Our latest movie reviews

Park Chan-wook made his name with his subversively funny, ultra-violent revenge trilogy, which culminated in Oldboy, a film that redefined the phrase ‘getting hammered’ and was remade by Spike Lee. His new film, No Other Choice – which premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival – is itself a remake: of The Ax (2005) by Costa-Gavras. With humour blacker than black bean noodles, the film is a masterful work of cinema which might well be Chan-wook’s masterpiece. And given this is the man who directed The Handmaiden that’s saying a lot.   Man-soo (a brilliant Lee Byung-hun, aka Squid Games’ Front Man) has the perfect life. He is respected by his company, who give him an eel to show their appreciation for his hardwork. He barbecues it in his lovely garden in front of his beautiful house, listening to his genius daughter practice her cello. His loving wife (Son Ye-jin), with a son from a former marriage who he considers his own, supports and loves him and they enjoy dance lessons together. He even has two cracking dogs.  And like an idiot, he can’t help but call attention to his immense good fortune and how happy he is.  So naturally, everything goes wrong. He loses his job at the paper company when the Americans take over and is soon in dire financial straits, with the threat of the bank foreclosing on his mortgage and even having to (gulp) cancel Netflix. With an ultra-competitive job market, Man-soo decides he has ‘no other choice’ than to murder a manager in order to free up...

Asked to guess who directed Caught Stealing, you might get through a long list before landing on Darren Aronofsky. The usually distinctive filmmaker – Black Swan, The Wrestler, Mother! – is in unflashy form for this solid, starry but not very memorable thriller about one man’s very bad night. Based on a novel by Charlie Huston (also the film’s screenwriter), it follows Hank (Austin Butler), a New York barman drifting through life and into alcoholism. When he and his girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), agree to cat-sit for their neighbour (Matt Smith), they get far more hassle than anticipated. Soon, violent thugs are crashing through their door. After Hank wakes up in the hospital, beaten severely and minus one kidney, he has to find out what the criminals want from him and how he can get rid of them before bullets start flying. 'It often feels more dated than nostalgic' The story takes place in 1998, which has little bearing on the plot but seems appropriate because – surely deliberately –  the whole endeavour has a ’90s throwback quality. It has the DNA of post-Tarantino films like Doug Liman’s Go or Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, where scrappy young things dash around town evading cartoonish criminals. Anora showed there’s a way to jump into that subgenre in a way that’s still modern, but Caught Stealing often feels more dated than nostalgic, as well as tonally awkward. Characters are broad, frequently leaning into caricature and stereotype. Russian...

In 1989, Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas were the perfect choice to star in an adaptation of the novel The War of The Roses, about a once-happy couple fighting over their dream home during a divorce. They had on-screen history and were known for their sprightly, darkly humorous banter. Revisioning this hit black comedy is a tall order, and while beloved British greats Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch seem ideal for a reboot, the results are mixed. When mischievous chef Ivy meets idealistic architect Theo at work, the chemistry is immediate - in fact, they're bonking in the restaurant kitchen within seconds. They move to America, where she looks after the kids. After a comical but excruciating disaster at his work, the roles are reversed: Ivy launches a restaurant, and Theo is charged with keeping house. Meantime, Ivy is loving the life of a burgeoning celebrity chef.  Like the marriage at its centre, the novelty wears off Theo’s nuanced discomfort with the new order is amusing: here's a dad who sees himself as a feminist yet feels deeply jealous when his wife is the breadwinner. While she's filled the kids with sugar, he decides to turn them into athletes. It's funny and relevant, and could power most of the film. So it feels like a bit of a shame when the story descends into a version of the madness penned by Warren Adler back in the materialistic ’80s. As they scrap increasingly violently over their dream home – which Theo designed – it feels less comedic and...

It’s been 30 years since Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes traded social realist documentary filmmaking for narrative fiction. Active since the 1970s, the Belgian brothers are now well into their seventies, having built up an impressive body of work, largely from intensely naturalistic stories of the poor and dispossessed. Their closest British analogue would be Ken Loach, but it isn’t too much of a stretch to say the rawness and compassion of their narratives, often populated by non-professional actors, can make Mike Leigh look like Michael Bay.  With the brothers’ latest – their thirteenth feature and first ensemble piece – the two-time Palme d’Or winners bring their tried-and-true methodology to a diverse quintet of teenagers temporarily housed in a residential shelter for young mothers in the directors’ native city of Liège.  We cannot help but root for every one of their characters, even when they inevitably fuck up. Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan) has resolved to place her newborn with a well-off foster family, against the wishes of her own troubled mother, who wants the baby for herself. Perla (Lucie Laruelle), like the hapless Bruno in the Dardennes’ breakthrough film The Child (2005), is not ready for the responsibility parenthood brings, and no wonder – she is, after all, ‘a kid with a kid’. Pregnant Jessica (Babette Verbeek), desperate to reconnect with the parent who abandoned her, recalls Cyril in 2011’s The Kid with a Bike. Hairdressing apprentice Julie (Elsa...

How do you rebuild your sense of self after a traumatic event? There lies the question at the heart of Eva Victor's charmingly sincere and very funny feature debut – a nuanced, character-driven story that Victor wrote, directed, and takes the star-making lead in. Agnes is an English literature lecturer at a liberal arts college in New England, and she’s stuck in a rut. Still living in the same house as she did while a grad student, through five weighty but witty chapters, some told in flashback, we understand why she’s become emotionally tethered to the same place.  It opens in the present day, with her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) arriving for a visit after a long separation. They easily fall back into their matey banter, with the actors exuding a deep intimacy that makes their friendship so cosy and believable. But there’s underlying tension in the fact that Lydie’s life so far has more propulsion. She’s married and expecting her first child, which only highlights Agnes’s professional and personal inertia. You see, a ‘serious thing’ happened to Agnes during her studies. The self-deprecating star pupil of her class, led by handsome literature professor Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), she, maybe naively, trusts him to be the good man he appears to be. Victor admirably uses delicate care in the depiction of Decker’s sexual assault of Agnes. We don’t see it, yet in her retelling to Lydie, how she navigates the aftermath with the college’s disciplinary board and herself,...

‘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...

Some murder-mysteries – Seven, for instance – immerse you in grisly menace. Others – Memories of Murder –  weave a web of intricate plotting and surprising feints. The Thursday Murder Club, by comparison, just wants to plump up a cushion, pour you a nice cup of tea and spin you a cosy yarn with an unusually high body count. And, honestly, you’d be a silly sausage not to enjoy it on those terms. For a movie in which people die violently every 30 or so minutes, the stakes are stupendously low, the vibe steadfastly upbeat. In fact, there’s more fuss at Downton Abbey when a fork goes missing than when Tony Curran (Geoff Bell), a flash building developer at posh retirement village Coopers Chase, gets bumped off. The dastardly deed is all the crime-solving pensioners at the heart of Richard Osman’s best selling murder-mystery novels need to set about ID’ing the culprit, in between mouthfuls of Celia Imre’s surprisingly moist sponge cakes.  Alongside Imre’s newcomer Joyce, an ex-nurse whose handy forensic knowledge sees her fast-tracked into the group, our amateur sleuths are Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth Best, a guileful ringleader with a coy espionage back story. Land-grabbing Ray Winstone’s rightful turf, a grinning Pierce Brosnan is West Ham-supporting ex-union boss Ron, and Ben Kingsley is gentle psychiatrist Ibrahim. The gang, who congregate in the orangery each Thursday to puzzle over a long-ago cold case, prove equally adept at elbowing their way into the new investigation....

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...