Our latest movie reviews

Harry Lehman (John Turturro), a New Yorker pushing 70, is facing a dystopian scenario in Noah Segan’s poignantly nostalgic drama: planned obsolescence.  He still diligently shines his wingtips every morning, gets excited about ‘renting a tape from the library’ (Barbara Stanwyck is his favourite), and treats people with gentlemanly courtesy. True, he also happens to be a pickpocket. But once he’s taken what he needs, he throws the wallets in a mailbox so his victims can get everything else back. Unfortunately, as the title suggests, Harry is increasingly a man out of time. And the clock really starts running when he lifts a bag from Dylan (After the Hunt’s Will Price), the spoiled scion of a New York crime family. As it happens, Dylan has been hiding a USB drive holding a non-fungible token worth nearly $1 million in that bag. Harry, of course, has no idea what the drive is, and casually tosses it to someone else. He also doesn’t realise that there are cameras on every corner of the city. So it’s not long before Dylan tracks him down, and gives him an ultimatum: either Harry finds the drive, or his entire world implodes. It’s Dylan who brings up obsolescence, but – as a wry pawnbroker (Steve Buscemi) notes – it’s Harry who’s facing it. Harry’s most important relationship is with New York itself Turturro is impeccable as an old-fashioned man who has always lived by his own code of ethics, for good and ill. Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito, who plays a retiring detective, are...

‘I’m in an Eleanor Coppola film!’ Marianne Faithfull coos down the lens, the gilded walls of Versailles behind her cluttered with lighting rigs and crew prepping the next shot. It's the first time a filmmaker has been granted access to the palace on this scale. Marie Antoinette was Sofia Coppola’s third feature, following The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, and marked a serious step up in scale, with a 250-strong credited cast and crew.  Twenty years on, this documentary celebrates both the film and Eleanor, who spent her life among filmmakers before releasing her first feature, Paris Can Wait, at 80 in 2016. Sofia has explained that her mother’s 80-odd hours of footage were first trimmed into a DVD extra. Lockdown prompted the pair to revisit it, and Sofia completed the project following Eleanor's death in 2024. The film itself initially divided critics with its anachronistic style, but it’s since become a cult classic, thanks to its thumping indie soundtrack, punk-pastel palette and dry wit. It’s also a clear expression of Sofia’s empathy for troubled young women (Marie was just 14 when she married Louis XVI, and 18 when she became queen), a pattern in her films that her mother clocks, at one point asking why she always has an ‘isolated main girl’ in her pictures. On screen, Sofia has just 57 days, 20 of them at Versailles, to rebuild interiors including the Queen’s Grand Chamber, dress the cast in Milena Canonero’s elaborate, Oscar-winning costumes, and battle...

The year is 1381. Plague has killed half the population, grief and hardship engulf the survivors, and it’s only halfway through the Hundred Years’ War, which has bankrupted the state. Afraid of angering the wealthy, the crooked council of boy king Richard II tax the common people, stealing from the poor to prop up the rich.  The peasants are stretched to breaking point – and when a grieving ploughman (Andrew Garfield) snaps, he sparks an uprising that unites the peasantry, joining rabble-rousers John Ball (Jamie Bell) and Wat Tyler (Shōgun’s Cosmo Jarvis) to march on London and demand a new deal from the king. ‘All will be well once the poison of wealth is removed,’ one of the marchers tells the man known only as ‘the Ploughman’, a kind of outlaw who wears a hooded tabard in the sort of green you might find in Lincoln… now wait a second? Yes, as revealed extremely late into the US marketing campaign, The Uprising is kind of a Robin Hood origin story, and subtitling it (as the US did) ‘The Rise of Robin Hood’ is a little like subtitling the original Planet of the Apes ‘Rise of the Statue of Liberty from the Wasteland of Post-Apocalyptic Earth’. But since they’ve spoiled it already, we can set that aside – for now – and see how the director of ripped-from-the-headlines dramas United 93 and Captain Phillips does tackling the six-centuries-old story of the Peasants’ Revolt. Why not mix in a bit of the Robin Hood myth – you know, for kids? The answer is a resounding ‘not bad’....

Don't be fooled by the jaunty punctuation: Behemoth! is a serious drama, a character study from Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) that offers us not one, but two main characters: orchestral musician Alex Serian (Pedro Pascal), and the extraordinary score that follows wherever he goes. Alex is a cellist with deep, if increasingly rotted, roots in music. His embittered father (Hank Azaria) was a virtuoso horn player who wound up creating compositions for cartoons, his mother (JoBeth Williams) hasn’t seen her beloved harp since she declined into dementia, and his flaky brother (Will Arnett) is decades past a brief foray into rock stardom. Alex himself was once an acclaimed prodigy, appearing on Johnny Carson at the age of six before rising to principal positions at a range of prestigious orchestras. But he's still so unsettled in middle age that he almost appears to be a dispassionate observer of his own life. He wanders from one city, job, and accompanying affair to another, always searching for something he can't even name, let alone locate. After infuriating a wealthy patron (Olivia Wilde) in Chicago and a soulful violinist (Eva Victor) in Dallas, he retreats to a movie offer in LA. Once ensconced in Hollywood's legendary Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage, he begins work as the cellist on a top-secret project codenamed ‘Behemoth!’. The promise is right there in the title, but the effect is up to Alex: will this job wind up having an outsized impact on his life, or will he...

Colleen Hoover is Gen Z’s Nicholas Sparks. This marks the fourth (and counting) movie adaptation of her 25 (and counting) romance novels, following $350 million smash It Ends With Us and its associated Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni spin-off legal drama. And while damp squib effort Reminders of Him (out earlier this year) left viewers shortchanged on both plot and proper steaminess, rest assured both are fully present and erect in erotic psychothriller Verity. Dakota Johnson slips pleasurably back into Fifty Shades of Grey mode as Lowen Ashleigh. A penniless writer – she’s presumably blown the rent on all that skimpy designer lingerie – Lowen is offered a financial lifeline when she’s paid big bucks to secretly ghost write the next instalments in a bestselling series. Clearly the publisher hasn’t heard of a little thing called A.I…. Its author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), has been incapacitated by a mysterious accident. So it’s Verity’s hot, rich husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) who invites Lowen to stay at their remote glass-box mansion in snowy Vermont, where Verity lies mute, immobile and apparently catatonic. Or is she? Lowen is given free rein over Verity’s notes and papers and discovers a dark secret lurking there: a horrific autobiographical confession which casts a deeply disturbing light on what may really be going on chez Crawford.    Showalter and his cast clearly had a right giggle making this Based on Hoover’s self-published 2018 sensation, Verity is...

Call Alejandro G Iñárritu’s matryoshka doll of an eco-disaster movie many things – and people will – but you can’t call it unambitious or half-hearted.  At a time when America’s double-talking politicos refuse to point out when the emperor has no clothes on, Digger parades him around pointing at the jiggly bits with a big pointer. Subtle? Nope. Mordantly funny and wildly surprising? Definitely. Some will find its ‘I’m a bit mad, me’ energy exhausting. I lapped up every bonkers moment.  An elaborate meta-narrative that jack-knifes in ways I’m sworn to keep under wraps, Digger is, of course, Tom Cruise’s much-heralded Return To Proper Acting. As the larger-than-life Digger Rockwell, a Texan oilman hoping his personal vet can keep his beloved but disgustingly necrotic cat alive a little longer (‘He has anywhere between two weeks and five minutes’), he’s buried beneath prosthetics and gives a cartoonish, if thoroughly enjoyable portrayal of alpha-dog machismo and ‘drill, baby drill!’ enthusiasm for the black stuff. His mansion, an ornate yet obscene assembly of taxidermied animals, heavy weaponry and stunning, Ansel Adams-y views, could be Skyfall production designer Dennis Gassner’s best Bond villain lair yet. Subtle? Nope. Mordantly funny and wildly surprising? Definitely But if Cruise wins his Oscar for Digger, it’ll be for the quieter side to this atonal, tuba blast of a film: a more human, fragile and touching performance that plays in a similar register to Michael...

No film in recent memory has made me feel more relieved I'm no longer a schoolgirl than Extra Geography, the feature debut of Molly Manners. The British filmmaker serves up a barbed coming-of-age satire, diving into the choppy waters of female friendship and rivalry against the backdrop of a girls’ boarding school in Yorkshire. There’s dry wit laced throughout Succession writer Miriam Battye's script, as the adolescent bond of best friends Minna (Galaxie Clear) and Flic (Marni Duggan) is tested by anxiety, ego and jealousy over the course of a school year. Theirs is a toxic codependency: they eat, sleep and breathe together, share the same likes, dislikes and life goals.  A glimpse of a Nokia 3210, minimalist threads and needle drops from Shanks & Bigfoot and Belle and Sebastian suggest a 1999-early 2000s setting, with pops of bright colour, tight camerawork and intimate two-shots encapsulating the immature echo chamber Minna and Flic inhabit. There might be a nod to Heathers with a recurring sex survey joke, but it's an angsty realm akin to Ghost World, with both newcomers Clear and Duggan proving just as compelling a duo as Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson. The two are introduced ferociously in tandem, on the playing field, but are soon talking in deadpan hyperbole. They think they'll die if they don't get into Oxbridge, or become ‘destitute whores’ if they end up dropping out of uni. A few breaths later, they're claiming ‘they're not like other girls’ and dirtying...

Facebook promised a digital town square but delivered more of a wackier version of the Nuremberg rallies, where cat memes and pictures of your mates’ trip to the Canaries mix incongruously with hate speech and antivax conspiracy theories. The discourse has coarsened and social bonds have frayed. These days, Mark Zuckerberg is perceived as closer to a Bond villain than the geeky vibes guy we once thought we knew. At least, that’s the premise of Aaron Sorkin’s rigorous but conventional follow-up to the David Fincher-directed The Social Network, and it’s a tough one to argue with. Yet, for all of the movie’s elegantly marshalled fury, none of this will be news to its audience. Holding tech bros to account for things that happened in 2021 won’t keep anyone awake in Silicon Valley. That ship has long since sailed to much murkier waters. Sorkin swaps the Zuckerberg perspective of The Social Network with an old-fashioned journalism procedural, relegating the man to a side character. Jeremy Allen White is the Wall Street Journal’s new tech reporter, Jeff Horwitz, sent to San Francisco to investigate rumours that Facebook’s algorithm is causing a spike in online toxicity. An opening vignette shows a blonde woman losing her shit at two police officers of colour during a routine breakdown, footage that later goes viral. The reveal? She’d been radicalised by her addictive use of the social media site. Enter disillusioned Facebook data engineer Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), an old...

Misty Green is not, as they say, ‘likeable’. Not as a person, and not as a character. A B-list actress who believes she's an A plus, Misty is arrogant, irresponsible, and so prone to self-sabotage that we initially wonder if we're meant to root against her. But because she's imagined with so much regard by writer-director Chris Rock, and played with so much ferocity by Slow Horses’ Rosalind Eleazar, she is also spectacularly enthralling. We watch Misty Green on the edge of our seats, wondering where she will land even as we can guess at the likeliest trajectory.  Eleazar and Rock, however, manage to make a potentially clichéd story feel surprisingly fresh. He does it by openly acknowledging its depressing familiarity, through a lens of darkly wry wit. She does it by extraordinary force of focus and talent.  Misty is the sort of actor perpetually in demand at LA parties, which fools her into thinking the world is still at her feet. She is gifted, gorgeous, and, at nearly 40, a decade past her prime. She won a Best Supporting Actress Emmy in 2008, and now she's auditioning against young women whose parents loved her. That hurts, but she’s got bigger problems: she’s losing her free apartment (because her boyfriend's wife found her living there), her bipolar brother (Daniel Kaluuya, underused) seems increasingly unstable, and her reputation as ‘difficult’ has finally caught up with her. if there’s any justice, this will land Rosalind Eleazar on top of every casting director’s...

Movie hitmen don’t tend to come with complex motivations. They need the money. They had a lousy childhood. Or their beloved wife has died. Latif (Mahershala Ali), the hero of Bassam Tariq's Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, is indeed mourning his recently departed spouse. But it’s fair to say that he’s still the first assassin to be driven primarily by an urgent need for breastmilk. With his wife gone and his infant Aziza allergic to formula, he has to find a wet nurse, quickly. He rounds up his preteen son Qadir (Jahleel Kamara) and his teenage daughter Fatiha (Adia), and they head to their family’s Houston mosque for help. But when the imam (Giancarlo Esposito) can't help, he runs into Mike (Laith Nakli), a mobster who thinks Latif owes him a favour. He’s calling it in now, by asking him to kill Pastor Hwan (John Cho). The gun-toting pastor is no angel, but he’s put himself in the mob’s crosshairs by publicly calling out their Muslim-themed porn business. As it happens, one of Mike’s actresses just had a baby, so she can help nurse. But that leads to more trouble, and soon Latif and his family are spending half their time trying to feed Aziza, and half their time dodging men determined to murder them. It’s a genre thriller, but Latif is no John Wick This isn’t the only overwhelming conflict they have to live with, though, because while Latif is a genuinely grieving widow, devoted father, and faithful Muslim, he's also a stone-cold killer. He'll swiftly remind you...