Our latest movie reviews

Shih-Ching Tsou, long the secret weapon of Anora director Sean Baker since the pair met on a filmmaking course in New York, gets her moment to shine in this solo directorial debut, a family drama. The connections don’t end there: the pair co-wrote this film and it’s very much in the spirit of Baker’s own 2017 gem The Florida Project, which Tsou produced. Oh, and Baker edits too.Left-Handed Girl pits a young girl’s naivete against the hard edges of adult life, zeroing in on the messy, tender dynamics of mother-daughter bonds. While Baker thrives on populating his worlds with narcissists and budding psychopaths, Tsou opts for a gentler touch, shaping a family drama where even the worst impulses are met with compassion. Shot on iPhones (just like Baker’s 2015 breakthrough Tangerine), the result is a gorgeously colourful Taipei-set film that threads drama, comedy and heart with the ease of her compatriot Ang Lee, landing as a rare ‘life sucks’ relationship drama with a genuinely uplifting afterglow. Told in a conventional arc, the action starts with Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) returning to the capital with her two girls: teenager I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) and the irresistibly cute I-Jing (Nina Ye). Puppy-eyed I-Jing is the left-handed girl of the title, and she takes her grandfather’s berating of her ‘devil’s hand’ far too literally.  Left-Handed Girl threads drama, comedy and heart with the ease of Ang Lee She’s convinced her leftie is possessed and destined to do evil. Early dabbles in...

It’s weird, in the year 2025, that it seems necessary to point out that the Nazis were bad. But Nuremberg, an old-fashioned and satisfyingly complex morality tale in the guise of a courtroom drama and spy thriller, does that job in impressive style. Supercharged by James Vanderbilt’s smart script and snappy direction, and with an on-form cast, it plots a course through the immediate aftermath of World War II and into the legal nightmare of holding its German perpetrators to account.  If Russell Crowe seemed a cartoonish choice to play avuncular Nazi second-in-command Hermann Göring, he delivers his best performance since The Nice Guys a full decade ago, paradoxically dialling things back to prove that he’s not a faded force. Rami Malek returns to something like Bohemian Rhapsody form as the American psychologist, Douglas Kelley, sent to the Allies’ high security Nuremberg prison to evaluate him and his fellow Nazis.  Appearances are deceptive throughout this psychologically acute and entertaining dramatisation of the Nuremberg war trials of 1945. Göring seems jovial and harmless; Kelley seems in control of their sessions in the Nazi’s small cell. Straight-arrow American prosecutor Robert H Jackson (Michael Shannon) and his gin-sipping British counterpart (Richard E Grant) seem to have a copper-bottomed plan to send Göring and his fellow war criminals (including the deeply odious Robert Ley and Julius Streicher) to the gallows. ‘Eisenhower is not for hanging anyone without...

The belated third instalment of the Now You See Me series puts the ‘Z’ into ‘alakazam’ with a new and younger cast joining our established heroes. Like its predecessors it’s a flurry of action scenes, VFX-assisted tricks and witty banter from a wildly overqualified cast: it may vanish from the memory like a rabbit in a hat, but it’s fun in the moment. The premise has Jesse Eisenberg’s J Daniel Atlas recruiting three young musicians to help him in a heist he’s been assigned by the shadowy magical do-gooders known as The Eye. The trio – played by The Holdovers’ Dominic Sessa, Barbie’s Ariana Greenblatt and Detective Pikachu’s Justice Smith – will be helping him steal a gigantic gem belonging to South African diamond mine heiress and money laundress Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike). It’s not a big reveal when the other original ‘Horsemen of Atlas’ magical super-group members – Dave Franco’s Jack, Isla Fisher’s Henley and Woody Harrelson’s Merrit – turn up to help. Things move too quickly to allow much time to ponder logic or logistics Their quest will take them to the Netherlands, France and Abu Dhabi, with a few stop-offs for bickering and card tricks along the way. There’s some of the same spectacle-inflation that drove the Fast & Furious franchise into a wall, but director Ruben Fleischer mostly keeps things moving too quickly to allow you much time to ponder logistics or logic. There are dazzling heists to plan and wheels-within-wheels to turn, which is the best...

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, 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 and 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 plant the...

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...