Our latest movie reviews

One Night Only is so brazenly flirtatious, so determined to seduce, you’ll barely even notice how empty and cheap it feels – until the end, when you’re left alone again. Who wouldn’t, after all, enjoy a date with a movie that’s shiny and bright and brilliantly packaged? And who wouldn’t want to spend a couple of hours with Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, as they fall in and out of low-stakes love? There are some clever ideas in One Night Only, beginning with the intrigue of its central plot: with the United States now run by ultra-conservatives, single Americans are forbidden from sex 364 days a year. The movie opens on the 365th, as everyone in New York is prepping for the Big Event. Owen (Turner) is about to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke), while Allie (Barbaro) is hoping to find romance, or at least a memorable hook-up, in a downtown bar. It is no spoiler – unless you’ve never seen a romcom, in which case surely don’t start here – to say that things go awry, leaving our leads about ten hours to find their way to each other. The journey is, in fairness, pretty entertaining. Director Will Gluck has stuffed the story with so many cameos, he comes dangerously close to name-dropping. But it’s fun to see how much Molly Ringwald, LeVar Burton, Mike Birbiglia, Pete Davidson, Bobby Cannavale, Julia Fox, etc. can make of their minutes onscreen. (FWIW, Burton wins.) Who wants dystopian realities to ruin a feel-good comedy? But eventually, as Owen and Allie bicker and...

‘God, that’s cool,’ sighs Tom Holland’s Spider-Man as a bunch of ninjas descend on him in Marvel’s well-established slo-mo, camera-wheeling style. At this delicate stage in the Marvelverse – somewhere between the lumpen offerings of Phase 5 and the promised team-up bonanza of Avengers: Doomsday – the question needs to be asked: is it, though? Still?In the summer of The Odyssey, Backrooms and Obsession, a new Marvel movie was always going to be in danger of feeling old hat, even with Spidey, the studio’s A-list character, headlining it. Holland, now 30 but as fresh-faced as ever, remains the most likeable and exuberant of the on-screen Spider-Men, but he suffers in a movie that opts to sideline the web slinger in favour of a storyline that involves another character that could have been borrowed from Stranger Things. A whole chunk of the final act plays like a tribute act to the Netflix hit.  Like its hero, leading a solitary New York existence after 2021’s No Way Home erased his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and best friend Ned’s (Jacob Batalon) memories of him, Brand New Day runs the gamut of moods: at times, dark; at others, brooding. This is not the most fun of the recent Spidey outings, even with his gruff old pal The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) turning up to rampage unhelpfully about and grumble about life, Florence Pugh gleefully hamming it up as Thunderbolts*’s Yelena Belova, and the dependable Mark Ruffalo back as Bruce Banner/The Hulk. The trio’s scenes together are a...

Historians will claim that Richard Nixon opened China, but as this knotty, celebratory and rather moving doc makes pretty clear, it was actually a pair of big-haired Brits singing ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ that got the whole Sino-Western rapprochement thing going.   When they were flown into communist China in April 1985, part of a PR wheeze cooked up by their manager Simon Napier-Bell, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley were the fresh faces behind one of the world’s biggest pop bands, Wham!. They were there, perversely, to help launch them in the US, where their two showcase gigs – in Beijing and Guangzhou – and a host of awkward formal engagements and photo opps would propel them onto American TV news. That was the theory, at least. But as director Mike Christie’s fascinating documentary reveals, there was a much richer, stranger and more complicated reality in the week-and-a-bit the two confused celebrities spent behind the Bamboo Curtain. At first, Michael, looking barely more than a teenager and struggling to find a foil for his flamboyant persona amid all the dour-faced dignitaries, seems amused by the procession of functions and photocalls at the Great Wall. Ridgeley cuts a more circumspect figure, at odds with the hacks from the British tabloids who follow the band everywhere. It’s like watching a man on a pub crawl with a bunch of people he really hates, and no alcohol.  Ridgeley gamely revisits the highs and lows of the trip as one of the talking head...

If you’re a mother, do you get to be a person too? A separated woman who comes out as a lesbian is torn between motherhood and selfhood, duty and freedom, in Anna Cazenave Cambet’s brutal custody drama.  Love Me Tender is based on the bestselling novel by Constance Debré and inspired by Debré’s own life. Vicky Krieps plays Clémence, a make-up free, short-haired, scooter-riding ex-lawyer with a carabiner hooked through her belt loops. Clémence has left her highly paid legal job to become a writer. She has an amicable relationship with her ex-husband Laurent (Antoine Reinartz) who she left three years ago, and the pair share joint custody of their eight-year-old son Paul. But when Clémence tells Laurent she now dates women, he files for sole custody. What ensues is a bitter years-long custody battle fueled by Laurent’s infuriating, and borderline evil, determination to take Paul away from Clémence entirely.  Cazenave Cambet lucidly lays out the impossible expectations and ridiculous hypocrisy mothers face. Clémence is completely at home in her new queer life – her days without Paul are marked by discipline, as she spends them writing in her modest flat, swimming at the pool and occasionally meeting friends at cafés and bars. At the same time she embraces her erotic life with women with full abandon, organising rendezvous in the pool changing rooms, effortlessly picking up women in queer bars and dancing until sunrise at techno clubs. And why shouldn’t she? None of this makes...

In a world where adolescence is so often reduced to doomscrolling, six-sevens and brainrot, debut director Imran Perretta’s tender coming-of-age drama puts forward a strong case that children today are still capable of feeling deeply. Rather than retread London’s streets, co-writers Perretta and playwright Enda Walsh (I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning) take us a smidge north to Luton. The town’s unkempt woodlands make the perfect playground for 12-year-old friends, Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and Maram (Yahya Kitana). There we find the Muslim boys roughhousing, stuffing their faces with unidentified berries and building forts with stray mattresses. Like the planes that fly overhead from the local airport, there’s a sense of weightlessness to their imagination. But like the contrails trailing behind them, it’s fleeting. Their tiny frames already bear adult struggles. For Ish, it’s the loss of his mother; for Maram, who is of Palestinian descent, it’s the conflict in Gaza, leaving him convinced the ‘war is coming’. Back in Luton’s urban centre, the sound of sirens should be unnerving, but neither of them even flinches. Police sirens have already become part of the soundtrack of their childhood, a familiar reality for many Brown and Black communities in the UK. An artist and composer too, Perretta’s musical ear is evident in the film’s devastating sound design. The clipped chatter of police radios referring to Muslim passersby as ‘suspects’ and ‘targets’, and discussions about...

Homer’s The Odyssey first engaged Christopher Nolan when he was attached to direct Troy, 20-odd years ago, and he’s been stealth-adapting Western literature’s foundational text ever since. Interstellar puts a time-bending spin on the story of a man trying to make it home; Inception, beyond its mille-feuille of dreamscapes, is about trauma and homecoming; and The Dark Knight Rises sends Batman into the underworld to find his way home. Dunkirk… well, you get the point. So maybe The Odyssey has been the British filmmaker’s real odyssey all along. It’s a movie he could only make at this point in his career, with the full array of tools and treasure at his disposal. It may or may not be his best film – a lot of Greek island dust needs to settle before that debate kicks off – but it’s definitely Nolan at his most formidable. The ending, one of his very best, is even stronger than that of its main rivals for the crown, Inception and The Dark Knight. And who else would even try to bring this madly ambitious vision to the screen? Least of all entirely in 70mm IMAX, right down to the quiet bits. Albeit, there’s about two of those. The thunderous near-three-hours of storm-tossed seas, clashing steel, vengeful dei ex machina, awe-inspiring monsters, and Oscar-bound A-listers takes unpacking – and maybe a motion sickness tablet. Nolan and his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema pat a seat aboard Odysseus’s (a never-better Matt Damon) ill-fated longboat and invite you to follow the...

Journalists have been banned from entering Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. In Daniel Rugo’s new documentary, a group of international medics act as first-hand witnesses to the conflict.  ‘You’re not seeing what I’m seeing,’ is the documentary’s opening gambit, delivered by the straight-talking Dr Victoria Rose, a British plastic and reconstructive surgeon. With the absence of international media on the ground in Gaza, Rugo claims that what most people are learning about Israel’s action in Gaza are ‘lies’. Filmed from October 2023 to 2025, the 10 physicians featured, which includes surgeons, paediatricians and obstetricians, are here to set their record straight.  Life Support is forensic in its delivery. Understated, to-the-point and rational, it lays out the war in chronological order, splicing footage of Gaza, iPhone videos and sobering interviews with the doctors. We see the erosion of life in Palestine first-hand. Heartbreaking footage from 2022 shows a teeming beach: horses walk along the shore, people lounge under beach umbrellas, and children play in the surf. On Dr Rose’s first filmed visit in late 2023, she arrives with 23 suitcases packed with medical equipment. Returning almost a year later, she’s only allowed one medium-sized piece of luggage, which she fills with children’s clothes, food, and a few essential medical instruments.   We see the erosion of life in Palestine first-hand Talking into their grainy iPhone cameras, the...

Pierre Coffin’s gang of yellow pill-shaped anarchists are back with a helter-skelter third spinoff outing that romps along at a million miles an hour. It’s far more fun and inventive than the Despicable Me franchise the Minions spun out of, not to mention 2022’s Minions: The Rise of Gru, and delivers a barrage of giggles and an unexpected movie history lesson. This time Coffin and his long-time Minions co-writer Brian Lynch plonk the gang back into the moviemaking era that helped inspire their slapstick: the 1920s Hollywood of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. It’s a home run of an idea, right down to the opening montage of old Universal idents and silent film title card. In this alternative cinema timeline, the Minions were there at the birth of the talkies and even assisted in the partial demolition of the old ‘Hollywoodland’ sign. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon gets a reference, as do a flurry of silent classics. Watching the Minions being fed through Modern Times’ industrial cogs or gatecrashing Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr is a joy.  Allison Janney’s authoritative narration provides soothing structure for all the clowning, eye-poking and small explosions. She’s a tour guide shepherding a bunch of school kids through the Academy Museum. After a George Lucas sight gag for the ages, she introduces James and Henry, two pioneering Minion filmmakers from the 1920s, before a historical flashback reestablishes their ceaseless purpose: to find a villain to do take them into...

When David Vann was 13, his father committed suicide in a cabin on a remote island off the coast of Alaska. Decades later, Vann – who was born in the US state – channelled his examination of his father’s final days into a 2009 short story collection, Legend of a Suicide, a bestselling awards-magnet whose primary narrative forms the foundation of this bleak midwinter of a film from French director Vladimir de Fontenay (Mobile Homes). Shifting the setting to a remote Norwegian outpost with fewer humans than bears, My Father’s Island explores the frosty relationship between teenager Roy (C’mon C’mon’s Woody Norman) and his estranged father Tom (Swann Arlaud, best known as Anatomy of a Fall’s dashing lawyer) as they attempt to reconnect following Tom’s divorce from Roy’s mother (Tuppence Middleton). The forbidding Arctic landscape – temperatures can fall to minus 30 degrees overnight – provides a suitably chilly backdrop for their attempted rapprochement. This is complicated not only by Roy’s resentment at his father’s absence and serial infidelities, but also by Tom’s debilitating depression, which manifests both as violent episodes and startling outbursts of mercurial behaviour.  Rising star Woody Norman gives a blistering performance Naturally, the film stands or falls on the two lead performances. Both are exemplary, and de Fontenay rewards his actors by focusing more on the inherent drama of their relationship than on taking the easy win of, say, nail-biting battle with a...

A shoo-in for any ‘best of the year’ list (including ours), Sophy Romvari’s debut film is a stop-you-in-your tracks debut about Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a young man with oppositional defiant disorder, and the parents who struggle to support him. The Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker makes good on her early promise – her graduate film premiered at TIFF in 2020 – with a clever and poignant portrait of a family stuck in an impossible situation. It’s inspired by her own memories and you can sense it. Every frame broils with feeling. An obvious point of reference is Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin – and Lionel Shriver’s source novel – which charted the slow descent into despair for the parents of a troubled child. Blue Heron is a gentler, kinder film, introspectively exploring the nature of memory and the idea that trauma twists and manipulates it like heat warping a strip of celluloid. Set amid the Spielbergian suburbs and pine coves of Canada’s Vancouver Island in the early ’90s, it follows an unnamed immigrant Hungarian family as they settle into their new life. The isolation that comes with being a ferry ride from the mainland is quickly magnified by their increasing sense of being left to manage an impossible situation alone. Their son’s erratic behaviour has the police at the door and their neighbours twitching their curtains. Things are smashed. At one point, he climbs onto the roof and threatens to jump. He keeps gasoline in his bedroom and threatens to burn the...