Our latest movie reviews

By this point you probably know if the Transformers series is for you. We’re now six films in (seven, if you count the Bumblebee spin-off) and this is not a franchise that ever seeks to reinvent the wheels. Each instalment twists and rearranges the same elements – a trinket that could destroy Earth; a silver baddy; a down-on-his-luck human; some vague allusion to ancient civilisation – and surrounds them with impressively animated bot-on-bot action.  Rise of the Beasts is squarely tied to the same formula, but that turns out to be one of its assets. It gives the audience what they’re here for and nothing more. There’s none of the over-complication of the Michael Bay movies, which often featured far too much convoluted human plot and not enough smashing, and it doesn’t bloat its running time. Beasts begins in the non-specific past with a group of animal Transformers, the Maximals, fleeing their home planet as it’s attacked by planet-devouring robot god Unicron and his henchman Scourge. They escape with the transwarp key, a device that would allow Unicron to travel through time and space, eating planets at will. After stashing it on Earth, Transformers’ favourite hiding spot, they disappear. Cut to 1994, where the key is found and accidentally activated by museum intern Elena (Dominique Fishback). That awakens the Maximals and the Autobots, who have picked up a new human friend, Noah (Anthony Ramos), and everyone embarks on a mission to prevent an apocalypse.  By the series’ fa

The boldest blockbuster since Mad Max: Fury Road, this Spidey adventure takes the ‘anything goes’ ethos of 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse and somehow finds more boundaries to push, more visual extra-ness to tap into, more roller coasters to ride. It’s such a torrent of universes, ideas and styles that it should collapse under the weight of its own creative payload. But it all works – brilliantly. Typically, co-writers Phil Lord and Chris Miller – Hollywood alchemists who turn seemingly crazy ideas like The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street into gold – make a possible weakness a plot that revolves around the now-ubiquitous multiverse) into a major strength. Across the Spider-Verse’s central idea is what happens when you ‘break the canon’ and deviate from what’s expected. It’s a maverick antidote to the army of identikit superhero movies out there.  Here, it’s Into the Spider-Verse’s Spidey, smart, sensitive mixed-race New York teen Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), who is left facing the death of a loved one while stuck in another universe. But is that fate preordained and necessary or can comic-book narratives be defied? Like a multiversal lore enforcer, Oscar Isaac’s Miguel O’Hara – aka Spider-Man 2099 – emerges as the killjoy secondary villain, determined to keep the impetuous Miles in check. Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) is torn between duty and love for her old love interest. Even better is the movie’s main villain, the Spot. A portal-deploying superbad voiced by Jason S

The force remains strong in Ken Loach, aged 86 and delivering a film as fired up and human as any you’ll see this year. The conclusion of a loose trilogy of dramas set in England’s North East that also takes in the I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You, and likely to be his final film, it’s a fitting goodbye for this most empathetic chronicler of British society. If Kenergy still blazes from The Old Oak, the filmmaker certainly has no less material to fill his kitchen sink these days than when he kicked off his career with Poor Cow 56 years ago.  Facing new challenges is TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), the landlord of a struggling pub in an ex-mining town. Photos of the 1984 Miners’ strike line the walls, reminders both of a proud local history and jobs that have never been replaced. Money is tight. A once tight-knit community has become prime UKIP turf.  The arrival of a coachload of Syrian refugees, then, feels like another affront for TJ’s regulars. The film’s setting – 2016 – is significant. This is the year Britain opened its door, begrudgingly, to migrants from war-torn Syria. For the inhabitants of County Durham, they may as well have come from the moon. As is his MO, Loach assembles a cast of inexperienced actors who bring naturalism to their characters. Turner imbues his lonely landlord with a doughty kindness and a gathering sense of protectiveness over the new arrivals. He opens his heart to Yara (newcomer Ebla Mari is vibrant), a twentysomething Syrian photographer

A realist drama told with a fairy-tale lightness, Wim Wenders’ latest is a ruminative slice of slow cinema that requires patience but rewards it with a gentle wash of warm emotions. Set in the quieter corners of Tokyo’s bustling Shibuya district, Perfect Days follows Hirayama (13 Assassins’ Kōji Yakusho). He’s a middle-aged toilet cleaner, responsible for cleaning the city’s architecturally-designed, Wallpaper*-worthy public loos (they’re part of The Tokyo Toilet, a real-life urban renewal project). It’s a task this taciturn, diligent man approaches with the same care he affords his treasured household plants. Like a Japanese Jeanne Dielman, Hirayama’s daily routine is carved in stone: pick up a coffee from the vending machine outside his small apartment, clamber into his van for his daily rounds, soundtracked by his collection of American new wave album on the car’s tape deck (yes, Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ gets an airing). It’s a solitary life where his daily tasks act as a kind of medicine against loneliness. Wenders shows us those rigid parameters to his life in order to disrupt them with a patchwork of small but meaningful human encounters. Hirayama’s colleague (Emoto Tokio, broad) brings chaotic energy and a girl in tow, leaning on his boss to fund his date night by selling some of his treasured vintage cassettes. It feels like a false note when Hirayama aquiesces to a trip a second-hand record store. You know he’d as soon lose a limb as sell a single one.  Wim Wenders’

Italian social realism heightened by myth and magic is a subgenre that has become Alice Rohrwacher’s stock in trade. For the first time, her leading man is English as Josh O’Connor switches Prince Charles’s finery in The Crown for a dirty cream suit to play Arthur, the wandering soul at the heart of her most emotionally wrought film to date. La Chimera, true to its title, is a hybrid beast that merges the earthly with the ethereal, illuminating the criminalised archaeological digs of the working class ‘tombaroli’ in 1980s Umbria while immersing us in the mental state of a man on the brink. Arthur has a unique form of a genius. Armed with a divining rod he can identify the precise spots where Etruscan artefacts lie buried. These are excavated, in one case involving a tomb that leaves Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the dust. They are then sold onto a shady art dealer whose respectable front means that Arthur and his band of merry tombalari are the ones shouldering all of the risks.  In fact, we meet Arthur on the other side of jail time, as he takes the train to Tuscany. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart uses beautiful bleached colours and a vignetted frame to create the nostalgia of a postcard from a lost time. We are introduced in flashback to Beniamina, an old flame whose fate is a mystery but whose memory still burns brightly for Arthur.  O’Connor is sublime, alternately charming and aggressive, and indifferent to reactions to his volatile behaviour. Local girls flirt

For something so integral to our lives, food rarely gets its due on the big screen. For every Babette’s Feast, Big Night or Tampopo, there’s a thousand other films where the dining room is a place of conflict rather than nourishment, and a full plate is at least as likely to end up lobbed against a wall as lingered over.  Enter Tran Anh Hung, then, with a gastronomic feast so rich and romantic, it’ll leave you woozy.  The Vietnamese filmmaker takes us back to 1885, the heyday of classic French cooking, and a sun-drenched Anjou château that’s home to Dodin Bouffant (The Piano Teacher’s Benoît Magimel) and his cook, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). He’s a renowned chef searching for new inspiration – ‘the Napoleon of the culinary arts’, though it’s not a comparison he takes kindly to – but she’s his muse and the object of all his desires. Her cooking can reduce garrulous men to hushed silence and her salty good sense and directness serves as a pin in his balloon-sized ego. Magimel and Binoche have played lovers once before, in 1999’s period potboiler Children of the Century – but they portray a more affectingly lived-in kind of chemistry here. The former is a delight as the pompous but devoted Dodin. And La Binoche is luminous even as Eugénie is ailing from an undiagnosed condition. Deep emotions bring a palpable charge to this poised, patient film. The Pot-au-Feu is thirsty as well as hungry. Anyone who thinks eroticism in cinema is dead needs to witness Dodin sitting to watch the

Probably not one that’ll end up racking up views on the Vatican Netflix account, this period thriller from Italian director Marco Bellocchio (The Traitor) evokes a shameful episode in Papal history in grippingly operatic, if slightly superficial style.  A shocking story of institutional cruelty, Kidnapped faithfully records the real-life case of a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara (Enea Sala), in mid-18th century Bologna. Unknown to his parents, Edgardo has been secretly baptised as a baby by the family’s young maid during a bout of colic. Her intentions are good – she fears that he’s dying and wants him to spare him limbo – but the ramifications of her actions are horrific. For the local inquisitor, and ultimately Pope Pius IX himself (Paolo Pierobon), it’s carte blanche to snatch the child and raise him as a Catholic in the Vatican.  Of course, deep antisemitism underpinned the episode and it’s tempting to wonder if Steven Spielberg, who once lingered over the project, felt that this was ground he’d already covered in Munich and especially Schindler’s List. The historically freighted vision of soldiers stomping through a Jewish family’s home in the dead of night to a soundtrack of sobs and screams is evoked powerfully in the film’s thunderous opening. Pierobon is a suitably rotten Pontiff, unctuous and dogmatic as a surrogate father figure for the young Edgardo and spiky in the face of criticism. ‘I am standing firm, it is the world that is moving towards the precipi

Possibly the best thing to come out of lockdown – including that sourdough starter we finally mastered – Wes Anderson’s ’50s quarantine tale plays like the American auteur’s whimsical, surrealist answer to The Twilight Zone relocated to the dusty desert of the old West. Happily, for a filmmaker whose signature style can sometimes feel archly distancing, feeling as well as fancy courses through Asteroid City. It’s his most bittersweet film about family since The Royal Tenenbaums and hands-down his best since The Grand Budapest Hotel. The setting is the fictional desert town of Asteroid City – although in a meta twist, it’s actually the setting of a TV play that’s unfolding in film form, written by Ed Norton’s legendary playwright, Conrad Earp, and narrated with an enjoyably raised eyebrow by Bryan Cranston. It sits halfway between Parched Gulch and Arid Plains deep in John Ford country, but it’s a place that could only emerge from Anderson’s ludicrously fertile imagination. Monument Valley’s rock formations and perfect, emoji-like cacti adorn the painterly matte backdrop as A-bomb tests detonate serenely in the distance in cotton-wool mushroom clouds. Welcome to ‘Once Upon a Time in the Wes’.Here, among the symmetrical cabins, martini vending machines, toy-set gas and train stations and one giant asteroid crater, his rich assembly of characters gather under the baking Arizona sun to flirt, grieve, bicker and ultimately wait endlessly when a Junior Stargazer convention is inter

Deadpan Japanese maverick Takeshi Kitano – aka Beat Takeshi – has been making and starring in films for three decades and while often prolific, he’s slowed down a little of late (his last was 2017’s Outrage Coda). So it’s a joy to see him putting his explosive stamp on the samurai movie in a non-stop affair that bubbles with impish humour and basically drenches the screen in blood. It’s like Kurosawa on nitrous.  Taking the expression ‘heads will roll’ and turning it into an entire film, Kubi is awash with severed noggins. Practically the only bit of screen time without one comes in the film’s open shot, and only then because it’s of a crab scuttling from a headless torso. It’s a kind of crustacean trigger warning: the ensuing jidaigeki mayhem is not for the lily-livered. Adapting his own novel, Kitano springboards off real-life events – the Honnō-ji Incident in 16th century Japan – to chart a world in which nobility and honour have given way to a mad scramble for power and where violence is everywhere. So, unexpectedly, is queerness, with Kitano showcasing the commonplace reality of gay love between samurai in a way that few movies have.The big bad here is Ryo Kase’s Nobunaga, a psychotic feudal lord with a touch of the Joe Pescis. He demands that his loyal samurai track down rival lord Murashige (Kenichi Endō), who has narrowly escaped his army after a Ran-like battle at his castle. In return, he sets out a Succession-like scenario: the one who returns with Murashige’s head

A clapperboard snaps shut in frame and the camera starts rolling. You can cut the tension with a knife as four young women and an older one perch on a sofa. The opening of this daringly experimental and deep-feeling docudrama gives us Tunisian matriarch Olfa and her four daughters as they prepare to dive into their painful past and tell a story filled with twists, joys and sorrows. ‘I feel like Rose in the film Titanic,’ she jokes, bracing herself for the torrent of painful memories ready to be exhumed. But then director Kaouther Ben Hania unleashes her first surprise: two of the girls are not Olfa’s daughters. Instead, they’re actresses hired to stand in for Rahma and Ghofane, the two eldest girls whose absence is initially left unexplained. Slowly, like steam building in a pressure cooker, it becomes the urgent puzzle that the film must solve. With shades of Kiarostami’s Close-Up, Ben Hania never lets us forget we’re navigating a facsimile of real events from which emotional truths will emerge – a deconstruction of acting and storytelling that’s laid bare whenever a boom mic drifts into frame. She stitches together talking-head interviews, dramatic reconstructions, and even the filmed rehearsals of those reconstructions. They spiral wildly out of control as when the real Olfa takes her emotions out on the actor standing in for her ex-husband, pummelling the poor man as he cowers in the corner. Her daughters choke back the laughter. But those feelings soon become overwhelmin