Our latest movie reviews

Loosely based on his own life, Sean Wang’s beautiful coming-of-age drama follows a boy trying on different identities, desperate to find one that fits.  Chris (Izaac Wang) is a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American boy living in California. At home, his mum (Joan Chen) and grandma (Chang Li Hua) speak Taiwanese, while Chris and his older sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), only speak – or rather stroppily shout – English. He even pretends to be only half-Taiwanese, so keen is he not to seem different. Among his friends, he feels like the tag-along, the kid who hasn’t worked out any of the stuff everyone else seems to find easy. Chris is growing up at a tricky time. It’s 2008 and social media is in its infancy. People can see how many friends you have – or don’t. There’s a burgeoning expectation that you cultivate not just a real life persona, but a flawless, hilarious, apparently effortless online one. Chris doesn’t even know how to walk into a party comfortably. When he encounters a girl he likes, real life and online interactions give him double the opportunity to humiliate himself.  Director Sean Wang gets all the details hilariously, palm-sweatingly right There are strong shades of Bo Burnham’s 2018 movie Eighth Grade here. That’s not to call Dídi derivative at all, but to say that it nails that high-school yearning to be cool and complete lack of any idea how to get there, making things worse for yourself with every attempt. It’s all intricately observed, from the way Chris code-shi

The first Deadpool movie was a refreshingly unserious counterblast to the superhero industrial complex dominating cinemas in the mid-2010s. With his gleeful pisstaking and fourth-wall breaking, Ryan Reynolds’ motormouth Wade Wilson felt like the wobbly brick in the machine-built Jenga tower that was pre-Endgame superhero cinema.  Eight years on and the superhero landscape now resembles this densely-packed threequel’s barren, Mad Max: Fury Road-aping wasteland The Void. And Reynolds’ sweary superhero has evolved from plucky insurgent to the cornerstone of a potential Marvel revival. So when he refers to himself as ‘Marvel Jesus’ in this splashily violent, timeline-traversing quest to protect his friends and beloved ex (Morena Baccarin, barely in it) from erasure, he’s not kidding. Deadpool & Wolverine is a franchise resurrection dressed as an odd-couple bromance, with a new version of Hugh Jackman’s grizzled Wolverine along for the ride. And it’s altogether too much heavy lifting for a character who lives to snark from the sidelines. The movie’s big bad has a small-screen quality. Matthew MacFadyen channels Succession’s slimy Tom Wambsgans as a rogue Time Variance Agent (Disney+ show Loki is your course work here) hellbent on destroying swathes of the multiverse for reasons I can’t begin to explain. It’s another winky performance in a movie that asks you to take nothing seriously apart from its own moments of unearned pathos. Only the gruff Jackman, grousing monosyllabically a

There’s a lot of talk about what it means to be a woman in Levan Akin’s lovely drama Crossing. ‘There was a time,’ laments stern Georgian auntie Lia (Mzia Arabuli), ‘when our women were refined’. Then again, admits this refined lady about her refined existence, ‘I have no future and no plans. I’m just here until I’m not.’  Many of her assumptions – and ours – are challenged throughout Akin’s intimate tale, in which Lia crosses from Batumi, her small village on the Black Sea, over to Istanbul to find Tekla, her trans niece. Tekla was kicked out years ago by her conservative father. Local rumours have suggested that she became a sex worker before disappearing. But the last request from her recently-deceased mother – Lia’s sister – was that Tekla be found and brought back to Batumi. And a final wish must be honoured, no matter how misguided others may think it to be. Lia, an unapologetically intimidating former teacher, is joined on her quest by Achi (Lucas Kankava), a smart but aimless twentysomething determined to escape his own miserable, constrained life. He tells Lia that he has Tekla’s last known address, and off this mismatched pair go to Istanbul, where they cross paths with a range of other floating souls. Chief among these is trans advocate Evrim (Deniz Dumanli, a superstar in her first role), whose complex life is better left for viewers to discover. It’s a heartbreaker in all the best ways Actually, the same could be said for the entire movie, which writer-director A

Despite its nostalgic reappraisal, Twister didn’t do much to stand out from the disaster movies – Dante's Peak, Armageddon, Backdraft, Deep Impact et al – that laid waste to multiplexes on a weekly basis in the ’90s. At least, not beyond the memorable Helen Hunt/Bill Paxton double act and that now-iconic flying cow. Not an especially high bar for Lee Isaac Chung’s all-action sorta-sequel to clear, in other words – and it clears it with ease. With its peppy cast, streamlined story and about a bazillion pixels’ worth of VFX cyclones to sweep you back in your seat, it’s a fun and refreshingly old-school night at the pictures. Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones is a reined-in but sparky lead as meteorologist Kate Cooper, a Midwesterner with a groundhog’s ability to sniff out looming weather systems. She’s from ‘Tornado Alley’, a storm-ravaged strip of Oklahoma, so there’s been plenty of practice. But there’s been hubris, too, when her experiments in tornado-busting particles indirectly leads to the deaths of her partner (Daryl McCormack) and two young fellow tornado-chasers in a showstopping opening scene. Five years on, her surviving team mate (In the Heights’ Anthony Ramos) drags her reluctantly back from self-imposed exile in New York – only this time the twisters are coming thick and fast, and with them unscrupulous property developers, tornado tourists and hotshot YouTube storm chasers like egotistical Arkansas ‘tornado wrangler’ Tyler Owens (Glen Powell, steadily piloting hi

Dad is dying, unseen, in an adjacent room. His three grown-up daughters are gathered in his apartment for three days, preparing for his death while coping with their buried emotions – towards him, and, with increasing agitation, each other. Azazel Jacobs’s poignant but unsentimental film, set in a Lower East Side apartment, is painful, messy, sharp-edged, and for anyone who has experienced the weird mix of extreme practicality and unrealised grief that comes with helping a loved one through palliative care, a real heartbreaker. The New York filmmaker is a past master of intimate family dramas full of sly observations. Films like Terri (2011) and The Lovers (2017) have taken the edge off their stories of domestic woes – kids struggling at school, infidelity, money worries – with smart but goofy wit. His Three Daughters is a slightly graver proposition – terminal illness being tougher to jolly up. Funny but in an awkward, more nakedly emotional way. It’s built on the performances of its three leads: Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon – a trio of actresses whose contrasting strengths dovetail beautifully in that Cries and Whispers-y set-up. Beautifully acted and with an emphatic spirit, its humanity runs deep Lyonne is Rachel, a stoner shut-in and sports betting devotee who’s been living with her terminally ill dad. The arrival of her estranged half-sisters, the tight-wound Katie (Coon), struggling with a difficult teen at home, and the softer, more sensitive Chri

The brilliant 2010 documentary No Distance Left to Run charted the history of the Britpop hitmakers blur and the journey to their huge reunion gig at Hyde Park, after a falling-out a decade before. But despite the band members’ separate lives and other interests, from Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz and operas to Alex James’s cheese, middle age had mellowed the fractious foursome. A new studio album followed in 2015.  Then, in 2023, blur celebrated their rekindled brotherhood – at this point, they feel more like brothers than their former Britpop rivals, the Gallaghers, with two sell-out performances at Wembley Stadium (a venue they’d never played before) and a critically-acclaimed album, The Ballad of Darren. Director Toby L (Liam Gallagher: Knebworth 22) was there to document everything: from Albarn gently weeping as he hears The Ballad of Darren’s first playback, to Albarn and Coxon’s return to Colchester’s Stanway comprehensive, where the singer recalls being regularly bullied. Why? “’Cause they thought I was a cunt,” he grins puckishly. Far from a slick, record-label-sanctioned promotional film, blur: To the End is a fly-on-the-wall look at a band coming to terms with themselves and their shared history and destiny. It swerves formal interviews in favour of moments of friendship, joy, melancholia and reflection that transcend the ‘for the fans’ framework of a typical album/tour film and becomes something more meaningful. It’s still downbeat – this is blur, after all – but in a f

Not so much ‘fast and furious’ as slow and serene, Thelma is a nonagenarian action-comedy that’s taken its pills and will stop at nothing on a madcap quest for justice. Apart from platform lifts and particularly steep steps. Writer-director Josh Margolin draws inspiration from his own family for a likeable indie that wants you to think about ageing differently – and succeeds in warm-hearted style. His debut delivers pearls of wisdom about intergenerational family dynamics and the constraints (and freedoms) that come with old age, as Thelma, a 93-year-old grandma, sets off to track down the scammers who have ripped her off.  Played by the wonderful Squibb and based on the director’s own gran, Thelma Post is still a life force: living independently and knocking about with her loveable but lost grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger, soon to be a villain in Gladiator II). Then comes a mysterious call: Danny has been arrested and $10,000 is needed to bail him out. To the horror of her fretful daughter (Parker Posey) and know-it-all son-in-law (Clark Gregg), she mails a bundle of cash to the San Fernando Valley PO Box address specified by the fraudsters. Thelma is neither as funny nor as Marmite-y as Little Miss Sunshine, a kindred spirit in the quirky indie realm, but its light shines in myriad little character beats. Many of them involve Richard Roundtree – John Shaft himself – as Thelma’s old pal Ben, who reluctantly absconds from his care home, mainly because Thelma has stolen his mob

Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds Of Beavers is that rare thing in the current film landscape: a genuine cult classic. Made for just $150,000 over six years, the story of a fur trapper versus the titular century of beavers (actors in grown-up mascot costumes rather than the real thing) mashes up the old (silent comedy) and new (video games) with the nutty energy of a Looney Tunes cartoon. It found its audience in the US by making its mark at a grassroots level through canny screenings – halfway through mascots would invade the auditoria and hand out beers – but even without the gimmicks it’s a lo-fi, original, refreshing treat with a gag count that leaves much more expensive fare in the dust. Or more specifically, the snow. In the frozen wastes of North America during the 19th century, a French applejack salesman Jean Kayak (played by co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) sees his livelihood taken away when a colony of bastard beavers burn down his distillery (all this is accompanied by a catchy Davy Crockett-y ballad).  Turning to booze, Jean finds salvation when he falls in love with the pole-dancing daughter of a fur salesman (Olivia Graves). But there is a catch. The miserable merchant (Doug Mancheski) will only give his consent to the happy couple’s marriage if Jean can bring back the only valuable commodity in these parts – one hundred beaver pelts. It’s that rare thing in the current film landscape: a genuine cult classic Onto this admittedly thin premise Cheslik and Tews bring i

There’s a real horror to extreme cases of sleepwalking – one that’s not unlike possession. The loss of bodily autonomy, the unwitting threat to one’s loved ones, the lack of awareness that these things are even happening. In Sleep, director Jason Yu turns that idea into a home-invasion thriller where the trespasser is whatever is forcing Hyun-su (Parasite’s late, great Lee Sun-kyun) to do strange things while he’s unconscious. Soon, his cosy domestic space is alive with danger.  It starts small: Hyun-su is sitting upright in bed and murmuring ‘someone’s inside’, leading his wife Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) to think that there’s a stranger in their home, a feeling affirmed by the strange noises coming from the landing. But the stranger is actually Hyun-su himself, who has begun to wander the apartment in his sleep. The noise comes from a slipper left behind on his midnight excursion to jam a door open. And these episodes only more menacing from there: in one of the film’s most disturbing images, Hyun-su uncontrollably claws at his own face.  The home of Sleep’s newlywed couple is transformed by their desperate attempts to safeguard it from these nightly episodes. Yu, an assistant director on Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, shows a similar taste in dark comedy as the Korean master – personal anxieties externalised in instances that can turn from horrific to funny in their absurdity. One such early moment is a simple edit: one of Hyun-su’s spooky night-time walks culminates in him urinating on a

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe the moon landing was the greatest feat of ingenuity in human history, and the conspiracy theorists who think it was all a bunch of hogwash. Greg Berlanti’s (Love, Simon) feelgood, summer romcom is probably as close as we’ll ever get to calling a truce. Set long before smart phones and social media, the film’s recreation of 1969 is a simpler, cosier time. Well, for everyone except Cole Davies (Channing Tatum), the NASA launch director in charge of getting Apollo 11 to the moon. It’s a task complicated by his involvement in the ill-fated Apollo 1 mission just two years earlier. Arguably, the only job harder than getting a rocket to the moon is convincing Congress that trying it again is a good idea. Enter Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), a charismatic marketing exec with enough pizzazz to sell the story. While Cole is as dependable as grandma’s apple pie, Kelly likes to play things fast and loose. A shadowy White House figure, played by a delightfully off-beat Woody Harrelson, forces Kelly to stage a fake moon landing behind Cole’s back in case the mission fails (shades of 1979 conspiracy thriller Capricorn One here). It’s a juicy subplot that also introduces a scene-stealing as Community’s Jim Rash takes as a zany commercial director hired to orchestrate an elaborate production in place of  Stanley Kubrick – a playful nod to the moon landing conspiracy that the 2001: A Space Odyssey director was hired to direct th