Our latest movie reviews

This thriller ‘from the world of John Wick’ has been a long time in the making: over three years since its leading lady was announced and eight since the script was first optioned following reshoots and reports that franchise creator Chad Stahelski took an active hand alongside director Len Wiseman. Happily, it emerges at last with enough inventive action to stand alongside its murderous predecessors, and makes Ana de Armas into a likeable assassin hero – a phrase that makes more sense in her killer-filled world than our own. She plays Eve, a girl orphaned by Gabriel Byrne’s Chancellor. She is raised under the care of Anjelica Huston’s director at a ballet school-stroke-assassin training academy, learning arts both delicate and deadly. But Eve never planned to simply make her living punching people’s tickets: she has vengeance in mind. So far, so standard revenge plot: a nice twist here is that when her desire threatens all-out war between her tribe and the Chancellor’s, Keanu Reeves’ John Wick is pressed into action to stop her. There’s a bit of business with Norman Reedus, as a defector from the Chancellor’s cult, and Catalina Sandino Moreno as a rival assassin, but that’s largely beside the point. Any Wick-adjacent film comes with the expectation that extreme violence will be dispensed and kill shots administered with abandon, and there this film eventually delivers. After a faltering first mission, Eve gets the hang of things, as demonstrated wittily via the bloody...

Haneke's adaptation of a novel by Elfriede Jelinek may be shot, edited and performed rather more conventionally than most of his work, but in many ways it's no less confrontational or transgressive than, say, The Seventh Continent or Funny Games. If the latter was a chaste but provocative variation on the violent thriller, this puts the porn movie through much the same paces, refusing to provide explicit titillation even as it explores the psychopathology of a professor of music, touching 40 but still so oppressed by her tyrannical mother, with whom she still lives, and by the disciplines of her vocation, that her only acquaintance with emotion and eroticism comes from watching porn. Then, into her sad life comes a young student, who falls for her. No conventional redemption ensues, as the pair slide slowly but inexorably into a relationship so painfully twisted it would be implausible, were it not for Haneke's rigorous intelligence and Huppert's controlled and courageous performance. Ambitious, profoundly articulate, and despite its avoidance of sentimentality and sermonising, very compassionate.

The title of Kelly Reichardt’s (Certain Women) bone-dry art heist comedy, set in the ‘70s of Vietnam War protests and waterbed sales, is strictly tongue-in-cheek. Not only is he not a mastermind, Josh O’Connor’s unemployed Massachusetts carpenter James Blaine ‘JB’ Mooney would make Fargo’s Jerry Lundegaard look like the last word in criminal competence.  Mooney plans to steal four abstract – and fairly low value – portraits by modernist painter Arthur Dove from his local gallery. We see him scoping out the place, observing the snoozy guards and using his wife (Alana Haim) and sons (Sterling and Jasper Thompson) as cover as he figures out all the angles and nails down a watertight scheme to lift the art. And the actual plan? To grab the paintings, stick them in a bag and leg it. It’s executed with the help of a gormless local contact and a hot-headed last-minute ringer who brings a gun and starts pointing it at screaming kids. To add to the tragicomic vibe, their getaway vehicle gets stuck in traffic on the way out.  Based loosely on a real-life 1973 heist of Massachusetts’s Worcester Art Museum, it’s the kind of material from which the Coens would spin a blackly comic tale of betrayal, murder and cosmic justice. But Reichardt’s interest lies in a more existential kind of unravelling. As the cops circle, more serious criminals start sniffing around, and Mooney’s circuit court judge father (Bill Camp) and exasperated mum (Hope Davis) read about the story in the papers,...

Prepare the Brokeback Mountain comparisons now, because Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor’s tender romance has all the ingredients of Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning queer love story. Like that Annie Proulx adaptation, it’s based on a short story (by Ben Shattuck, who adapts here) and is set in the woods and hills of rural America (Maine, rather than Wyoming). It’s full of the stifled emotions of two men who fall in love but can’t quite express it.  The only thing missing – and it’s a biggie – is the deep passion that coursed beneath the surface of that Oscar winning western. South African director Oliver Hermanus finds plenty of deep feeling and sincerity here but his beautiful-looking, measured period piece gets stifled by its own languors – especially in a first half that needs a slug or two of moonshine to inject some life into it. As he’s proved twice already, with gorgeous Ikiru remake Living and striking queer bootcamp drama Moffie, Hermanus is guided by a powerful sense of empathy and compassion. Here, he follows the story of Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor), two music students who meet at Boston Conservatory in 1917 and bond over their shared love of folk music. Lionel, a gentle country boy blessed with an ability to see music – synesthesia – is the shy outsider; David is an east coaster with easy confidence and a boyish sense of mischief. They fall into bed, but their love remains unspoken and undefined. Soon, David is in uniform and off to the Great War trenches of...

A sun-soaked dream – okay, nightmare – of a midnight movie, this Australian survival horror asks the question: what if Steve Irwin was basically the devil? The answer would probably look a lot like Jai Courtney’s shark dive owner Tucker, a brawny bogan who takes backpackers and tourists onto his rusty old boat to enthusiastically introduce them to the bull sharks, makos and great whites that swim off the Gold Coast. First in a cage, then sedated and trapped into a harness, lowered into the water while the sweaty psychopath records it all on his VHS camera. Obviously, he gives them a Vegemite sandwich and some shark facts first. He’s not a total monster. The movie’s two heroes are American hippie-chick surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) and hunky local softboi Moses (Josh Heuston). They get some cursory character details (her: estranged from parents, likes eating buns; him: sensitive rich kid, drives a Volvo; both: love Creedence Clearwater Revival), and there’s a budding romance between them that’s rendered in the cheesiest possible notes. But the two actors make them likeable enough for you to hope they don’t end up chomped on by a peckish mako. Zephyr gets abducted during a late-night surf and wakes up chained to a bed aboard Tucker’s boat. From there, we’re off on a gnarly fun ride in the dank cabins and on bloodstained decks, as the sharks, captured in some gorgeous real-life footage, circle below. This is no Sharknado CG fest – it looks and feels real. And...

Iranian cinema is your go-to for knotty, complex morality tales. Small missteps are made, a series of seemingly inconsequential events leads to one big, defining one – and the fallout leaves characters trying to navigate the awful repercussions often made worse by the country’s suffocating social and religious codes. A gun goes missing in Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig; a handbag is stolen in Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero. Torment and tragedies ensue.In Saeed Roustayi’s Woman and Child, a carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama that follows a Tehran family’s slow disintegration, it’s the supposedly joyous occasion of a marriage proposal that set the wheels of fate in motion. Hard-working nurse Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar, magnetic) is a 40-year-old widow with two kids: teenage tearaway Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi) and all-round poppet Neda (Arshida Dorostkar). She’s dating ambulance driver Hamid (A Separation’s Payman Maadi), an older man whose flirtations suddenly turn serious. He pops the question, but there’s an immediate string attached: will she pretend she’s childless when his strict rural parents come to visit them at her house?  For anyone unfamiliar with the strictures and mores of Iranian society, the answer would be ‘hell no’. But as Roustayi shows in a movie that’s sympathetic to its female protagonist almost to a fault, it’s nothing like that simple. As a single mum, Hamid might be her best bet – even if he immediately scans as something of a rogue and...

It’s a suitably arresting set-up for Jafar Panahi’s politically charged and darkly hilarious abduction movie – especially when it becomes clear what’s going on: impulsive mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) believes he’s caught the brutal interrogator who once tortured him for three months and left him scarred – a man given the epithets ‘Peg Leg’ and ‘the Gimp’ by his victims. The guy in cuffs has a prosthetic leg, just like the Gimp, who lost his fighting in Syria. It scans. But like so much else in this blackly brilliant film, a question mark hangs over this Blood Simple-style scenario. Is this man, played by Ebrahim Azizi, really the author of his suffering or is he just a family man called Eghbal, as he claims? All the Gimp’s victims were blindfolded, so how can anyone be sure?  Panahi is a formidably courageous filmmaker who has spent time in jail at the hands of his country’s repressive regime. Here, he brings deep feeling to a movie that often plays closer to a straight comedy than a fiercer indictment of the state or a Munich-like morality tale about justice and vengeance.  You can definitely sense the directorial wish-fulfilment in the carnivalesque that follows as Vahid drags the drugged Eghbal around Tehran in his beat-up transit van, gathering a small band of fellow victims to help him identify the man and decide what to do with him. Joining this increasingly hapless quest are wedding snapper Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a soon-to-be newlywed couple (Hadis Pakbaten and...

Something stinks right from the off in this twisty, tense, languorous 1970s-set Brazilian drama that captures the absurdity and suffocation of life under a corrupt dictatorship. It’s 1977, and middle-aged Marcelo (Civil War’s Wagner Moura), is on the run from the north of Brazil to Recife, where he wants to reunite with his young son.  In the opening scenes of The Secret Agent, Marcelo pulls into a remote gas station in his bright yellow VW Beetle. There’s a body lying under sheets of cardboard that’s been there for days. No one dares do anything about it. The police arrive and needlessly harass Marcelo, trying to take a bribe for some empty reason. The vibe is set right away for a film which brilliantly captures the fear and sheer ridiculousness of a lawless state. The Secret Agent is vicious and vivid in its sense of place and danger. But it also has a streak of weirdness and offers a very human take on the political-crime thriller genre. It also has an explicit film lover’s touch, with references to Jaws and key elements of the story set in and around a sweaty, sleazy cinema. There’s even a daring and jaw-dropping scene with a severed leg hopping about a nighttime Recife cruising spot that feels fitting and also straight out of another film entirely, like a grim hallucination. The Secret Agent is vicious and vivid in its sense of place and danger But most of the movie, which is written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau), feels horribly real. Marcelo isn’t...

Disney’s live-action remakes thus far have mostly focused on the stone-cold classics; the big sweeping epics. 2002’s animated Lilo & Stitch is not one of the studio’s most glittering jewels. It’s a sweet, funny, simple story with a cute central duo and modest scale (thanks to a smaller than typical budget). It turns out to be an excellent candidate for a do-over, able to establish a personality of its own without the original looming over it. In live-action mode, Lilo & Stitch has some of the charm of an ’80s Amblin movie, like E.T. or Gremlins. Lilo (Maia Kealoha) is an orphaned Hawaiian kid who keeps accidentally getting in trouble. Her elder sister, Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong), is trying to keep her on the straight and narrow after the death of their parents. Stitch (voiced by Chris Sanders, director of the 2002 film) is a genetically engineered alien. When he’s banished from his home planet, considered too dangerous to live, he escapes to Earth, envisaging a reign of destruction. Instead, he has to pose as a dog and move in with Lilo to evade the aliens tailing him. As Stitch tries to avoid capture and Lilo risks being taken away by social services, these two misfits form an unlikely bond. It bounces along energetically under the direction of Dean Fleischer Camp, who made 2024’s adorable Marcel: The Shell With Shoes On. This is a very different proposition to that film, but Fleischer-Camp shows the same ability to quickly establish a beating heart to his story. The...

Imagine George Clooney being coerced into playing Donald Trump in a straight-faced hagiography – perhaps directed by one of White House’s new Special Ambassadors – and you’ve got the predicament faced by the Egyptian movie star at the heart of Swedish-Egyptian director Tarik Saleh’s new thriller. George Fahmy (Fares Fares), the so-called ‘Pharaoh of the Screen’, is a much-loved fiftysomething actor carving out a comfortable, westernised living on Cairo’s soundstages and in its members’ bars, parroting Samuel Beckett quotes to the much younger girlfriend (Lyna Khoudri) who looks to him for a career leg-up. But under the repressive rule of real-life president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, that feckless lifestyle leaves him wide open to blackmail. It’s made clear that if he wants to continue having a career and keep his student son out of jail, he’ll have to don el-Sisi’s old military uniform for a propaganda film called The Will of the People. He’s already a cliché, they want to make him a tool too. ‘Nothing is for free,’ he’s told. Including his freedom.  Fares, star of the two previous films in Saleh’s ‘Cairo trilogy’, The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) and The Cairo Conspiracy (2023), is a hoot as an egotistical dilettante whose dreams of an easy life in a difficult country are scuppered in brutal fashion.  It’s an Armando Iannucci-esque send-up of something deadly serious Saleh uses the first half to poke fun at both the regime and the actor, before hairpinning into a final...