Our latest movie reviews

‘Babe’ is a term of endearment that can have a lot of uses. For real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who star as long-term, not-yet-married couple Tim and Millie in their new horror film, it can be wielded with passive-aggression, gooey pleading, or clingy apology; the pair use ‘babe’ so much it’s basically meaningless.  Tim and Millie are on the verge of a move from city to country as Millie takes on a new teaching job; we find them at a difficult crossroads, with a moratorium on sex and a growing distance between them. Tim is rudderless, ageing out of his dreams of success as a musician while Millie is pragmatic and high-achieving; to make matters worse, Tim is also recovering from a traumatic incident, haunted by the memories of discovering his father’s badly decomposed corpse. The pair put a cheerful facade over their uncertainties, but their move only seems to increase tension – especially when, on a hiking trip in the nearby woods, they stumble into a seemingly manmade cave and find themselves infected by a strange medical condition. They cannot, seemingly, be physically apart. The metaphor is not subtle, but it is deployed with delicious and surprising twists nonetheless: when Millie gets in the car, Tim’s catatonic body throws itself violently against the wall as if to mimic her movement. When Tim closes himself behind his office door late at night, Millie drags herself from bed, zombifies, and headbutts it. A kiss makes their lips stick painfully...

Ironies – both intimate and enormous – imbue It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley with much of its thematic weight. So it’s only apt that they also contribute to its artistic buoyancy. For the most part this does feel like a straightforward musical biography, with copious and well-chosen footage of the late singer-songwriter both onstage and off. But though his life and art were influenced most visibly by men, director Amy Berg (West of Memphis) chooses to tell his story in large part through women. We hear emotional memories and thoughtful insights from his single mother, Mary Guibert, his good friend Aimee Mann, his former girlfriend Rebecca Moore, and his longtime partner Joan Wasser (the musician known as Joan as Police Woman).  We’re also witness to his own broken heart, cleaved both by the parent who abandoned him and the world that wouldn’t allow him to move on. Even as Jeff was trying to understand what it meant to be the son of celebrated singer Tim Buckley, he despised the way everyone else wanted to understand it, too. And there’s another paradox as well, one that’s likely to remain with viewers every time they hear his music from here on. As his admirers already know, and Berg shows us at length, he put tremendous effort into crafting his own work. He also pushed back hard against a commercial mindset that coldly exploited creativity. Fans will fiercely argue that Buckley has so much more to offer than Hallelujah Buckley became increasingly disenchanted by the...

If laughter is the best medicine, this gut-twisting tale of vanishing kids from American comedian-turned-horror auteur Zach Cregger comes with its own built-in cure.  Put simply, if Weapons wasn’t the best horror movie of the year – pipping even the mighty Sinners – it would probably be the best comedy. The last 30 minutes alone is hands down the most satisfying final reel I’ve winced through – and corpsed at – in absolutely ages, a whirlwind of laughs and scares that ties up the movie’s knotty narrative in a singular fashion. Of course, Weapons is a less-you-know-the-better experience. Suffice to say, at 2.17am on an otherwise unremarkable night in the fictional US town of Maybrook, 17 classmates spontaneously get out of bed, leave their parents’ homes and run into the darkness, arms outspread like sycamore seedlings blown by some unseen tempest (in suitably macabre fashion, the pose was inspired by photojournalist Nick Ut’s legendary Vietnam War snap Napalm Girl).  When teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) turns up to class the next morning, there’s only one pupil to greet her: a taciturn boy called Alex (Cary Christopher). Is his silence down to shock or is there something else going on?  Who – or what – is the Pied Piper behind this bizarro event is the mystery that Weapons works its way towards in unhurried but enthralling fashion. Cregger’s camera sweeps, wraith-like, through a town whose shock is turning to anger and recrimination, with the besieged Gandy in the...

It feels like the taste of cinema audiences may be shifting. 2025’s biggest movies so far are Lilo & Stitch, Minecraft and Jurassic World: Rebirth; all shrugged at by critics but offering viewers straightforward entertainment. Better reviewed but darker titles like Thunderbolts* and 28 Years Later have struggled. Perhaps, as the real world seems ever bleaker, escapism is what we all crave. That could be good news for Freakier Friday, a sequel that makes barely a lick of sense but is infectious, ridiculous fun and feels like a trip back to simpler times. The 2003 original had Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as Anna and Tess, a bickering mother and daughter who undergo a body swap and learn to understand each other. Two decades years later, Tess is a renowned therapist who psychobabbles any conflict into submission. Anna is now a music exec and mum to a rebellious teenager, Harper (Julia Butters). Anna’s also due to marry sweet chef Eric (Manny Jacinto), who has his own teen, Lily (Sophia Hammons), who cannot stand Harper. After the female family members visit a dodgy ‘psychic’ at Anna’s bachelorette party, the teens and adults switch bodies and have to figure out their differences in order to swap back. The whole gang is just a good hang, and that feels like enough In many ways, this also feels like a movie from 2003. Its understanding of both teens and the over-sixties feels highly outdated. In the bodies of older people, the teenagers dress like Hannah...

It says much about the sheer slog of making a stop-motion animation that it’s taken this long for Swiss director Claude Barras to follow up 2016’s Oscar-nominated orphanage tragicomedy My Life as a Courgette. But it’s a relief to see that he’s stuck fast to both the tone and aesthetic that made Courgette so wonderfully distinct and memorable.  Once more, Barras populates his quirky handcrafted world with beautifully expressive, wide-eyed clay-sculpted characters who are closer to vivid childhood drawings than boring old photo-realism. And once again, he contrasts this visual approach with an admirable refusal to pander to sentimental, commercial urges in his narrative (this time co-scripted with Catherine Paillé), which bares the bruises – both emotional and physical – of real, difficult, messy life. Although, admittedly, there are rather more cute animals in this one.  Where Courgette was located on Barras’s snowy home turf, Savages transports us to the thick tropical jungles of Borneo, which, in his charming depiction, really do feel lush and teeming with precious fauna. Here we meet Kéria (voiced by Babette De Coster), a schoolgirl with indigenous Penan heritage on her dead mother’s side, who lives on the fringe of a palm oil plantation with her father (Benoît Poelvoorde). After witnessing the shooting of a female orangutan by loggers, she adopts its young, teat-craving offspring. The pair then embark on a jungle adventure with Kéria’s young Penan cousin Selaï (Martin...

In the second of Aussie author Aaron Blabey’s kids’ graphic novel series The Bad Guys, the titular crew of antihero animals decide to prove to the world that they are now reformed characters by… rescuing some chickens.  I don’t want to spoil the bizarre places its film counterpart goes to, but let’s just say that in Dreamworks’ The Bad Guys 2, the source material has been largely left behind in favour of a plot of such Byzantine maximalism it makes the Roger Moore Bond films look like models of gritty restraint. That’s fair because Pierre Perifel’s films are as much a celebration of classic heist movies as they are the original books. And The Bad Guys 2 is the heist movie cranked up to at least a bajillion, and involves the now reformed Mr Wolf, Mr Snake et al getting blackmailed into One Last Job – something they’re not entirely opposed to given they’re having a miserable time going straight.  They’re framed for a series of robberies they didn’t commit and manipulated into helping a trio of new animal criminals collect a rare metal called McGuffinite (yes really) to further their leader Miss Kitty Kat’s extremely insane scheme. It makes the Roger Moore Bond films look like models of restraint It’s overstuffed: the gang’s absurdly over-complicated heists are a joy to watch in isolation but occasionally tenuously worked in. There are simply too many characters: Richard Ayoade’s mad scientist guinea pig Professor Marmalade was a great villain in the first film, but his...

While most directors fret over final cuts and spiralling budgets, it’s more likely to be exploding mortar shells and buzzing drones that keep Ukrainian filmmaker-reporter Mstyslav Chernov awake at night.  Fresh from winning a Best Documentary Oscar for 20 Days in Mariupol, a fly-on-the-shattered-wall depiction of the brutal 2022 siege by Putin’s invading army, the insanely brave journalist-filmmaker has picked up his camera and found somewhere even more dangerous to go.  That place? A pencil-thin strip of blasted forest just outside the destroyed village of Andriivka in eastern Ukraine. The fields on both sides are sewn with landmines, making the task of capturing the village a forest crawl of hidden Russian bunkers, random shellfire and sudden death. It’s a trench-by-trench battle as brutal as Okinawa or the Somme, and Chernov and his Associate Press colleague Alex Babenko are right there with the Ukrainian assault brigade assigned to the task.  Its vérité view of combat is intense and confronting. What makes it so impactful is the first-person nature of the footage – suddenly, the tools of modern warfare have become filmmaking tools too. Footage from soldiers’ bodycams and aerial photography from reconnaissance drones puts you right in the shoes of the men – sometimes even as they fall, wounded. The result is disorientating, distressing and often surreal. It’d feel like Call of Duty if it wasn’t so grimly real. Alex Garland’s Warfare suffers by comparison Of course,...

Even those cinemagoers who have grumbled about the preponderance of superhero origin stories – and I’m guilty there – might feel a touch of remorse watching writer-director James Gunn’s puckish and political (but wildly overstuffed) blockbuster skip merrily past all the basics of DC’s most righteous figure. The Guardians of the Galaxy man, probably mindful of the many Super-movies that have come before his, races through Kal-El’s origins in a handful of captions over the opening frames: an Antarctic vista into which a battered and vulnerable Superman (David Corenswet) is hurled after his first defeat in battle over the skies of Metropolis. In those few sentences, establishing the existence of metahumans on Earth and the arrival of Superman from the planet Krypton 30 years prior, this DC reboot skips jauntily past the entire plot of Richard Donner’s 1978 classic.  So, there’s no orientation, none of the scene-setting Smallville stuff with Jonathan and Martha Kent (though they do get a touching later scene). We’re not getting those early flirtations with girlfriend Lois Lane (the impressive Rachel Brosnahan) either, or even Clark Kent learning how to use The Daily Planet’s nifty-looking CMS. In fact, we’re not getting much of Clark Kent at all.It’s the most in medias res-iest bit of storytelling imaginable, a gambit that feels more and more misguided as the movie slips deeper into generic superhero terrain in a packed but muddled second half. A giant chasm is carving its way...

Miyazaki was already a culture hero in Japan when this animated mythic adventure raised him to a status approaching living national treasure. The young warrior Ashitaka is infected by poison while saving his village from a demonic giant boar; he rides his elk to the west (where the boar came from) in the hope of finding a cure. He stumbles into a three-way battle between a woman chieftain in a fortified encampment (built to protect the secret of smelting iron from ore), a clan of samurai eager to take control of the iron - and the creatures (chiefly wolves and boars) of the surrounding forest, enraged by all the human damage to their natural habitat. Fighting on the side of the animals is Mononoke, a girl raised by the wolves, who hates and distrusts all humans, including Ashitaka. The samurai are pretty unredeemed, but Miyazaki insists that there are things to be said for both the Iron Age settlers and the animals and their deities: rather than a Lord of the Rings-style showdown between good and evil, this argues for peaceful co-existence. Superbly imagined and visually sumptuous, it's let down only by Hisaishi's sub-Miklos Rosza score. (An uncut English language dub also exists, with dialogue by Neil Gaiman and a voice cast including Gillian Anderson, Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver and Billy Bob Thornton.

If the warm, funny and fuzzy Colin From Accounts represents one extreme of Australian popular culture, then Bring Her Back is its polar opposite. The second feature from directors Danny and Michael Philippou, the brothers behind Talk To Me, takes the gore and frights of their debut and ally it to an examination of maternal instincts gone batshit crazy. Anchored by a terrific Sally Hawkins, it firmly cements the Australian duo as fresh, interesting voices in the over-saturated, often cookie cutter horror market. The set-up is economically sketched: following the death of their single father, teenage siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) are sent away to live with quirky foster parent Laura (Hawkins) in a spacious, secluded cabin in the woods replete with an empty swimming pool. Because it’s never a luxurious townhouse with a fancy hot tub, is it? Laura is already a parent to another adopted, seemingly mute orphan Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), while grieving the mysterious death of her own daughter Cathy, who was blind. Andy, who is just shy of being old enough to become Piper’s guardian, has vowed to look after his sister, who is also visually impaired, but begins to suspect their new custodian might have her own agenda. It doesn’t reassure anyone – Andy or the audience – that Laura keeps her dead stuffed dog in the living room and Oliver in a locked bedroom, or that she throws a dance party plying her underage wards with whisky. Bring Her Back doesn’t rely on...