Our latest movie reviews

From Bruges to Inisherin to Easter Island. Not your typical Tripadvisor itinerary but the thematic leyline that connects Martin McDonagh’s loose triptych of Beckettian buddy movies. His latest could be the best yet: a bittersweet hangout film about lonely, crumpled men facing up to mortality, dealing with the consequences of violence and chewing the fat to outlandishly funny effect.  That fat is mostly chewed by John Malkovich in a performance so good, you’re left rueing all the genre slop he’s had thrust his way in recent years. He’s Chris, a wolfish but ageing and increasingly forgetful CIA spook whose coup-organising and democracy-disrupting days may even have extended to supplying the rifle used to kill John F Kennedy 10 years earlier. His best (ie only) friend is Sam Rockwell’s Lee, a younger, slightly less jaded agent who nonetheless knows better than to trust a word their exasperated station chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi), tells them. It’s 1973, a few months before a CIA-orchestrated coup will bring down Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president Salvador Allende. This pair of loose cannons have been sent off to the remote Chilean territory of Easter Island to take in ‘the big heads’ and stay out of trouble. And it is not going well. ‘We came down here to destabilise your government,’ Chris happily tells a pair of students (Mariana di Girolamo, Ailin Salas) at the airport, ‘and it is going great’. Forget Slow Horses, these guys are basically stationary.  But...

In the 1960s and ’70s, a tide of eccentrically-dressed Westerners flowed East along the hippie trail, hunting for enlightenment as they trundled through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to India and beyond (before the Russian invasion put a violent end to all that peace and love). Far fewer people looked for spiritual fulfilment in the opposite direction. But this beautifully imaginative hybrid documentary, executive-produced by Priyanka Chopra, is dedicated to telling the story of one of them: PK, an Indian portrait artist who fell in love with a Swedish tourist, and set off on an impossible journey to find his destiny. British director Orlando von Einsiedel (The White Helmets) foregrounds interviews with this story’s central couple: PK himself, who revisits his impetuous youth over chai from a Delhi roadside seller, and Lotta, who recalls their passionate affair with enjoyably Nordic understatement in the muted Swedish countryside. When PK was born, a soothsayer foretold that he would meet a woman from over the sea – a Taurus, with musical flair. So when he sketches Lotta’s portrait one day, and discovers that she is all those things, the future seems to be written in the stars. She heads home – and, too broke to buy a train ticket, he follows her by bicycle, with no map, and only $80, art materials, and some dried fruit to sustain him on this treacherous pedal-powered journey through inhospitable deserts and snowy mountains.  Clearly, he survived. But von Einsiedel...

An extreme sports doc so pummelling, you may need a huff of oxygen (or a hug) afterwards, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s follow-up to Free Solo is not the Everest climbing documentary you’re expecting. It left me gasping at points, as its protagonists dice with death in ways us sea-level folk can only gaze up at in awe and bafflement. Of course, people have been (successfully) scaling Everest since 1953. Nothing new there, right? But only five of them have done it from the Chinese side of the mountain rather than the commonly used southeast ridge in Nepal – the formidable North Face route that looks like something you wouldn’t want to fly over, much less climb. Much, much less ski back down. Yet that is the task real-life partners and elite mountain skiers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson set for themselves in 2022. Chin, not only the co-director here but a friend of the couple and their fellow climber, is on hand with a dual-purpose climbing/filmmaking crew to help them achieve their dream of conquering ‘the ultimate ski run on Planet Earth’. Ahead of them are sudden avalanches, treacherous ice fields, high winds and fatally fickle weather – all captured with stunning cinematography via drone footage, helicopter shots and GoPro cameras. A sudden avalanche yields footage from inside the snow, like some terrifying new virtual reality experience. Widescreen shots of Everest beg the obvious question: how the hell do you begin to ski down that?  Ahead of them are...

Five years in the making, Ed Sayers’ feature debut brings together 40 people across 25 countries, each armed with a Super 8 camera to film the natural world on their doorstep. The result is like a lo-fi remix of Godfrey Reggio’s epic Koyaanisqatsi – both a celebration of nature and environmental omen, albeit minus the tribal warbling. Thanks to those goliath, bombastic BBC productions, nowadays we consume nature as a hyperreal hi-def event, so obsessed with spectacle there’s little space for reflection. There’s no to-the-death battles here or exotic mating rituals. Accompanied by Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres’s spectral score, this is nature, up close and often very personal. The spark for Sayers’ experiment was French filmmaker Roger Batteault, whose footage of flamingos included an eerie shot of a lone bird flying to catch up with the flock, like a broken spear gliding through a wide expanse of sky. Inspiring him to film grey seals near his Norfolk home, Sayers rallied a community of Super 8 enthusiasts and conservationists to share the world around them.The sheer variety of life is astounding. We see octopus in Patagonia; silkworms in London; water buffalo in Assam; reindeer in the Arctic Circle; fin whales in Thailand; rattlesnakes in the Mojave Desert; the puffins of Skomer Island in Wales… Inevitably, man’s impact crashes the party with footage of glaciers reduced to puddles, Kenya’s two last surviving northern white rhinos and a haunting vignette in the sunken human...

Remember the pandemic, when everyone had time to Netflix and chill? TV shows that might otherwise have come and gone became global hits, and in between the Tiger Kings and the Queen’s Gambits there was a Parisian acting agency called ASK that became a global sensation. But by the time Call My Agent became a hit, the show’s creator, Fanny Herrero, had quit, citing burnout. Despite the clamour for a season five, it never happened, partly because the show’s stars – Camille Cottin, Laure Calamy, et al – were now top of every casting director's list. (Basically the plot of one of the episodes.) Fans of the format and its self-spoofing celebrity cameos – Cécile de France, Isabelle Huppert, Jean Dujardin among the most recognisable – were left to cry over the diminishing returns of copycat shows in the UK, India, Italy, Korea, Turkey and elsewhere. Five years on and this movie is the satisfying compromise the stars and Herrero, who returns to write the script, agreed to. And it says everything about the enduring standing of Call My Agent! that George Clooney has a monumental scene-stealing cameo. Eva Longoria, Laetitia Casta and Vincent Macaigne round off the celebrity involvement. But they are the bubbles, not the champagne. Despite a hokey fourth-wall-breaking pre-credits recap of the demise of the ASK agency – jobbing actor Hervé (Nicolas Maury) fills us in on where everyone is five years later – fans will be happy that the movie doesn't take the easy route of installing...

‘I had to sacrifice a lot for the greater good. Aren’t you glad I did?’ There aren’t many people who could stare down the barrel of a camera and say this without coming across as cocky or unlikeable. Billie Jean King is an exception. Liz Garbus (Love, Marilyn) and Elizabeth Wolff's exhilarating documentary, part of ESPN’s acclaimed 30 for 30 series, pulls apart the complicated relationship between sporting greatness and social responsibility. King never set out to become a trailblazer. Give Me The Ball! takes its title from the phrase a young Billie Jean King would shout whenever there was a ball to be caught, chased or hit.  That desire to compete would later manifest in activism. Despite dominating the tennis circuit from the outset, King didn’t receive the financial rewards enjoyed by her male counterparts, routinely paying for her own travel to tournaments and working side hustles to get by. With the support of her then-husband Larry, she took matters into her own hands to secure sponsorship and create the foundation for what would become women's professional tennis. The focus of the documentary is 1973, the year of ‘the Battle of the Sexes’, when she took on chauvinist Bobby Riggs in a highly-publicised match to prove that women could compete with men on the court. Rather than rehash the film of the same name, the lens is widened to show everything else the year demanded of King. ‘Everything else’ amounted to the collapse of her 20-year relationship, the pressures of...

Six years after our own very real pandemic, Hollywood’s first Covid-inspired blockbuster manifests what many of us fantasised about during the darkest moments of the first lockdown – a broken world emptied of human life. Influenza is to blame in Ridley Scott’s film, which technically makes it an a-cough-alypse, and while there are bursts of Mad Max berserking, The Dog Stars is a surprisingly sensitive meditation on what we could have lost. It’s May, 2035. On a deserted Colorado airfield, we meet two men and a dog clinging onto existence. Josh Brolin’s shoot-’em-burn-’em ex-Marine Bangley is hellbent on defending the compound from scavengers. Jacob Elordi’s pilot Hig can’t wait to escape, flying the Rockies for signs of civilisation with his faithful Belgian Malinois. A glitchy radio message appears to promise a new life, but when Hig crash-lands his battered Cessna near a remote ranch, he gets a shotgun welcome from its owner (Guy Pearce) and curiosity from his daughter (Margaret Qualley).  From Blade Runner’s neon dystopia to Gladiator’s barbaric Rome, when it comes to immersive world-building, Scott is one of cinema’s great architects. But in The Dog Stars, we’re transported to a wasteland we’ve walked countless times before: tomb-like skyscrapers, overgrown freeways, feral packs of savages. In the ironically overpopulated genre of post-apocalyptic cinema, what makes The Dog Stars stand out from the pack?  Superficially, Scott offers a few novel twists – notably, a bison...

If you’ve fallen under the spell of House of the Dragon’s determined-to-marry-well witch, Alys Rivers, you’ll surely be drawn to Gayle Rankin’s wild turn in Scottish filmmaker Louis Paxton’s beguilingly debut, The Incomer. Rankin plays Isla, one half of an exceedingly strange, semi-feral sibling duo completed by Outlander star Grant O’Rourke as her softer, jollier-in-spirit brother, Sandy. They’ve been isolated on a remote island somewhere off the northeastern coast of Scotland, with their parents little but unreliable memories. Marrying the dark anarchy of Lord of the Flies with a dash of Limbo’s kooky, bruised heart, Paxton delivers a furiously funny piece of folklore. He’s aided in by animation director Selina Wagner’s charcoal-drawn animated sequences, which reveal that the island once teemed with locals. They were apparently betrayed by the wily mainlanders. An unrecognisable Four Weddings and a Funeral star John Hannah’s tricksy, Gollum-like selkie who lingers in the rocky shallows is another danger, wheedling at Isla and Sandy to join him in the murky depths. Hannah is marvellously menacing, with make-up and prosthetics designer Siobhán Harper-Ryan giving him a sharp-toothed smile and blubbery skin. The siblings’ dad went into the sea to keep these creatures at bay. He also taught his bizarre kids to defend the isle, insisting the only good mainlanders are those bludgeoned with a cudgel or hoiked off the cliffs. Isla and Sandy ceremonially adopt the likeness of...

A lamp-lit street’s gleam, punctuating the inky blot of night in a remote Normandy village enveloped by forest, looks for all the world like the Milky Way brought low. It’s the first sign that Eden star Félix de Givry’s beguiling debut directorial feature, Goodbye Cruel World, will lend a mystical element to this story of a lost boy finding his way. That ‘boy’ is teenager Otto Vidal, played by Milo Machado-Graner, best known for his turn as the visually impaired kid, Daniel, in Justine Triet’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall.  We hear Otto before we see him, racing through gloomy streets pursued by the bullies who’ve driven him to feel like life’s not worth living. A passing comment about the rigidity of his Catholic schooling and the nuns who stroll by his hiding spot, oblivious to his presence, illustrate his outsider status. A narrator (Françoise Lebrun) underlines his predicament with gentle grace, amplifying the almost fairy-tale nature of this melancholy story.  Otto posts an accusatory suicide note to all of his classmates, escusing only two kind girls and another boy (‘at a push’) from causing his death. He’s been pushed to his limit, as we witness him all alone on a high bridge over a roaring river that’s captured in gorgeously textured 16mm by cinematographer Tara-Jay Bangalter. Except that his desperate plunge isn’t as final as the husband’s in Anatomy of a Fall. A love song for the lonely that glows like starlight Surviving, bedraggled and ghostly, a bruised...

That high-altitude action sequence in Where Eagles Dare has sudden new competition for the most knuckle-whitening cable-car moment in cinema.  In August 2023, in the Pakistan province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a group of teenagers, travelling to school by cable car across a valley in the Himalayan foothills, were left dangling 900 feet up when two of the three cables above them abruptly snapped. The obstacles facing would-be rescuers were formidable: swirling cross winds, desperate family members, choking crowds of locals on either side of the ravine. Oh, and the prospect that the third cable could give way at any moment. Directed by Pakistani filmmaker Mohammed Ali Naqvi, this terrifically tense documentary tells the story of that nightmare commute, using a wealth of media and cameraphone footage, plus interviews and reenactments with the people involved, to piece together the 12 or so hours of bedlam that followed.The cable car, hanging at a canted angle like a frame from a horror movie, is a heart-in-mouth sight that Naqvi never cuts away from for long. Alerted to the unfolding story, the Pakistani media and then international networks arrived to capture the rescue efforts. Drone footage zooms in on the calm-looking boys inside the gondola and you wonder how they seem so cool when their lives are hanging in the balance.  The ticking-clock tension will leave you breathless Naqvi assembles all the key figures, from the determined police chief and broadcast journalist who...