storage: an unashamed throwback to a past era of low-fi, high-spirited creature-feature fun. Think Tremors, only with extra-terrestrial, mind-controlling slime instead of giant worm-things.  Based on a novel by David Koepp (who also adapts) and directed by Jonny Campbell (whose last movie was the 2002 Ant-and-Dec-starring Alien Autopsy, but don’t let that put you off), Cold Storage unleashes the aforementioned green slimy space-stuff in a Kansas self-storage facility patrolled by a pair of bored millennials. Teacake (Stranger Things’ Joe Keery) is a talkative ex-con just trying to stay on the straight and narrow; Naomi (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell) is a listless single mother trying to balance her responsibilities with med-school ambitions. Together, this likeable pair become the front line of defence against the extinction of all life on Earth, while also, of course, falling for each other.   Think Tremors with mind-controlling slime  But though Keery and Campbell have riffy chemistry, it’s the supporting cast who command the attention. Foremost is Liam Neeson as the grizzled US military specialist buzzed back into service when this smalltown crisis sparks....

There’s a wicked little premise at the dark heart of Corin Hardy’s latest horror flick. If you are present to hear the spine-tingling shriek of an Aztec death whistle, death is coming for you – chiefly the way you will inevitably die in the future is accelerated to bring you down in the present. Neat and nifty, right? Whistle has a ton of fun remixing three decades worth of horror carnage — ‘80s (A Nightmare on Elm Street), ’90s (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer) and early 00’s (Final Destination, The Ring) – but, for the most part, without an ironic wink. It doesn’t all work but it is well-mounted, throwback fun that delivers welcome Halloween hijinks in mid-February. After an intense prologue, the well-designed whistle, all skull-like eyes, intricate carvings and emblazoned with the motto ‘Summon Your Death’, finds its way into the locker of new high-school student Chrysanthemum (Logan’s Dafne Keen). Relocating to the sleepy steel mill town of Pellington, Dafne is a troubled soul, rumoured to be a former junkie just out of rehab and implicated in the murder of her father. Still, accompanied by her cousin Rel (Sky Yang), she makes fast friends with Grace (Ali Skovbye), Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) and Ellie (Yellowjackets’ Sophie Nélisse) who almost immediately vibes with Chrys. When one of this likeable Gen Z Breakfast Club decides to use the whistle at a late-night revision pool party, the clock starts ticking and the body count starts climbing. Corin Hardy delivers a...

Finally, someone has returned to The Damned United’s cunning formula for a good football movie: don’t show any football.  Happily for co-directors Lisa Barros D’sa and Glenn Leyburn’s (Good Vibrations) sports flick, a psychological drama full of quirky touches and dry wit, not much of the Republic of Ireland’s pre-2002 World Cup prep on the Pacific island of Saipan made it as far as the pitch. As still-traumatised Irish fans will tell you, the reward for seeing their team qualify for the tournament in Japan and South Korea was to witness their star player and manager fall out in spectacular fashion. The two antagonists were Manchester United’s superstar midfielder Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke) – these days the furious face of dog walking and TV punditry; back then Ireland’s greatest player – and the team’s wry, Yorkshire-born manager Mick McCarthy (Steve Coogan).  Already minded to stay home, and nursing grievances against McCarthy, whom he considers a ‘plastic Paddy’, Keane is ready to explode when the squad touches down at its training base. Throw in a crappy hotel, rubbery cheese sandwiches, a bumpy training pitch and no practice balls and a full atomic meltdown is ensured. ‘Some people are unmanageable, aren’t they?’ McCarthy notes sanguinely to Mrs Mick (Alice Lowe), before the full horror unfolds. It’s a prophetic remark.  Normal People’s Hardwicke is striking as the fierce, brooding and ultra-competitive Keane. Coogan’s McCarthy, 50 percent proper football man, 50...

In Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir H is for Hawk, a young woman named Helen trains an ill-mannered goshawk and eventually sees it off to an aviary for moulting season. Part meditative exploration of grief in the wake of the sudden loss of her father, part exhaustive detailing of the process of training a complicated and challenging creature, the film adaptation hews closely to the same description. You don’t need a PhD to understand that the two processes feed into one another in alarming and honest ways; so in BAFTA-winning director Philippa Lowthorpe’s moody adaptation, the visual metaphors are striking – even as the running time outstays its welcome.  The film stars Claire Foy as a rather stiff-upper-lipped protagonist, an academic who avoids moping at all costs even after her beloved photojournalist father passes away suddenly of heart failure. He’s played by Brendan Gleeson with warmth and humour in occasional mournful flashbacks, and the relationship between dad and daughter is poignantly sketched as a special one: supportive, cerebral, and one of shared hobbies like ornithology. The goshawk Helen adopts is one she might have found on a bird-spotting trip with her dad; she names it Mabel, and a new relationship of sorts springs out of the depths of her loss of another. Difficult, alienating, and even violently gauging Helen in the face, it’s hardly a fluffy companion; this is as good a metaphor for living with loss as any. Helen’s friend Christina (Denise Gough)...