Our latest movie reviews

Bad Apples opens with the chirruping of feathery creatures, but what follows is anything but birdsong. In this bleak comedy, Jonatan Etzler dreams up a nightmarish educational scenario: a teacher kidnapping a student on the eve of an Ofsted inspection. Absurdist plot twists follow, as well as an unexpected pivot into dark and unsettling terrain. It follows Maria (Saoirse Ronan), a downtrodden teacher trying her best to connect with her ten-year-old pupils. The reigning brat of the class, Danny (Eddie Waller), places catastrophic strain on Maria’s personal and work life, pushing her to ever greater risks to keep him at arm’s length during school hours. But then an after-school encounter with Danny turns violent. The meek Maria turns into an unassuming kidnapper, locking the kid in the basement, and a boisterous hostage scenario is soon unfolding. At night, Maria’s farming simulator game drowns out Danny’s basement tantrums; in the daytime, Maria is showered with praise when the school inspection is a success. With Danny being served pesto pasta in a harness fit for a large dog, it’s clear the situation is as dire as it is downright hilarious. Saoirse Ronan is, as ever, the best thing here As Maria and Danny enter a surrogate mother/son territory during their time in the basement, we get a glimpse of who Danny is behind the school-bully mask. The pair bond during their basement tutor sessions and shared video game banter – tender yet ludicrous moments, where you’d think...

Fall proved to be a pretty decent box office success for an indie survival thriller, making seven times its budget and gaining even more popularity once it began streaming. Cue Fall 2: Deadpoint, a sequel penned once again by Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank but this time Peter and Michael Spierig replace Mann on directing duty and transport the perilous action from the US to Thailand. Rehashing the absurd but entertaining premise of two grieving women trapped on a ridiculously high and dangerously tiny platform, the film, like most sequels, ups the ante. Where the first film’s besties, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Shiloh (Virginia Gardner), illegally ascended a 2,000 foot TV tower, here Shiloh's sister Jax (Harriet Slater) and old friend Luce (Arsema Thomas) take on the rickety plank walk wrapped around the fictional, 11,000-foot Mount Kwan. Which also, bizarrely, happens to be a drug mule route. Why Jax is convinced by a single text from a woman she's met once to risk her life attempting this climb is utterly bonkers, even if it was in Shiloh’s ‘Fuck it List’ book of adventures. Her sister’s fate went viral and beyond a childhood video of Jax on the monkey bars, desperate to pull Shiloh's attention away from Becky, her mountaineering skills seem to be lacking.  The nail-biting efforts to survive are wincing to watch Jax is the nervous Becky of this situation while Luce fills Shiloh's deceptive and cocksure boots, which mostly functions as a copy-and-paste job save for...

When it was released in 1998, the response to Practical Magic was mostly negative. But slowly this charmingly oddball supernatural comedy, with its zany characters and message of female empowerment, has found its tribe. Three decades on and the original has become a quirky, feminist gem from ‘90s Hollywood. Fans have been begging for a sequel for years, and now they finally have one. Who says magic isn’t real? For this oh-so-legacy sequel, director Susanne Bier (Bird Box) has wrangled all the original Owenses, the witchy heroines of the original. They’re still living in that beautiful clapboard house in Massachusetts, and the curse they thought was broken – the one that sees any man they love die a tragic death – has continued. The cast is as stacked as ever: Gilly (Nicole Kidman), Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Aunt Jet (Dianne Wiest) all return. Even Stockard Channing has been conjured out of retirement to reprise her role as the sage and eccentric Aunt Fran. They are joined by a new younger generation of Owens sisters Antonia (Maisie Williams) and Kylie (Joey King) alongside new members of the coven who include Lee Pace – playing Ian Wright, the rugged, tattooed English professor of witchcraft – and Solly McLeod, as his brooding former apprentice.  The plot revolves around Sally reconnecting with her witchy powers after decades of suppressing them, and a quest to break the curse that leads Sally, Gilly and Kylie to quaint olde England.  The leads handle a fairly cheesy...

Writer-director Florian Zeller’s follow-up to The Father and The Son brings fresh life to the marriage-on-the-rocks sub-genre with the inspired casting of real-life couple Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Zeller wrote the film for the Spanish actors and while the most obvious precedent is Eyes Wide Shut, Bunker is markedly different piece to Kubrick’s final film. Sex is never discussed but the probing question of how and why people change is explored in with depth and maturity. There’s even a few laughs, too. Bardem plays successful architect Miguel; Cruz is a similarly established book editor named Sofia. The pair live in a beautiful modernist home in London with their two daughters, having moved from Madrid years ago to help boost Miguel’s career. Although both are generally satisfied with their professional lot, Sofia puts herself forward to run the fiction section at her publisher at the suggestion of a friendly colleague, but is rejected because they want a Brit for the job – as she suspected she would be. This, and the arrival of young though perceptive novelist James (Patrick Schwarzenegger) on promotional tour, causes her to evaluate what really matters. Miguel, meanwhile, has a mysterious job offer from a secretive tech billionaire (Paul Dano): a huge fee to design an equally mammoth bunker in Hawaii.  Naturally, Bardem and Cruz have great chemistry and their scenes together crackle Domestic matters are also thorny. Neighbour Toby (Stephen Graham) has smashed a...

Immaculately filmed and emotionally precise, Italian filmmaker Andrea Pallaoro’s addiction and relationship drama is shaping up to be something special until it unleashes a plot development so silly, it got big laughs in my screening – and not the good kind. It’s like watching a waiter nimbly carry a salver of champagne flutes through a crowded apartment before tripping over the cat and falling out the window.  It’s a major shame because there’s so much to love in Pallaoro’s careful handling of Bernardo Bertolucci’s screenplay – the last by the Italian auteur before his death in 2018, co-written with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi.Martin Eden’s Luca Marinelli is superb as Leo, a successful, charming but emotionally distant music producer whose life is being made intolerable by chronic back pain. He needs a solution so he can continue to work with Ava, a legendary folk singer he’s successfully lured out of self-exile. She’s played by Susan Sarandon as a husky, all-seeing Marianne Faithfull type and it’s her best role in years. The three-hander is completed by Alicia Vikander as Anne, the doctor who treats Leo in the bedroom of his elegant apartment (is it London? Is it Rome? It’s kept oblique but we never leave it). She falls under the Italian’s spell, and is soon dispensing off-the-books opioids to help him blur out the pain. Their relationship turns co-dependent: Anne is lovesick; Leo is mostly dope sick. Ava, meanwhile, is torn between embracing the alchemy with...

Dau begins as Einstein meets Eisenstein. Not literally, I need to add. But director Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s manic montage, inspired by the old Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein, flashes dream-like visions and chaos onto the screen like the probabilistic appearances, fluctuations of elementary particles, images of startling vividness and violence, until finally the wave function collapses into narrative. It is, when your eyes readjust, a dazzling opening to a dazzling film.  Dau – based loosely on Nobel laureate Lev Landau and played by Greek classical music composer, Teodor Currentzis – is the brightest of the Soviet physicists, a socially gauche genius, who heads to Kharkiv during the Ukraine famine to join an elite group of scientists who are being pressured by the military to use their work in theoretical physics to produce weapons. Pressure turns to intimidation by the security services, and then violence against his colleagues, but Dau has at least discovered love over a meal of sheep’s head (don’t knock it until you try the eyeballs) with factory girl Nora, played by Radmila Shchogolieva, one of the few professional actors in the cast.  As things get out of control in Kharkiv, Dau takes refuge with his old mentor Krupitsa, the director of a secret institute for science (played by theatre director Anatoly Vasiliev), where he finds himself out of the frying pan and into the atomic fire. The applications of the science have become truly terrifying. His principled stance leads...

As the creator of Peaky Blinders, Steven Knight knows a thing or two about bickering brothers. But even the veteran show runner must have felt he’d met his match in Liam and Noel Gallagher, the gobby Cane and Abel of ’90s lad rock, as he set about finding an emotional thread for this barnstorming concert film of Oasis’s 2025 reunion tour.  With the help of directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern (Meet Me in the Bathroom), amps turned up to about 111 and the endlessly quotable siblings on top form, he brings an unexpectedly touching story of forgiveness to a wall-of-sound concert doc that fans will lap up and even Oasis agnostics (like me) will be swept up in. It’s The Last Waltz with parkas, an unashamedly nostalgic time capsule to simpler days that finds the swaggering guitar heroes kinder, gentler and sounding as tight as ever.  The opening is a montage-y as you’d expect. We’re back to the band’s swaggering 1990s rise and acrimonious fall. There’s old Noel referring to Liam as ‘a pain in the arse’ and 2025 Noel noting his total inability to forgive. ‘It’s not like I stabbed his cat,’ says Liam, shrugging off the dressing room set-to that finally finished the band off in 2009. Watching the pair and their band – including Oasis OG Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs, the band’s answer to Ringo – practicing for the reunion tour, the first time they’ve allowed cameras into the rehearsal room, there’s a sense that it could all end in tears like Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back....

Two couples of wildly contrasting means connect awkwardly in Lee Chang-dong’s perceptive and empathetic new drama. The Korean filmmaker isn’t prodigious in his output – this is his first film since 2018’s masterful thriller Burning and only his fifth of the century – but when he has something to say, it’s worth listening. Here, he delivers an absorbing parable about the ruin wreaked by late capitalism. It’s a four (and a bit)-hander that blossoms over its 164-minute runtime into a gesture of defiance for uncertain times.  The four characters are the unsmiling Ho-seok (Peppermint Candy’s Sul Kyung-Gu), who lost his job as an industrial wielder after a private equity buyout two years previously and remains mired in silent grief and rage; his dogged, upbeat wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon); the eager Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), an affluent and aspiring filmmaker who wants to get the couple on camera for a documentary about labour relations; and her husband, urbane but unknowable entrepreneur Sang-woo (Hope’s Zo In-Sung). Adding an extra dynamic is Ho-seok and Mi-ok’s neglected school-age son, a shy observer who bears the cost for his family’s hardships in his own way.  An absorbing parable about the ruin wreaked by late capitalism Lee carries the film along on the undercurrents that pass between this quartet. He occasionally uses footage from Ye-ji’s camera to remind us that there’s an ulterior motive to this new kinship. There are flashbacks to the industrial action that left Ho-seok...

Furies by name, furious by nature, this full-bore Lebanese heist flick, executive-produced by George Clooney under his Smokehouse production label, brings Safdies and Tarantino energy to the streets of Beirut circa 2022. It even conjures memories of Thelma & Louise in its feminist, rage-against-the-machine story of two women sticking it to an unjust system.  A one-first-job crime thriller, it has the madcap feel of a true story. But director Rami Kodeih, who co-writes with his wife Nora Mariana, borrows only the real-life backdrop of a Beirut stricken by the fallout from the 2019 economic crisis, daily powercuts, even some latent ill-will dating bac to the Lebanese Civil War. The banks aren’t just not lending money, they won’t give customers their own savings. Single mum Maro (Rym Mroueh) needs funds to help her younger sister Dalia (Maria Nakouzi) with her cancer treatment. Instead of a George Bailey to calm everyone down at the counters, she has to deal with the dismissive bank manager who waves her away as he scarfs down his lunch. Obviously, no half-decent thriller is going to let this stand. The bank – and its patronising manager – are about to face an ungodly amount of payback as the two sisters hatch a plan to break into the vault and make off with money for meds, and some on the side to pay their two accomplishes: ageing war veteran Sunshine (Issam Bou Khaled) and angry, erratic Hamza (Hasan Akil), who unbeknownst to the sisters is in debt to a vicious mob boss. ...

The humdrum but magical business of making a low-budget film – lugging sets around, pulling off fake lashes, haggling with extras, cobbling together the cash to pay for it all – is perfectly captured in this intimate, joyful and politically-edged doc about the making of Derek Jarman’s queer 1991 period drama Edward II.  Seamus McGarvey is now a twice Oscar-nominated cinematographer who has worked with Greta Gerwig, Joe Wright, Lynne Ramsay and others. Back in 1991, he was an aspiring DP who scored an access-all-areas invite to film Jarman as he shot Edward II over five weeks at Bray Studios. Using this hitherto unseen material, debut director Theo Rollason does a fine job stitching together an effervescent making-of doc with a social history of the gay rights movement, AIDS-era Britain and the repressive policies of ’80s and ’90s governments.  Were he still alive, the treatment would no doubt have made excellent sense to Jarman. The great British artist and filmmaker, who would die of an AIDS-related illness three years after making the film, had already forged a punky vision of contemporary Britain with Jubilee (1978) and a violent, anachronistic period piece in Caravaggio (1986), With Edward II, he’d merge the two ideas together. A modernised take on the Christopher Marlowe play, it spoke to the homophobic and politically repressive state of the day. For Jarman, there was no hard boundary between art and politics or basic human rights. He’s filming by day, protesting...