Our latest movie reviews

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...

‘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...

When eight-year-old Josephine (Mason Reeves) witnesses a rape in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park early one Sunday morning, the horrifying event – depicted fully on screen at a slight distance – has understandable repercussions. In writer-director Beth de Araujo’s devasting second film, the man who committed the vile act is almost immediately apprehended, partly thanks to Josephine’s quick-thinking and fast-running father Damien (Channing Tatum). The impact on victim Sandra and Josephine, however, is only beginning and, excluding short moments which bookend the story, the focus is on the latter. Josephine, played by Reeves with a commitment and poise rarely seen in such a young actor in their first role, is justifiably troubled. She imagines the rapist lurking in her bedroom, all around her home and in the streets. With the encouragement of her dad she toughens up with self-defence classes and wins an arm-wrestle with a boy in her class, only to strangle him with a carrier bag after he pushes her ungraciously following his defeat. Josephine’s mother Claire (Gemma Chan) and Damien struggle to keep a lid on their daughter’s outbursts and sadness but show love, patience and care in a horrible situation which all three probably realise will traumatise her for life.  As Josephine and her parents try to live with what she has witnessed and its consequences on her mental wellbeing and behaviour, the machinations of the American legal system grind frustratingly away in the...

Most film versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet come from an essentially stagey place, and are almost invariably made by theatre people (the ultimate example being Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour 1996 version). But in the play’s latest screen outing, star Riz Ahmed and director Aneil Karia – neither of whom have any background in theatre – have essentially made a film about grief and depression that uses Shakespeare’s words and story in a way that is cinematic first and foremost.  I could bore on about how screenwriter Michael Lesslie has done stuff like cut out Horatio, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and the entire Yorick bit. But discussing this version as if it was just a stage take with some novel ideas is to miss the point of how wholly Shakespeare has been swallowed by the cinema here – even if in the end there are a couple of plot beats it struggles to surmount. Ahmed’s Hamlet is a traumatised man from a wealthy British Indian family, stumbling in a daze through suburban London after the death of his father. Cinematographer Stuart Bentley’s shaky camera cinematography is lush and neon streaked as it soaks up blingy nightclubs, a lavish Hindu wedding and a bathetic funeral, and lots and lots of outer London at night. There’s never a sense that the need to cram in Shakespeare’s words ever gets in the way of the business of cinema. And while the iambic pentameter isn’t exactly deployed sparingly, it feels like the pruned text is used with great purpose: the fact these very modern...

Aside from 2009’s Drag Me to Hell (one of the horror movies of the century so far,) and a stint spicing up the Marvelverse with some dark and freaky touches, Sam Raimi has been largely AWOL from the genre that made his name.  Happily, Send Help is both a return to the world of horror and a major return to form for the Evil Dead man, who’s been waylaid with bland franchise fare in recent years. There’s nothing bland in his queasy funhouse ride, a table-turning death match set on a remote island. Or in the wild performances of Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. The pair plugs into Raimi’s wavelength with increasingly unhinged commitment.  McAdams, a comic actress gifted enough to count as Canada’s Olivia Colman, plays hard-working, unsung professional Linda Liddle. She’s been overlooked for promotion at her anycorp employer because she isn’t one of the boys, doesn’t ‘golf’, and in a case of especially bad timing, meets the company’s disgusted new nepo-baby CEO, Bradley (O’Brien), with her lunch on her face.  But when the company’s private jet flight to Bangkok goes down in a tropical storm, boss and underling are forced to team up on a remote island. Except, she’s a Survivor superfan able to whip up a shelter and handy enough with a knife to turn the local marine life into a sashimi platter – and he’s injured and next to useless. Being a sexist dinosaur, he believes that office hierarchies still apply, even on a desert island. It plays out like a violent mix of Cast Away,...

Sometimes you’re just in the mood for a bit of gunge. Sure, cinema can move us, teach us, thrill us and inspire us, but every now and then you just want to watch people spewing green slime before their heads explode. You know, like in a straight-to-VHS horror/sci-fi/comedy from the ’80s or ’90s. Or, indeed, in Cold Storage: an unashamed throwback to a past era of low-fi, high-spirited creature-feature fun. Think Tremors, only with extra-terrestrial, mind-controlling slime instead of giant worm-things.  Based on a novel by David Koepp (who also adapts) and directed by Jonny Campbell (whose last movie was the 2002 Ant-and-Dec-starring Alien Autopsy, but don’t let that put you off), Cold Storage unleashes the aforementioned green slimy space-stuff in a Kansas self-storage facility patrolled by a pair of bored millennials. Teacake (Stranger Things’ Joe Keery) is a talkative ex-con just trying to stay on the straight and narrow; Naomi (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell) is a listless single mother trying to balance her responsibilities with med-school ambitions. Together, this likeable pair become the front line of defence against the extinction of all life on Earth, while also, of course, falling for each other.   Think Tremors with mind-controlling slime  But though Keery and Campbell have riffy chemistry, it’s the supporting cast who command the attention. Foremost is Liam Neeson as the grizzled US military specialist buzzed back into service when this smalltown crisis sparks....