Our latest movie reviews

As diehard fans go, Australian showman Baz Luhrmann has done more than most to spread the gospel of Elvis. He pretty much reinvented the wheel with his big, brash 2022 biopic on the music icon. Elvis – a wild rollercoaster of a ride on the singer’s life – made a star out of Austin Butler, snagged a pile of awards, cleaned up at the box office and introduced the singer to a new generation. Suddenly, everybody knew who Elvis was again. Empowered by this, Luhrmann went back through the 60-plus boxes of concert archive he’d hauled out of Warner Bros.’ deep storage (literally, they were in a salt mine in Kansas) for his original research. Finding reels of ‘lost’ footage shot for two 1970s docs on the King was like discovering gold. Why not, he thought, turn it into one epic concert movie? Here, then, is a glorious mash-up of that material, preceded by a speedy summary of pre-1970s Elvis for those who don’t know. Elvis Presley shocked white America by popularising rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. But then, the former dirt-poor truck driver from Tupelo got drafted for national service in the US Army. When he got out, his wily manager, the self-titled Colonel Tom Parker (not his real name) turned him into a lucrative family entertainer in Hollywood, pumping out three increasingly inane musicals a year. By the end of the 1960s, Elvis had had enough and put his foot down  Which is where EPiC takes off. A joyous, energetic and inclusive experience Drawing from 10 professionally shot...

No matter how powerful or pampered, celebrities are still human. They have their own foibles and panic attacks. So we all feel it when Charli xcx’s looks are mercilessly savaged in Aidan Zamiri’s anarchically absurdist mockumentary, The Moment. Charli escapes to Ibiza for a few days to get away from the fractious implosion of her Brat concert movie, being shot in a pigeon-infested warehouse in East London. Skipping the huge waiting list to see the hotel’s in-demand facialist results in the singer’s ego being blow-torched. Apparently, her dry skin physically drains said specialist to the point of snoring. Tossed out unceremoniously, the Apple singer crumbles. A collapse further crumpled on bumping into Kylie Jenner, who raves about the barking mad facial-abuser and the documentary filmmaker who has caused Charli so much grief: Johannes, played with passive-aggressive condescension by Alexander Skarsgård.  He’s a tacky stuntmeister who wants the show, and therefore his film, to lean into giant cigarette props and a less vomit-hued green, dolling up Charli in the drag queen sheen favoured by Chappell Roan. Johannes breathes down the neck of Marty Supreme actor Hailey Gates’ creative director, Celeste, who’s battling to move on from Brat. But the singer is so wigged out she doesn’t know who to trust, let alone her gut. A wild ensemble of celebrities playing warped caricatures includes Rachel Sennott, who speedily overcomes caution to huff K on camera. Some disappear – into...

Adolescence and Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ startlingly assured debut feature opens in darkness. We hear, but don’t see, the panicked aftermath of a knife crime and voices in heated debate as a siren announces the arrival of the police. Cut to Troy’s rabbit-in-the-headlights stare in the back of a cop wagon. Played by The Long Walk actor Tut Nyuot, he’s a good, if waylaid, kid caught up in a furious world he’s vastly unprepared for. Thrust into a foreboding brick youth detention centre, all the crueller for its positioning by the freedom of the sea, Troy is stripped naked alongside two fellow detainees. They’re destined to be his good and bad angels.  Doe-eyed Ukrainian actor Vladyslav Baliuk plays Krystian, a gentle Polish lad even more out of his depth in a brutally unforgiving place where the kind-hearted have no protection from a shiv’s skin slice. That his goofy crime, revealed later, is entirely undeserving of this imprisonment has no bearing on an unbending system.There’s a crackle of energy between Krystian and Troy that suggests their deep bond could be more than it seems, a source of calm amid this storm of teenage testosterone.The bad angel, a lithely unnerving Dion (What It Feels Like For a Girl actor Sekou Diaby), has other ideas. Not his first stint inside, Dion holds court as a dealer with a bevy of boys at his command. He presses fellow Black kid Troy into his service, leaving Krystian adrift Dion is only half Troy’s trouble, with the loose unit energy of...

From Thor and Hulk to (basically) McCauley and Hanna. The reunion of two of Marvel’s mightiest heroes, Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo, as a meticulous but troubled thief and the schlebby, Columbo-alike detective on his case across LA evokes unenviable Heat comparisons. They’re overblown but not outrageous.  Crime 101 doesn’t have quite the operatic sweep of Michael Mann’s 1995 crime masterpiece or its army of supporting characters, but it’s a serious and satisfying throwback to the golden days of the crime thriller, full of crackling dialogue, noirish LA locations and adrenalised car chases, all briskly overseen by talented British writer-director Bart Layton (The Imposter). The title, of course, has a double meaning: Hemsworth’s hangdog jewel thief Mike Davis has a simple code – he’s courteous, avoids violence and his back story is a blank – and targets marks along LA’s 101 freeway. The road, which runs along the Pacific coast, represents something spiritual for Mike, who carries scars from a former life in the city. His spartan oceanside apartment offers more common ground with De Niro’s thief in Heat. When he falls out with his growly fence and mentor (Nick Nolte), who replaces him with Barry Keoghan’s loose-cannon biker, the stakes ramp up. Mike needs to pull off one last job. Ruffalo’s detective and his loyal but wary partner (Corey Hawkins) are hot on his heels. You know the drill. The Heat comparisons are overblown but not outrageous  Caught up with them both is a...

It’s 1870 in Friendship, Wisconsin when Sheriff Jacob Hansen (Johnny Flynn) discovers a feverish, ranting woman in a field adjacent to the dead body of a soldier he’s just removed from an out-of-town homestead. This bizarre, mysterious and macabre blend sets the uncommon tone for A Prayer for the Dying. When she and the unknown corpse reach local physician, ‘Doc’ (John C Reilly), concern turns to panic when he diagnoses diphtheria. Aside from wife Marta (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and new baby at home, Jacob has a head awash with dark secrets from the Civil War, which ended five years previously. This backdrop of trauma, encroaching disease and wildfires nearing town make for a challenging tenure, which escalates when the dead bodies pile up in town and nearby woods where cult leader Chase and his all-female followers reside. Quarantine is the only solution, for what good it will do. All of which makes for a tense, tough western low on the usual gunfights and saloon brawls but high on apocalyptic foreboding and suspense. The pacing is assured and the action plentiful, whether this encompasses the inspection of a cadaver or last-gasp train escape.  It’s a western low on gunfights but high on apocalyptic foreboding  There’s also bizarre humour – the arrival of a long-awaited circus is weirdly hilarious – and, in Jacob’s gruesome dreams and the vividly infernal conclusion in particular, startling imagery. Though it packs more action, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff and her...

‘What you are about to see is something you’ve never seen before,’ we're promised at the start of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. That may be true for some of us, but not for all: Nirvanna the Band the Show was actually a culty and beloved Canadian sitcom based on an early aughts web series – which has now, as advertised, been turned into a full-length movie. Totally confused? Lean all the way in. There is little logic to be found in this cheerfully bananas mockumentary from Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, who have been playing the fictional Matt and Jay for nearly two decades. Their latest misadventure, deftly directed by Johnson and hilariously scripted by both, should by all rights break the world. Like the series and sitcom, the movie follows two clueless friends determined to book a gig at Toronto’s famed Rivoli music club. Unfortunately, they don’t have a manager, an agent or much of a setlist. What they do possess, besides a band name that causes infinite confusion, is a refusal to flag in the face of eternal rejection. Matt and Jay don’t spend much time on actual music, but they’re fully committed to hatching schemes. These run the spectrum from painfully misguided (parachute into a stadium, impress thousands of potential fans) to utterly insane (build a time machine, travel to the past, secure a booking for the future). It’s easy to underestimate the intelligence it takes to make something so silly To say more would ruin the fun. Taking equal inspiration from...

Sometimes, an Oscar nomination is almost as good as a win. Little Amélie may have scant hope of beating the mighty K-Pop Demon Hunters to Best Animated Feature, but its nod puts some deserved attention on a sweet and thought-provoking movie.  It begins with the birth of God. Or at least, that’s how one newborn sees it. When Amélie emerges into the world, her parents are told she’s ‘a vegetable’. Seemingly incapable of movement or speech, she stares fixedly ahead, absorbing everything around her. With her family orbiting around her, she believes she’s the centre of the universe.  At the age of two, Amélie is sparked into animation by two events: an earthquake that hits her family’s home in Japan, and a taste of white chocolate. She’s awoken simultaneously to life’s many pleasures and the constant spectre of death and destruction. Both will inform her understanding of the world in her earliest years. She’ll look death squarely in the face several times. Adapting a memoir by Amélie Nothomb, debut feature directors Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han do a beautiful job of conveying the overwhelming feeling of being brand new. The animation initially looks like something produced on an early Nintendo console, but what it lacks in finesse it more than makes up for in feeling. It makes sense of how a small child sees the world, saturated and magical but not yet subtly detailed.  A trip into a small girl’s life that leaves you with plenty of big things to ponder It works perfectly...

Emily Brontë’s only published novel has always been utterly batshit, and director Emerald Fennell’s take on the gothic ‘romance’ of Wuthering Heights follows suit, as peculiarly cold as it is visually decadent. The destructive aspect of Cathy and Heathcliff’s obsessive love is front and centre, yet it’s hard to care about Margot Robbie’s bratty Catherine Earnshaw – who seems too old to be acting this teenage – and Jacob Elordi’s boring, one-note Heathcliff. In the book he is ‘wild’ and deeply charismatic. In the film, he is… tall?  For those unfamiliar with the unhinged masterpiece, Cathy has been infatuated with Heathcliff since her widowed father brought this mysterious boy to their Yorkshire home. Fast forward to adulthood and Heathcliff has buggered off, while Cathy has married their neighbour, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), who in Fennell’s delirious vision lives in a kaleidoscopic Rococo palace. Heathcliff then returns, stonkingly rich. She wants him, and he wants her, but they cannot be together as Cathy is now pregnant with Edgar’s child.  In the book, this leads to much unconsummated yearning, but Fennell – who infamously made Barry Keogan stick his dick in a freshly dug grave in Saltburn – gets the pair romping with impunity. This is, naturally, after Cathy experiences her sexual awakening while spying on household servants having a kinky stable-based encounter. But despite all this shagging, Wuthering Heights is not even Fennell’s horniest film. It’s hard to care...

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...