Our latest movie reviews

Strange, ravishing and rhapsodic, there aren’t many movies like Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, unless you can think of another historical folk musical about a nearly-vanished religious movement that turns its followers’ convulsive expressions of devotion into Busby Berkeley-style dance numbers. A cradle-to-grave portrait of Ann Lee, the founder of the Christian sect known as the Shakers, the film is, at turns, completely stunning and utterly baffling. At its most successful, though, it doesn’t just depict ecclesiastical fervor – it sweeps you up in it. In that way, the movie is really a testament to the performance of Amanda Seyfried. As Lee, she fills her large, expressive eyes with a sense of unwavering belief — appropriate for a woman who came to see herself as the reincarnation of Christ himself.  The movie is a testament to the performance of Amanda Seyfried Informed by an impoverished childhood and staggering personal losses as an adult, the 18th century Mancunian preached a utopian vision of society based in broad egalitarianism and a strict adherence to celibacy. Naturally, that led to persecution at home from the ruling evangelical order, prompting her eventual escape, along with her latent-homosexual brother (Lewis Pullman), bewildered husband (Christopher Abbott) and small flock of disciples, to the alleged promised land of America. Illustrating her life in the tones of a Dutch oil painting, Fastvold treats Lee’s faith with sincerity and respect, and...

German filmmaker Ilker Çatak, born in Berlin to Turkish immigrant parents, enjoys putting his stressed-out characters through the wringer. Leonie Benesch delivered a masterclass in anxiety-attacking tension in one very bad day at school in Oscar-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge. That gem took home two awards at the 2023 Berlinale. Two years later, the writer-director has claimed the festival’s big prize, the Golden Bear, with Yellow Letters.  An intriguingly metatextual work, co-written with Ayda Meryem Çatak and Enis Köstepen, it opens in the Turkish capital, Ankara, before shifting the action to Istanbul. Only Çatak and his cinematographer Judith Kaufmann film in neither of these locations. Instead, jaunty intertitle cards announce: ‘Berlin as Ankara’ and ‘Hamburg as Istanbul’. Even the locations are victims of authoritarianism here.  Yellow Letters follows the implosion of a family after state censorship strips a married couple, actor Derya (Özgü Namal) and her playwright and drama professor husband Aziz (Tansu Biçer), of their culturally daring careers. They’ve been used to freely criticising the government on social media, and now their work is deemed ‘too political’. Of course it is – as is all art. As rumbling protests throng in the streets, Derya’s latest play is promptly cancelled and she’s fired from the company, while Aziz is let go from his university gig too. With money increasingly tight, they move in with his mother (İpek Bilgin) in Istanbul, alongside their...

If, like Alan Partridge, you believe that Wings were ‘the band The Beatles could have been’, Morgan Neville’s propulsively upbeat music doc is a total treat. And, honestly, even if the merest waft of bagpipe on ‘Mull of Kintyre’ brings you out in hives, Man on the Run is still full of treasures. Piecing together a snappy collage of ’70s home video, unseen archive and gig footage, plus some insightful voiceover interviews, the Piece By Piece and 20 Feet From Stardom director revisits Paul McCartney as he tries to figure out what it is to be an ex-Beatle – and, ideally, how to graduate from it.  For Macca, the immediate post-Beatles era was a confounding time: the band hadn’t yet officially split and rumours that they’d reform for a big pay day would dog him, John, George and Ringo throughout the 1970s. A fugitive from his own life, Neville’s doc finds a glum McCartney, wife Linda and family in a ramshackle farmhouse on Scotland’s Kintyre peninsula. It’s a billion miles from the glare of his mop-top days but he’s still dealing with the odd intrepid journalist. In one case, using a lobbed bucket.But, as Man on the Run shows so enjoyably, McCartney’s urge to make music conquered even his love of serenity and sheep shearing. In a jiffy, he was recruiting Linda, Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine and a revolving cast of bandmates to form experimental rock band Wings, recording among the chickens at a jerry-built studio at the farm.The songs initially reflected those surrounds,...

‘Funny how something can hurt when it’s no longer there,’ a little girl muses upon witnessing an amputee’s phantom leg pain. She could as easily be speaking of the transgenerational trauma at the heart of Mascha Schilinski’s stunningly accomplished Sound of Falling, winner of the Jury Prize in Cannes. Its original title, which translates as ‘staring into the sun’, was surely ironic, for this is an eclipse-black vision of the darkest recesses of the human condition. The film takes place in a single location – a farm and nearby river in rural Germany – across four time periods: the stultifyingly austere 1910s, the war-benighted 1940s, pre-unification 1980s, and early 2020s. Scenes in the earliest timeframe, experienced from the point of view of the aforementioned girl, are shot like a sepia-tinted Lynchian nightmare. The effect is deeply unsettling, but entirely appropriate for a family that exists in a kind of living death of shame, repression and abuse. (You’ll never again hear the phrase ‘workplace accident’ without shuddering involuntarily.) When they stage a ‘death photograph’ – the Victorian practice of taking family photographs complete with the often artificially enlivened corpse of a dead family member – it’s difficult to know who is alive and who is dead. She’s conjured up a heady brew of superstition, folklore and repressed sexuality As the foundational trauma of this period echoes and rhymes down the generations, the clothes, colour palette and film formats...

There’s nothing wrong with being old-fashioned. Padraic McKinley’s Great Depression gold heist flick has a welcome ’70s vibe and a careworn charm, mostly emanating from the always trusty Ethan Hawke. Hawke, Oscar-nominated for his melancholic turn in Blue Moon, is down-but-not-yet-out dad Samuel. With no work to be found, he’s scraping by on the generosity of neighbours, who create odd jobs for loose change. But this can’t keep the bailiffs from their door, sneakily evicting him and peppy daughter Ava (A Quiet Place: Day One’s Avy Berry) while they’re at church.  Spying a vacant apartment in the local paper, he attempts to break in so they can squat, but is accosted by brutal cops and promptly sent to a labour camp, clearing a gold mine closed by order of President Roosevelt. With at least six months’ back-breaking work ahead of him, he stands to lose his daughter too: Penny, now a ward of the state, may well be adopted out before they can be reunited. However, Samuel’s resourcefulness in applying smart thinking to a stubborn boulder attracts the favour of his boss, Clancy (the appealingly grizzled Russell Crowe). Though this gift horse comes loaded with hidden perils. Clancy recruits Samuel, plus confederates Olson (Borgen’s Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), Singh (Avi Nash), an Indian-American with a head full of socialism, and the sketchy Rankin (Austin Amelio) to help him smuggle out bricks of bullion. Having closed all the mines, President Roosevelt has ordered them to be...

The minor and major chords are played close together in this moving and beautifully shot and performed portrait of jazz’s legendary pianist, Bill Evans. Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie (Sentimental Value) tickles the ivories with a melancholy charm in a quiet and restrained performance. He looks album-cover cool, while at the same time drifting through a life marked with tragedy and addiction.  We start with a stunning recreation of the live set at New York’s Village Vanguard which was to be issued as two landmark albums by the Evans trio. Only ten days later and shown in flash forward during the gig, bass player Scott LaFaro is killed when he falls asleep at the wheel of his car. Unable to perform, or even face the piano, Evans is first taken in by his brother, Harry (Barry Ward), who has his own mental health issues, and then his parents – played as an adorable double act by Laurie Metcalf and Bill Pullman – in Florida, where he kicks the junk. The pictured is clouded by girlfriend Ellaine (Valene Kane), a fellow junkie also trying to kick the habit, who circles warily.  Anyone hoping for the usual music biopic beats that were so effectively dismantled by John C Reilly in Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story is going to be disappointed. Aside from the opening scene, there are relatively few moments of music in the film. The title of Owen Martell’s novel, ‘Intermission’, from which the film was adapted by Mark O’Halloran, is even more explicit. Evans’s mother says the...

As diehard fans go, Australian showman Baz Luhrmann has done more than most to spread the gospel of Elvis. He pretty much reinvented the wheel with his big, brash 2022 biopic on the music icon. Elvis – a wild rollercoaster of a ride on the singer’s life – made a star out of Austin Butler, snagged a pile of awards, cleaned up at the box office and introduced the singer to a new generation. Suddenly, everybody knew who Elvis was again. Empowered by this, Luhrmann went back through the 60-plus boxes of concert archive he’d hauled out of Warner Bros.’ deep storage (literally, they were in a salt mine in Kansas) for his original research. Finding reels of ‘lost’ footage shot for two 1970s docs on the King was like discovering gold. Why not, he thought, turn it into one epic concert movie? Here, then, is a glorious mash-up of that material, preceded by a speedy summary of pre-1970s Elvis for those who don’t know. Elvis Presley shocked white America by popularising rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. But then, the former dirt-poor truck driver from Tupelo got drafted for national service in the US Army. When he got out, his wily manager, the self-titled Colonel Tom Parker (not his real name) turned him into a lucrative family entertainer in Hollywood, pumping out three increasingly inane musicals a year. By the end of the 1960s, Elvis had had enough and put his foot down  Which is where EPiC takes off. A joyous, energetic and inclusive experience Drawing from 10 professionally shot...

Family can be hell. But tearing them apart on film is pure paradise for us bloodthirsty drama queens. A hunger that gonzo Brazilian filmmaker, visual artist and festival fave Karim Aïnouz (Motel Destino) is more than happy to satiate with his latest bonkers, horny offering. Leading the stacked cast is Callum Turner, the latest grist for the James Bond rumour mill, who provides narration. He plays Ed, a sharp-suited, cold-hearted chap in an astonishingly privileged pack of cutthroat fashion-lovers. They have little in common besides their impossibly priced threads. Under the imperious command of their blind patriarch father (Tracy Letts), the clan includes Ed’s older brother Jack (Jamie Bell), who drinks animal blood for kinks and fetishises the gun purportedly used to kill Gianni Versace. Epilepsy-prone baby bro Robert (Lukas Gage) dons lingerie for kicks. Their equally pent-up sister, Anna (Riley Keough), will have what anyone’s having. Each wants shot of the rest, though Robert wants Jack to shoot his incestuous shot with him. (What is it about The White Lotus cast members?) Anna mercilessly mauls Jack’s girlfriend, Martha, who is pointedly lower class but still pretty spoiled and insists he must move out. Anna latches onto Martha’s dress, damning it as being from either Kos or Zara in this year’s answer to Triangle of Sadness’s Balenciaga/H&M moment. Fitting, as Rosebush Pruning feels snipped from both Ruben Östlund’s eat-the-rich satire and Pasolini’s Teorema. Why are...

No matter how powerful or pampered, celebrities are still human. They have their own foibles and panic attacks. So we all feel it when Charli xcx’s looks are mercilessly savaged in Aidan Zamiri’s anarchically absurdist mockumentary, The Moment. Charli escapes to Ibiza for a few days to get away from the fractious implosion of her Brat concert movie, being shot in a pigeon-infested warehouse in East London. Skipping the huge waiting list to see the hotel’s in-demand facialist results in the singer’s ego being blow-torched. Apparently, her dry skin physically drains said specialist to the point of snoring. Tossed out unceremoniously, the Apple singer crumbles. A collapse further crumpled on bumping into Kylie Jenner, who raves about the barking mad facial-abuser and the documentary filmmaker who has caused Charli so much grief: Johannes, played with passive-aggressive condescension by Alexander Skarsgård.  He’s a tacky stuntmeister who wants the show, and therefore his film, to lean into giant cigarette props and a less vomit-hued green, dolling up Charli in the drag queen sheen favoured by Chappell Roan. Johannes breathes down the neck of Marty Supreme actor Hailey Gates’ creative director, Celeste, who’s battling to move on from Brat. But the singer is so wigged out she doesn’t know who to trust, let alone her gut. A wild ensemble of celebrities playing warped caricatures includes Rachel Sennott, who speedily overcomes caution to huff K on camera. Some disappear – into...

Adolescence and Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ startlingly assured debut feature opens in darkness. We hear, but don’t see, the panicked aftermath of a knife crime and voices in heated debate as a siren announces the arrival of the police. Cut to Troy’s rabbit-in-the-headlights stare in the back of a cop wagon. Played by The Long Walk actor Tut Nyuot, he’s a good, if waylaid, kid caught up in a furious world he’s vastly unprepared for. Thrust into a foreboding brick youth detention centre, all the crueller for its positioning by the freedom of the sea, Troy is stripped naked alongside two fellow detainees. They’re destined to be his good and bad angels.  Doe-eyed Ukrainian actor Vladyslav Baliuk plays Krystian, a gentle Polish lad even more out of his depth in a brutally unforgiving place where the kind-hearted have no protection from a shiv’s skin slice. That his goofy crime, revealed later, is entirely undeserving of this imprisonment has no bearing on an unbending system.There’s a crackle of energy between Krystian and Troy that suggests their deep bond could be more than it seems, a source of calm amid this storm of teenage testosterone.The bad angel, a lithely unnerving Dion (What It Feels Like For a Girl actor Sekou Diaby), has other ideas. Not his first stint inside, Dion holds court as a dealer with a bevy of boys at his command. He presses fellow Black kid Troy into his service, leaving Krystian adrift Dion is only half Troy’s trouble, with the loose unit energy of...