Our latest movie reviews

Two bungalows with a shared partition, a dog, and a couple of Oscar nominees at the top of their formidable games: Paul Andrew Williams’s pared-back and bruising three-hander is a realist drama with deep undercurrents that whirlpool into a denouement you will not see coming.  On a nondescript street in an unnamed town a few metres from a set of traffic lights that seem forever stuck on red, Brenda Blethyn’s elderly, arthritic pensioner Elsie muddles along with a life, assisted by a series of box-ticking private carers and the occasional call from her distant, middle-aged son John (W1A’s Jason Watkins). Those comings and goings are observed by her wiry, sardonic neighbour Colleen (Andrea Riseborough). The distance between these two lonely souls – a stretch of lawn with a lone splash of colour provided by Elsie’s flowerbed – shortens in increments as Colleen and her beefy bull terrier Sabre pile over to help with the shopping and pick up the slack. Soon, Elsie is providing that most British sign of welcome – sticking the kettle on.Blethyn is a two-time Oscar nominee and Riseborough, of course, earned one as For Leslie’s working-class alcoholic, and they are both absolutely stellar as two strangers finding a gentle connection. Both communicate different forms of brittleness – physical for one, psychological for the other – with immense skill, but leave space for a third kind: the idea that their connection is also alarmingly fragile. Colleen’s manner and lack of back story...

Measured rather than playing to the gallery, The Choral is Brassed Off in a minor key – an elegant, Yorkshire-set exploration of music as a spiritual morale-boost in the darkest times. With Ralph Fiennes gravely essaying the controversial choirmaster at its heart, it does a lovely job of swerving the obvious notes but misplaces its stirring crescendo. In fairness, the setting isn’t a joyous one. We’re in the fictional mill town of Ramsden in 1916, a Yorkshire community rocked by steady losses on the Western Front. Word from France comes in the form of death notices delivered by postie Lofty (Oliver Briscombe) to bereft mothers. The town is divided between those eager to do their bit and those who fear that they or their young loved-ones will soon be called on to die in the trenches. The local choral society is busy trying to lift the town’s spirits with a production of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Except local patron and mill owner Alderman Duxbury (Roger Allam) is stuck trying to replace the departing choirmaster who’s just joined up. And when everyone twigs than Bach was, in fact, a Hun, the question becomes moot. It won’t do to be getting cosy with German culture in a time of war – although, as their new musical director Dr Henry Guthrie (Fiennes) points out, that would rule out Haydn, Beethoven and most of the other options too. Guthrie’s own German past soon marks his card too, although he claws back some patriotic points by suggesting a modernised version of Elgar’s...

Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is a peach of a picture. At once miniaturist yet epic, it’s an exquisite film that touches on every human emotion – agony, ecstasy, discovery, surprise, togetherness, loneliness – without contrivance or strain.  A film of captured moments – some that feel much more important in the rear-view mirror – it’s an elegiac character study that perfectly expresses the emotions its protagonist is unable to articulate. Until he does. Based on a 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, Train Dreams is one of those rare films that tackles a so-called ordinary life and illuminates it as rich, complex and extraordinary. Joel Edgerton is Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker in the US at the turn of the century.  We follow him from being a soft-spoken orphan unaware of who his parents are to his death in the late ’60s (he gets to marvel at space travel) meaning, as well as everything else that is going on, Train Dreams is also a snapshot of a nation during a period of radical change and growth. But mostly sophomore director Bentley and co-screenwriter Greg Kwedar (the pair co-wrote Kwedar’s Sing Sing) concentrate on Robert’s days clearing the forests and pathways for train tracks in the Pacific Northwest. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso finds stunning image after stunning image – a mist rolling across a landscape, a locomotive barrelling over a bridge at night – but these sections thrive on Robert’s encounters with fellow itinerant workers, each interaction...

With his big-screen trio of Animal Kingdom, The Rover and The King, Australian director David Michôd has made a solid career of drawing heavy-duty drama out of problematic-dude protagonists. But boxing biopic Christy marks an interesting shift to a feminine focus as it tackles the true life of trailblazing prizefighter Christy Martin (Sydney Sweeney).  Born in smalltown West Virginia, the teenage Martin went from entering a fight for a lark in the late ’80s to becoming big-shot promoter Don King’s first-ever female signee, hitting her professional peak during the ’90s. This arc promises – and indeed delivers – another good old-fashioned punch-the-air tale of underdog sports triumph. But, if you’re unfamiliar with Martin’s story, you should brace yourself for a pivot into some dark and harrowing territory. For while she was a big public personality and an incredible heavy hitter in the ring, at home Christy was horrifically abused by her controlling spouse and trainer, Jim (Ben Foster). And though the scenes of domestic violence are handled sensitively by Michôd (whose film has Martin’s blessing – in fact, she was often on set), they do make for some deeply distressing moments.  Much of this is down to Sweeney and Foster’s performances, each of whom undergoes a remarkable transformation throughout the story’s two-decade span. Foster’s Jim is sweaty, paunchy and petulant, a spoiled man-child with an explosive inferiority complex who is too horribly realistic to tilt into...

A lot of movie franchises could learn a few things from Dan Trachtenberg. The director reinvigorated the Predator series with 2020’s Prey, stripping the sci-fi down to a lean cat-and-mouse thriller and making the best instalment since the 1987 original. His creative animated movie, Predator: Killer of Killers, a surprise release in June this year, playfully imagined the alien wreaking bloody havoc throughout history. Now Predator: Badlands, a much beefier movie than Prey, continues the strong run. What Trachtenberg does so well is to start with a good ‘What if?’ Where so many franchises grasp for new ways to spin the same old story – something that hobbled the Alien series for decades – or get tied up in overcomplicating the ‘mythology’, Trachtenberg starts with strong scenarios. Here it’s, ‘What if the predator was the hero?’ Badlands begins on the home planet of the Yautja (the predators’ preferred term). Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is the runt of his clan. Yautja do not tolerate weakness, so Dek’s father sentences him to death. Thanks to his brother, Dek is instead sent to an alien planet, where he vows to bring back a supposedly unkillable creature and prove his strength. His plan to fight alone, as is the Yautja way, is upended when he’s forced to accept the help of a Weyland-Yutani synthetic, Thia (Elle Fanning), who has been chopped in half by the very creature Dek is hunting and would quite like her legs back. It’s steeped in death and gore and massive...

Ash is a man with a strange job. For one thing, it’s illegal; for another, he is curiously well-suited to its anonymity and moral grey areas. Played by Riz Ahmed with terse meticulousness in David Mackenzie’s New York-set thriller, Ash is a former addict who runs a business as a ‘fixer’, helping corporate whistleblowers and malcontents to quietly take their hush money from angry companies. He conducts this work mainly through ‘relay’ telephone service – intended for use by the deaf and hard of hearing – an old-fashioned item which leaves no record of its communications.   He runs into trouble when a client, Sarah (a tenacious Lily James), seems to be at risk of being snuffed out. She’s a passionate whistleblower flagging unethical practices at her bioengineering company. The unlikely duo, forced together by desperate circumstances, race against time and the arrogant capitalist goons on their tails. Those goons are led by Sam Worthington’s Dawson and Willa Fitzgerald’s Rosetti, both amusingly obnoxious and even occasionally disguised in silly gear at airports, offering both realistic and faintly humorous foils for our protagonists. The leads have an unusual rapport, with Ahmed – an icily quiet, methodical customer – particularly good.  Relay is an old-school thriller with a drum-tight script and real style Directed by Mackenzie, the man behind prison flick Starred Up and neo-western Hell or High Water, this is another genre exercise of sorts – a consciously retro, twisty...

The jury’s out on popcorn and the case has been made against phone use (time to criminalise?), but where do we stand on big, ugly, drenching-the-cinema-floor sobbing? Chloé Zhao’s (Nomadland) Tudor tearjerker makes the debate suddenly germane. ‘Take tissues’ is a hopeless cliché. Tissues won’t do. You’ll need towels.  With Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal delivering the performances of their careers, Hamnet tells the story behind Shakespeare’s great tragedy – Hamlet – and much more besides. The wild power of motherhood; the fearsome responsibility of parenting; the jolting anxiety of nurturing something precious in a time of death; the drive for creative expression. Zhao holds all these primal but relatable forces in check before unleashing them in an emotionally totalising final reel. Devotees of Maggie O'Farrell’s 2020 novel, a deeper dive, of course, into the deep wells of bewitching force-of-nature Agnes Hathaway (Buckley) and her genius-in-the-making husband William Shakespeare (Mescal), will be reassured that the author has collaborated with Zhao for an adaptation that’s the right kind of lean. Gone are narrative curlicues that enrich on the page but would clutter on screen: early dating strife; Shakespeare’s journeys to London; the establishment of The Globe; a whole flea-cam interlude that follows the plague carrier from Asia to Stratford-upon-Avon and would look awesome in a David Cronenberg film. Hamnet is a movie that finds power in simplicity.  And Zhao trusts...

There’s so much talent behind Nia DaCosta’s provocative adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that it’s easy to embrace as an inventive artistic experiment. But also, there is so much talent behind Hedda that it’s especially disappointing when the initial sparks eventually fizzle out. DaCosta has updated Ibsen’s stage play in intriguing ways, moving the story from 1891 Norway to a 1950s English estate, expanding on Hedda’s sexuality, and reimagining one of the main characters entirely. Tessa Thompson (so good in DaCosta’s 2018 debut, Little Woods) plays venomous newlywed Hedda with an ostentatiously clipped British accent, chewing wickedly on each word. Her self-conscious approach is echoed in Tár composer Hildur Guonadóttir’s aggressively insistent score. With its increasingly desperate villain, operatic nemesis, and heavy musical cues, DaCosta interprets the struggles of societally-bound women as a form of horror story, a genre in which she’s especially adept (see 2021’s haunting Candyman). For a while, her louche directorial touches give her own scathing screenplay an unsettling, avant-garde theatricality. Sean Bobbitt’s gorgeous cinematography is particularly attuned to this approach, gliding coolly through the enormous manor in which a grasping Hedda and her pathetic husband George (Tom Bateman) throw a hedonistic party. Imogen Poots, Nicholas Pinnock and Finbar Lynch are good value as revellers united only by their hidden motivations. It swoons where it should...

Sweet, shy Colin is having a shit time. His mother is terminally ill (but still trying to set him up with inappropriate men), his only hobby is barbershop quartet singing with his father, and to top it all, he’s a parking attendant.  Played with wide-eyed bemusement by an outstanding Harry Melling, Colin’s dreary existence changes dramatically when he meets very tall, exceedingly handsome and inscrutable biker Ray in a Bromley boozer. Ray, a fittingly stern Alexander Skarsgård, propositions him over a bag of crisps, and before he knows it, Colin’s licking Ray’s boots (and rather a lot more) by the bins next to Primark. Pillion starts as it means to go on; aligning its oddly innocent nature with extreme, hardcore imagery, and managing to give screwball humour an emotional gravitas. Think, if you will, Kenneth Anger’s horny, leather-clad opus Scorpio Rising as directed by Richard Curtis.  Think Scorpio Rising as directed by Richard Curtis Based on Adam Mars-Jones’ 1970s-set novella Box Hill, and helmed by first-time director Harry Lighton, Pillion brings Ray and Colin’s unconventional relationship into the present day, with Colin happily (at first) taking on the role of Ray’s submissive, shaving his head, cooking him dinner and sleeping on a rug on the bedroom floor with a lock around his neck. Colin ingratiates himself with Ray’s gang – featuring real-life members of the historic Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club – which also includes fellow sub Kevin (a perky Jake Shears from...

An award-winning slice of life set on Paris’s margins set over 48 helter-skelter hours, Souleymane’s Story is the latest in a series of social realist dramas to tackle Europe’s migrant crisis from the perspective of African migrants. The Dardennes’ Tori and Lokita (2022), Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2023), and Matteo Garrone’s fantastically-tinged Io Capitano (2024) have shared the stories behind the sensationalist headlines – and here’s another one to bring deep humanity and insight to this political football. Io Capitano followed two Senegalese kids on the Saharan people-trafficking route to Italy. Here, French director Boris Lojkine could almost be picking up where Garrone left off. His twenty-something protagonist, Souleymane Sangaré (Abou Sangaré), has travelled the same path – from Guinea this time – and we meet him as a cog in Paris’s exploitative gig economy, cycling frantically to deliver food orders to apartments across the city and thrusting bags of takeaway into the hands of Parisians who barely notice him. Lojkine, who co-wrote the naturalistic screenplay with Delphine Agut, has unearthed a real talent in newcomer Sangaré. A Guinean who travelled to France in similar circumstances, he obviously understands Souleymane and his fraying emotions intimately. But it takes more than first-hand experience to inhabit a character with this much subtlety and skill. Souleymane is introduced in a flash-forward to the interview with France’s asylum affairs people that will...