Our latest movie reviews

Not a flat-out fizzer but definitely nowhere near the ludicrously high standards he’s set for himself, Steven Spielberg’s return to sci-fi goes down as a mid-tier entry in his personal canon – albeit one elevated by Emily Blunt and a couple of the type of nuts action sequences that few others could pull off.  The fabulous Blunt continues her hot streak as Detroit TV meteorologist Margaret Fairchild, whose life takes a freaky turn after a strange kitchen table encounter with a cardinal bird. Within moments, she’s speaking fluent Russian to her boyfriend (Thunderbolts*’ Wyatt Russell) and doing an alien-sounding clicking sound on live TV. ​Turns out ET isn’t phoning home any more, ​h​e’s presenting the weather.  Also​ on the run is cybersecurity wonk-turned-whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) with stolen files from ​a sinister agency that prove the existence of aliens – with his old boss (Colin Firth, growing into a rare villain role) in hot pursuit. Oh, and the world is on the verge of nuclear war over North Korea, albeit this is a backdrop that’s given scant attention.  It’s a lot to pack in, and even John Williams’ mercurial but hardly memorable score seems unsure which beats to underline. Boiled down, though, it’s the connection between Margaret and Daniel – plus Colman Domingo as Hugo, the Morpheus of the disclosure operation – that underpins the fugitive thriller that breaks out.  Russell gets the best lines as Margaret’s doofus musician boyfriend Jackson,...

‘Would I lie to you, baby?’ So sings Bond star Léa Seydoux’s pop-inflected concert pianist, Lucy, in a slow-burn reworking of the Charles & Eddie hit at the open of Corsage director Marie Kreutzer’s latest. A niggling worry that creeps around the corners of this austere, guarded film.  The first sign that something’s not quite right comes when Lucy must comfort her filmmaker husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), who collapses mid-panic attack in the hall of their Munich apartment. He’s says he’s burnt out, insisting they move to a rustic rural homestead with their precocious kid, Johnny (Malo Blanchet). But no sooner has the bucolic bliss begun than Jella Haase’s detective Elsa bursts their bubble, rocking up with a cohort of cops while vaping and blasting techno in her car. They’ve come to seize Philip’s phone, computer, laptop and thumb drives. His face is a glistening sheen of sweaty guilt. Seydoux, an incredibly gifted actor, nails the flustered, frightened panic. It’s not until she arrives at the cop shop and takes the lift to Elsa’s office that she realises Philip’s accused crime: purveying paedophilic images. All denial, defence and disbelief, Lucy’s confusions gives way to the skin-crawling horror of betrayal as an incandescent rage whirls inside. Has Philip abused Johnny? For such a young actor, Blanchet shows incredible promise. Johnny’s giggles about hidden secrets muddy the waters just enough, even as the psychologist attached to the case insists there’s no overt...

Revered Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki adheres to the concept of ‘Ma’, or intentional emptiness. Likewise, Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer’s equal-parts effervescent and unsettling third feature, Rose, sings with thoughtful silence and enriching stillness. The mighty Sandra Hüller of The Zone of Interest, Toni Erdmann and Anatomy of a Fall fame plays the intriguing title character, a performance that has rightly earned her a Berlinale Silver Bear. An independent woman refusing to be hemmed in by the limiting realities of gender in 17th-century Mitteleuropa, Rose has assumed the identity, and privileges, of at least two men. First, she fought as a soldier of fortune in the devastating Thirty Years’ War, gaining ample coin and a facial scar, the latter thanks to the bullet she wears on a chain, occasionally sucking it absentmindedly in the film’s quieter beats. Rose then adopts the (unheard) name of a fallen comrade, returning to his village to claim his family’s long-abandoned stretch of fallow land. Intending on living alone, she employs well-treated farmhands. But her unexpected presence and strange appearance raises the grumbling suspicions of envious villagers.When Rose slays a marauding beast – an early iteration of ‘Would you rather meet a man or bear in the woods?’ – she gains their grudging respect. So much so, one neighbour insists on marrying ‘him’ to his daughter, an also-brilliant Caro Braun’s curious Suzanna. A further queering of the situation that sets...

You’d have to wonder what the South Korean tourism board makes of ferocious filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho. Catch public transport in downtown Seoul (Train to Busan) and you’ll be attacked by zombies. You’re no safer attending a biotech conference in the sprawling metropolis in his latest braindead maelstrom. Flipping the action from horizontal to vertical, this alternate spin on the time-honoured action/horror/comedy tropes plays out in a towering edifice that’s equal parts prison for corporate slaves and never-ending shopping mall for those shackled to late-stage capitalism. It’s into this more more more Babel that sharp bioscientist Kwon Se-jeong (Gianna Jun) walks. A mega-brain, she’s nevertheless no use at reading a room and has a habit of driving folks away with her prickliness. She’s coaxed by her colleague and amicable ex-husband, Han Kyo-seong (Go Soo), to play nice and maybe rustle up some sort of future security in her gig. Theirs is a purely platonic bond – he’s very much in love with his new wife (Shin Hyun-been), also a scientist, and daughter. Then vengeful scientist Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) unleashes a real-time experiment in terror, sparking a rapidly spreading outbreak of frothing infected in the process.  What makes this a fun night out is how well the mayhem is staged With the authorities locking the building down and ringing it with busloads of heavily-armed riot cops, dynamic duo Se-jeong and Kyo-seong are left to rally a rag-tag band of generic...

Taking a little of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a sprinkle of Mike Nichols, a toke or two of stoner comedy silliness and a big huff of post-Woody Allen urbanite repression, Olivia Wilde’s latest slots into a rich lineage of hilariously awkward sex comedies. With a stellar cast  – Wilde, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, Penélope Cruz – finding alchemy in their contrasting styles, it’s daringly close to the bone and frequently fall-off-your-chair funny. And with apologies to Vanilla Sky stans, it’s comfortably the best US remake of a Spanish film yet. Cesc Gay’s Goya-nominated The People Upstairs is transplanted from Barcelona to the one-time home of free love, San Francisco, where fraying married couple Joe (Rogen) and Angela (Wilde) are finding love of any description hard to come by.  The bellyaching, jaundiced Joe has got back to their luxe apartment from his unfulfilling job as a music teacher to find Angela putting the finishing touches on a platter of cheeses and ‘jamon’. She’s sent their kid to the in-laws and invited the upstairs neighbours over for a soirée; the same neighbours who’ve been keeping them awake with noisy late-night sex. Nursing a bad back and a burning desire for a spliff, Joe is horrified by the whole idea. She’s seriously high-strung; he doesn’t seem to have any strings left at all. Meanwhile, the score, by Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange, scuttles through your brain like a spider in the bathtub.  Amusingly, the bickering doesn’t stop when Norton’s...

A sensitive drama touched by melancholy, Enzo is a bittersweet farewell to the late and often great Laurent Cantet. The French filmmaker, who won the Palme d’Or for The Class in 2006, conceived the idea for this queer coming-of-age drama and retains the directing credit, but it’s his long-time writing partner Robin Campillo who shepherded it over the line. Whatever the division of labour, it’s an effective marriage of the unblinking humanism of Cantet and the observational eye of the 120 Beats per Minute director. The rugged, sun-splashed landscapes of the Côte d’Azur provide the backdrop for a film that perfectly captures what it is to be young and uncertain in your skin. Rocky outcrops, sheer cliffs that reach to the skies, and the occasional turquoise lagoon could be metaphors for the rocky but seemingly idyllic life of 16-year-old Enzo. He’s struggling to make head or tail of his desires and the expectations – real or assumed – of his well-to-do parents, Paolo and Marion (Pierfrancesco Favino and Elodie Bouchez).  Played by open-faced newcomer Eloy Pohu, we meet him as an apprentice on a building site in La Ciotat – the setting for Cantet and Campillo’s 2018 drama The Workshop – where his inattentiveness and inertia draws the ire of the foreman. He’s marched back to his family’s hilltop villa and asked if he really wants the gig – and why? His hands are blistered and his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. His dad points to his older brother, who has uni in Paris ahead of...

It’s been interesting, over the last few years, to watch romcoms wrestling with the restrictive rules of modern dating and romance. Last year’s Materialists grappled with love on the apps, while more recently, Finding Emily sees a shy young man face a baying mob because he attempted a grand gesture. Now Office Romance has that hoary old cliché, the crush on someone at work, faced with the censorious rules of a post-MeToo workplace. Sadly for this Ol Parker-directed Netflix effort, there’s little that’s new or exciting to say about dating the boss, but at least their working relationship presents a reasonable roadblock to two outrageously attractive people who are hot to jump one another’s bones. Brett Goldstein is mild-mannered, foul-mouthed lawyer Daniel, who’s taken a job in-house at a US airline run by Jackie Cruz (Jennifer Lopez). When his immediate boss (Bradley Whitford) is injured, he steps in to cover a key deposition in a major lawsuit, and sparks immediately fly with Jackie. The two fight their growing feelings until, inevitably, giving in and hitting the sack – but with Jackie’s management under close scrutiny from her board and only semi-retired father (the always welcome Edward James Olmos), there’s every reason to keep their liaison under the covers. As with any romcom, there’s little real doubt about the outcome. The question is whether it’s funny along the way, and here we’re helped by Goldstein’s solid script (with co-writer Joe Kelly), because few...

‘By the power of Grayskull!’ If those words shoot a lightning bolt of nostalgia straight through your soul, then this is the Masters of the Universe movie you’ve been waiting for.   Faithfully capturing the simple joys and craziness of the beloved 1980s TV cartoon, the story starts in Eternia, a beautiful, blossom-laden land that’s a boggling mix of fairytale fantasy (castles, medieval weaponry) and sci-fi (jet rockets and cyborgs with laser blasters). Here, sensitive little Prince Adam is told to ‘be a man’ by his father (James Purefoy) who forces him into combat training because ‘the world is no place for the weak’. When the family are attacked by the evil Skeletor (Jared Leto hidden under blue latex), Adam is sent to Earth via an inter-galactic rainbow highway (very Thor).  A mild-mannered Adam (now an adorable Nicholas Galitzine) grows up and gets a Clark Kent-type job in HR where his ‘he/him’ nameplate (as revealed in a trailer) triggered instant anti-woke controversy online (it is a joke, guys). But unlike the franchise-destroying 1987 movie (nice cameo by its star Dolph Lundgren), this doesn’t waste too much time on Earth before Adam retrieves his magical sword, rips his shirt off and goes back to fight for Eternia.  After decades in development hell, Masters of the Universe finally fell into the right hands with Bumblebee director Travis Knight. Where other reboots lean into dour origin stories, his is as brightly coloured as a bowl of e-numbered breakfast cereal....

Charli xcx is having a moment on the big screen. Pivoting from Brat summer, the multi-hyphenate has written music for Mother Mary and Wuthering Heights, produced and starred in a mockumentary about her own career, and signed up for further quirky cinematic projects.  With a lick of the French New Wave, a nip of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy and a dash of the playful end of the Polish Film School, Erupcja is the latest. Writer, director, editor and cinematographer Pete Ohs’ shot-on-the-hop, playfully wistful deconstruction of the romcom, co-written with his cast, presents Charli as restless soul, Bethany. A return visitor to Poland’s capital city, Warsaw, this time she’s brought her live-in boyfriend, Rob, played by fellow musician-turned-actor Will Madden. Her glazed looks, as they endure the frustrating mundanity of self-checking-in to an Airbnb, suggest she’s already checked out of their relationship. Erupcja (the Polish word for eruption) opens with footage of Mount Etna going up, with Rob and Bethany’s planned flight home cancelled due to the volcanic ash cloud. This real-life event doesn’t foreshadow a big blow-up between them. Leaning into the great cinematic tradition of foreigners finding (and losing) themselves abroad, their slow death is a mostly amicable fizzer. When Rob snoozes on arrival, Bethany scoots to the apartment of Nel (Lena Góra), a Berlin techno-loving florist she first met here 16 years ago when they were teenagers. Strangely, Bethany silently...

If he hadn’t been France’s defining 20th century statesman, Charles de Gaulle might have made a great comedy straight man. Played by a ramrod straight and poker-faced Simon Abkarian in the first instalment of this two-part, bilingual French epic, he carries the air of a man who knows that, yes, that ladder is about to crash to the ground and someone is getting covered in paint.  For the majority of writer-director Antonin Baudry’s (The Wolf’s Call) stirring and big-scale biopic, it looks likely to be an exasperated Winston Churchill on the end of such a pratfall. As both friend and, at least in a political sense, foe to the exiled leader of the Free French government, Churchill (Simon Russell Beale returning to his Operation Mincemeat role) puffs his cheeks at de Gaulle’s gumption in trying to steer his foreign policy decisions. The pair’s fiery face-offs are a rollicking highlight of a film that occasionally feels stilted and orthodox.Adapted from Julian T Jackson’s 900-page 2018 biography 'A Certain idea of France', De Gaulle: Résistance is about how the French President-to-be worked himself up through the cracks of history. He’s a captivating and paradoxical figure: a home-front soldier and an unelected democrat who conjures an unofficial mandate for himself through bulldozing force of will and an unwavering belief in himself and his country. He speaks of France in spiritual terms as he tries to coax Churchill and Roosevelt (Campbell Scott) into taking on the...