Our latest movie reviews

With apologies to Rod Stewart, what if the first cut isn’t the deepest? What if the cuts keep coming, the wound won’t heal and there’s no obvious way to staunch the bleeding? That’s roughly where middle-aged dad and trawlerman Magnús finds himself in Hlynur Pálmason’s Icelandic family drama. Played by Sverrir Guðnason (Borg/McEnroe’s Bjorn Borg) with rumpled affability and a semi-permanent sense of puzzlement, ‘Maggi’, as he’s known to everyone, is lonely and struggling in the aftermath of his recent separation from long-time partner Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir). He’s outside the family home, now, but pops in to see their three growing children before he embarks on another herring season in the Atlantic. Like the family’s sheepdog Panda, he’s scratching at the door, trying to get back in.   For artist Anna, played with steel and soul by Garðarsdóttir, the break-up means gently brushing off her ex’s clumsy entreaties to give it another go, gently but firmly reinforcing the family’s porous new boundaries, and rediscovering her own inner life. She has a new metalworking studio and a patch of countryside where she leaves her sculptures to rust. Rogue horses and a self-involved gallery owner are a reminder that artistic expression will be hard won.  The landscapes may be equally stunning but The Love That Remains is a major change of pace for Pálmason after his haunting period piece Godland charted spiritual alienation in 19th century Iceland. Here, the gifted filmmaker exchanges...

In theory, Bi Gan’s transcendentally beautiful film Resurrection is a work of science fiction – one set in a future where people can live forever if they surrender the ability to dream.  But the Chinese filmmaker is not all that bothered about explaining the logistics of this anodyne imagined world. Instead, he follows a single rebel who chooses dreaming over conformity – and like the episodic visions that visit this tossing, turning sleeper, Gan's story has a bewildering logic all of its own. It's simultaneously a mesmerising love letter to film (no wonder it wooed its way to a Prix Spécial at Cannes), and a Buddhism-tinged meditation on what it is to prepare for death, even as the ugliness of the world pulls you back from the brink of nirvana. We begin in a gorgeously crafted, trippily meta rendition of an old silent movie: figures scurry in and out of a matte painting of an opium den, then a giant hand peels back the picture to reveal a stone tunnel leading underground. This is the lair of the Deliriant (Jackson Yee), who's dressed in a monstrous, Nosferatu-esque white mask, and devouring poppies that fuel the dreams that will soon kill him. A female projectionist/spiritual guide (Shu Qi) finds him and uses his body as a living cinema, loading him up with four films that'll help him let go of his earthly ties before he dies, by living out strange, sinful scenarios. First, he becomes murderously embroiled in the bleak life of a theremin-obsessed musician in a wartime...

This giddy, wonderfully optimistic intergalactic epic teams Ryan Gosling up with a friendly extraterrestrial rock creature to save the galaxy from a catastrophic solar event. It’s proof, if it was even needed, that it’s impossible not to love the Hollywood star – even if you have a heart of stone.  With a near-irresistible combination of Steve McQueen charisma and Droopy Dog reluctance, Gosling brings charm and physical comedy chops as scientist-turned-teacher-turned-reluctant astronaut Ryland Grace, who wakes from hypersleep to find that his crew mates are dead and he’s several lightyears into a one-way mission to save the dying sun. He’ll start to tackle the task as soon as he figures out how to float through the ship without braining himself on a console.  If the actor’s last teaching assignment, heroin drama Half Nelson, went badly, this one is even less auspicious for the bemused scientist. ‘I put the “not” in “astronaut”,’ he notes when Project Hail Mary flashes back to ‘what came before’ bits that preceded lift-off. There’s been no training, he protests. He hasn’t even done ‘the bit in the pool’. The world is counting on you,’ replies Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), formidable head of this last-ditch international effort. Earth is bracing itself for frosty annihilation, so he’s probably dead either way.  Enter that mysterious rock-shaped alien, ‘Rocky’, who docks alongside Ryland’s ship and makes first contact. The pair are soon finding a way to communicate, pooling...

It’s rare that formidable French actress Juliette Binoche is fighting to match her two co-stars. But, so it is in American writer-director Lance Hammer’s (Ballast) London-set, moral maze of a dementia drama. Anna Calder-Marshall is Leslie, a woman with advanced dementia, and Tom Courtenay is Martin, her doting husband. Both embody their roles with subatomic nuance to drum up not just their present relationship, but a history that, like the rings on a mighty tree stump, has brought them to this moment.  In one of the year’s boldest openings, Hammer drops us in at the deep end. Amanda (Binoche) and her teenage daughter Sara (Florence Hunt) pop into this elderly couple’s sanctuary to find Martin having sex with Leslie. Amanda calls the police, believing that her mother lacks the capacity to give consent to her stepfather. Given the chance to avoid this outcome in exchange for a promise that he won’t do this again, Martin gently seethes: ‘You’ve no right to ask us this.’ This scene launches dilemmas that will unspool for the rest of the runtime. It’s a credit to Hammer that he seeks to explore rather than to answer them. Is Martin abusing Leslie or does she initiate their intimacy as a remaining source of marital comfort? Is that a moot point when she is almost non-verbal and her illness has erased her sexual inhibitions? As these questions are introduced, so are the mechanisms of humane state care. The police arrive, instigating an upsetting medical check-up, a visit from a...

‘By order of the Peaky Blinders’ is the catchphrase of Steven Knight’s blockbuster Netflix crime saga show. And the order in this sturdy movie-length sequel is: ‘gaze into a whisky glass while ruminating on the past’.  Because there’s a lot of brooding in this feature-length, 1940-set Peaky Blinders expansion, as Cillian Murphy’s Birmingham crime boss, Tommy Shelby, mulls over 25 years of trauma and loss over opium binges. If only you could bootleg therapy, eh? The Immortal Man finds the Nazi Blitz in full swing and Tommy in self-imposed exile in an eerie country pile, a Brummie King Lear contemplating a lost kingdom. Director Tom Harper (Wild Rose) sticks to the sombre, muted tones of a ghost story as the gangster is confronted by the spectres of his past, including the daughter he lost to TB. His efforts to translate the pain into a memoir bring amusement to his loyal factotum Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee). Only upstanding MP sister Ada (Sophie Rundle) and son Duke (Barry Keoghan, currently cornering the market in wild-eyed tearaways) survive the winnowing of season six. Duke’s erratic attempts to run the empire in his dad’s absence soon have Tommy saddling back up to take the reins in the city. Literally, in one horseback ride through Luftwaffe-blasted Birmingham.  It’s often enthralling, though rarely explosive Knight, the show’s creator and the screenwriter, seems to have taken inspiration from Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed in a fun, inspired-by-real-history plot...

Frankenstein’s monster gets a companion: that didn’t end well in the Mary Shelley novel, or 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein. But, thanks to writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, the Bride is given a voice – in fact, it’s more of a roar. Played fearlessly by Jessie Buckley, this Bride is very much alive. In a contrast to her indie debut The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal stitches together many genres: from B-movies and crime thrillers to musicals. An eerie black and white opening sees Buckley play Mary Shelley, suspended in an afterlife but somehow able to connect her consciousness to that of a young living human. She is Ida (also Buckley), a smart but stifled working girl in 1930s Chicago. Ida suddenly begins spouting painful truths in a Mob-run restaurant. Her outbursts are lewd and articulate as she becomes apparently possessed by the spirit of Shelley. Silenced, Ida’s body is stolen and revived by Dr Euphronius (Annette Bening), who’s been persuaded to create a mate for Frank (Christian Bale) – named after his creator, Dr Frankenstein. Confused and amnesic, ‘the Bride’ is full of spirit and rage: she hits the town with Frank and a trail of killings follow.  That the initial death is sparked by a sexual assault links this to the feminist buddy caper Thelma & Louise. The Bride! also has echoes of Bonnie & Clyde and Poor Things as the pair flee across the US, pursued by a detective (Peter Sarsgaard) and his underestimated colleague (Penélope Cruz). More classic cinema is referenced...

Pixar loves a furry body-swap adventure – see Brave, Turning Red, Soul – but the animation house has really gone full David Attenborough with its latest in which a young woman turns into a beaver to save her verdant corner of the America burbs. The results are like Avatar meets Life on Earth with bits of Mission: Impossible, The Birds, Sharknado and John Carpenter thrown in. Somehow from that eccentric array of ingredients, the studio has cooked up its funniest and most exciting effort since 2017’s Coco.  Ex-Pixar storyboard artist Daniel Chong, directing his first feature for the studio, and writer Jesse Andrews (Luca) get ahead of those Avatar comparisons early: ‘This is nothing like Avatar!’’ protests its heroine, spiky 19-year-old Mabel (Piper Curda), when someone makes the parallel. But actually it is a lot like Avatar – and there’s nothing wrong with that! Not when the conceit is executed this well.  Using a secret sci-fi gizmo pioneered by her college professor, Mabel transplants her consciousness into a robot beaver and heads off to galvanise the local wildlife to repopulate her beloved local pond and stop Beavertown’s preening mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) building a freeway straight over it.  Introducing herself to the local fauna, beaver Mabel quickly falls under the patronage of Beaver King George (less mad than his namesake, but only slightly), learns about ‘Pond Rules’ (‘When you gotta eat, eat’), and discovers a cabal of monarchs from across the branches...

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,...