Our latest movie reviews

How often does the best romantic comedy of the year also contain the year’s best fight scene? Probably as often as any romcom starts with a man standing over a dead stranger on the side of the highway, his penis unknowingly dangling from his shorts. Splitsville is full of surprises. Written by co-stars Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, and directed by Covino, the duo’s second feature is a screwball sex farce for an age when even the most buttoned-down couples are exploring ‘ethical non-monogamy’. Marvin is a cuddly schlub in the Jason Segel mold. Covino is his wealthier, hairier, more dickish best friend. Both are punching above their weight when it comes to their wives: the former is married to Andor’s Adria Arjona, the latter to Dakota Johnson. In a desperate bid to keep them from coming to their senses, both husbands propose opening their respective marriages — the ramifications of which neither is prepared to deal with. Of course, movies about normies awkwardly dabbling in polyamory go back at least as far as 1969’s Bob & Carole & Ted & Alice, and there are endless comedies involving dumb guys undone by their own insecurities. What makes Splitsville stand out? Simply put, it’s goddamn hilarious.  What makes Splitsville stand out? Simply put, it’s goddamn hilarious With 2019’s The Climb, another film about friends overstepping the boundaries of fidelity, Covino and Marvin placed themselves in the bromantic lineage of Judd Apatow, only with a greater penchant for...

‘If liberty means anything at all,’ George Orwell once wrote, ‘it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’. What happens, though, if you try to tell people what they don’t want to hear in an illiberal society? In this unblinking, engrossing film, it’s absolutely nothing good.  The year is1938 and Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), a wet-behind-the-ears young prosecutor in the provincial Russian city of Bryansk, has received a letter from an inmate at the local prison. Worryingly, it’s scrawled in blood on a scrap of paper. The idealistic law graduate announces himself at the rusted iron gates of this rotting grey edifice to hear what the man has to say.  The prison warden and governor, superficially helpful, eventually allow him into the cell of a bruised and battered old prisoner called Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko). The man, a veteran Bolshevik, believes his abuse is a sign of rogue elements within the NKVD security forces. Why else would a dogged old loyalist like him have been beaten half to death? What neither man understands is that this is a feature not a bug of Stalin’s Russia. He is just another victim of the Great Purge. It’s a haunting, mesmerising, pessimistic piece of work Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (In the Fog) adapts dissident writer Georgy Demidov’s novella into a collision of idealism and cold reality, as Kornyev takes the case to Moscow and sticks his head deeper into the lion’s mouth. Demidov knew of what he wrote – he spent...

Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough are superbly creepy in a not-quite-horror that begins promisingly but teases more than it delivers. Tommy (Anson Boon) is a deeply antisocial young man. On a drink-and-drug-fuelled night out, he starts fights, openly cheats on his sort-of girlfriend and intimidates anyone who crosses his path. After various substances cause him to black out, he wakes up in a basement, chained to the wall by his neck. He’s now the prisoner of married couple Chris (Stephen Graham) and Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), who intend to teach Chris the error of his ways and make him the titular good boy. They keep him in the basement of their remote home while they live upstairs with their fraught son, Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), and immigrant housekeeper Rina (Monika Frajczyk), who the couple threaten with deportation if she gives them away.  Initially, Tommy tries desperately to escape and treats his captors as the villains they are, but as they start to give him a level of attention, however dark, that he’s never received, his feelings about them become blurred. His attempts to escape are less urgent. His conversation with them more vulnerable.  It’s stubbornly short on plot or twists Like Tommy, director Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi) operates with hazy intentions and lands somewhere intriguing but rather unsatisfying. It becomes almost immediately clear that Tommy isn’t the first person who’s been held in the house, but anyone waiting for any explanation of what...

In the race for this year’s Best Animation Oscar, this hand-drawn Gallic sci-fi was always the rank outsider next to the zeitgeist-stealing Kpop Demon Hunters and box-office beast Zootropolis 2. But it has plenty of sparky charm, pops with colour, and an ending that’s more moving than either of them. ‘Dystopian sci-fi eco-fable for kids’ may not be the easiest sell, yet director Ugo Bienvenu and his co-writer, Eden lead actor Félix de Givry, have spun something distinctive and dazzling from those elements. Arco has an unflagging, Peter Pan-ish optimism despite being backdropped by a series of ecological catastrophes and absent parents.It tells the story of time-travelling tyke Arco (voiced in the English dub by Juliano Krue Valdi) who lives in a futuristic utopia built on tree-like platforms above the clouds. His parents and older sister use kaleidoscopic flying capes powered by a magical jewel to soar off on time-travelling adventures. The 10-year-old Arco is officially too young to fly but he really wants to see the dinosaurs. Sneaking out one night, he pitches himself headfirst into the unknown and hopes for the best Soon he’s crash landing into an ecologically-ravaged 2075, separated from his jewel but encountering Iris (Romy Fay), a lonely young girl keen to help. With her sassy domestic robot Mikki (Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman sharing voice duties), and Iris’s school pal Clifford, he has to find a way back to the future, braving a colossal wildfire and the...

Towards the end of this fleetingly freaky one-location horror about a young podcaster who claps on her headphones, clicks on a sound file and invites evil into her life, the screen goes black and the audio takes over. It’s an unusual and effective moment: horrifying surround-sound screams and screechings go beetling through your brain and your imagination does the rest. If there were such a thing as an aural cleanse, you’d need one when the credits roll.  If only the rest of Filipino-Canadian filmmaker Ian Tuason’s podcast horror lived up to that trapdoor-drop moment. Weaponising the cinema’s Dolby Atmos into a delivery mechanism for frights is a clever ploy that Undertone never maximises. Evy (The Handmaid's Tale’s Nina Kiri) is the host of a horror podcast in the mold of True Scary Story or The Dark Paranormal. Because he’s in a different time zone, and also because things are way more unnerving in the dead of night, she slips downstairs at her mother’s home each night to record with her co-host Justin (an unseen Adam DiMarco of The White Lotus). Upstairs in the beige house, her rasping, barely conscious mum is dying. The vibes are, to put it mildly, bad.  Evy’s full name is Evangeline. Like the crucifixes on the walls, it’s a clue about the suffocatingly devout upbringing she’s been subjected to. On the podcast she plays the part of wary skeptic, egged on by Justin to embrace whatever weirdness lands in their inbox in the name of content. So when 10 audio files arrive...

A horror sequel involving David Cronenberg and exploding heads… is it the Scanners sequel we dared not dream about? Well, not quite. The Canadian horror legend is in front of the camera in a follow-up that sacrifices Ready or Not’s insurgent sneer in favour of an upscaled premise and many more detonating bonces. Horror collective Radio Silence’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Scream) return to the blood-soaked wedding dancefloor to pick up exactly where their wild 2019 comedy-horror left off. Samara Weaving’s blood-drenched bride Grace is puffing a ciggie, in shock after the happiest day of her life descended into a lethal, viscera-soaked game of hide-and-seek. Behind, her rich fiancé’s mansion burns with his sick and twisted family cindering inside.  The lack of time jump offers a propulsive energy, skipping onto a new chapter that swiftly introduces Grace’s estranged sister Faith (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s Kathryn Newton) – the emergency contact she forgot to update – and more peril. Entertainingly, Ready or Not: Here I Come answers that age old question: what do the police really think when they encounter a blood-soaked final girl? ‘Yeah, you’re going to prison,’ notes her sister when she’s heard the incriminating recap of the events in the first film.  The world is much expanded here, though, in a way that’ll feel (over) familiar to anyone versed in the John Wick, Hunger Games, Squid Games or any number of other modern exploitation franchises – as...

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...