Our latest movie reviews

Farewell, then, Phase 5 of the Marvelverse, with your inconsequential plotlines and D-list villains (Dar-Benn and M.O.D.O.K. anyone?).  This run of movies and TV shows post-Endgame has felt like an extended middle-age for a once all-conquering franchise groping to rediscover its mojo. The joints have stiffened on the action, the temples have started to grey on the storytelling. And how do you avoid a sense of grating overfamiliarity after 35 movies?  The answer, to a point, is Thunderbolts*. It’s a team-up superhero movie that’s ballsy enough to set aside the usual labyrinthine weave of subplots and dig into mental health, childhood trauma and domestic abuse – and do it with feeling. Sure, you’re probably arguing that all of Marvel’s superheroes are the products of trauma – even Captain America, the wholesome heart, got a brutalising serum-ing – but not quite like here. The misfit nature of its scrappy antiheroes stems from relatable psychological damage that cuts a bit deeper. An Inception-like battle inside a character’s unconscious is an especially bold touch – like director Jake Schreier (Robot & Frank) has just handed the keys to Carl Yung. And the plot? Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s scheming CIA wonk Valentina Allegra de Fontaine is facing impeachment hearings after the events of a previous movie (don’t ask, not sure). With Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) now a senator and on her case, she’s trying to bury the evidence.  It’s like director Jake Schreier has handed the keys to...

To an extent, you know what you’re getting with a documentary film called Ocean With David Attenborough. And that is no complaint. What you’re getting, even if you’ve seen versions of this before, is an always welcome thing: a well-researched, visually sumptuous celebration of nature and examination of the ways we’re ruining it.  Attenborough, who turns 99 on the day of the film’s release, explains how the world’s oceans, and our understanding of them, have changed in his lifetime. Once full of both mystery and fish, our planet’s waters are now better understood than ever – though there are still vast depths unexplored – but their wildlife populations have been decimated by pollution and careless, excessive fishing.  The cinematography, as with just about anything Attenborough puts his name to, is stunning (directors are Toby Nowlan, Keith Scholey and Colin Butfield). As Attenborough describes the huge variety of species that live beneath the waves, we see gorgeous shots of turtles munching on coral reefs, giant whales sailing through the darkness, and seaweed forests teeming with most of the cast of Finding Nemo. If you’ve watched BBC nature documentaries over the last decade, you’ll have seen similar images, but only the coldest of souls could ever tire of the sight of dolphins and seabirds all swarming around an undulating ball of silver fish. On the cinema screen it looks more breathtaking than it ever could on TV. ​We see seaweed forests teeming with most of the cast...

The standout performer in The Friend sounds like he’s already a star, but you won’t have heard of him. Doleful-eyed and expressive, he articulates the deepest emotions with wordless economy. Played by a black-and-white Great Dane called Bing, Apollo is a dog with range.   Which is handy because this sincerely-felt New York dramedy, based on Sigrid Nunez’s much-praised 2018 novel, leans hard on the piebald pooch’s ability to communicate the sadness of losing someone without whom life has no colour and joy. Of course, as a dog – albeit arguably the finest dog actor since Anatomy of a Fall’s Messi – this is communicated via sad eyes, pointy ears and curling up in places he’s not supposed to be.   The devoted Apollo belongs, initially at least, to writer, professor and lothario Walter (Bill Murray, atoning for Garfield here). Then, out of the blue, we’re at Walter’s wake. He’s left instructions for the crestfallen dog to be rehoused with his friend, writer and literary professor Iris (Naomi Watts) – a pretty selfish act considering a) he hasn’t consulted her on it, and b) she lives in a rent-controlled apartment where pets are banned. How does she honour her old friend’s wishes without becoming homeless in the process? Being lumbered with a 180-pound grief metaphor isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s a classic Murray turn in the brief time he’s granted – feckless but kinda loveable all the same, and leaving a trail of broken-hearted ex-wives in (and at) his wake – but this...

You’ll get several movies for the price of a single ticket in Ryan Coogler’s (Creed) period drama-thriller-romance-musical Sinners. And while some of these disparate elements are more successful than others, the combination is audacious enough to leave you simultaneously awed and overwhelmed by his outsized ambitions. All of this, remarkably, is packed into a single day in 1932 Mississippi, a place filled with cotton fields and Klan members. Maverick twins Smoke and Stack (both played skilfully by Coogler muse Michael B Jordan) have finally returned home after a law-eliding sojourn in Chicago. They’ve got money, liquor, and a dream: to open a juke joint for their friends and family, a place to safely connect, conspire and pitch a wang dang doodle on a Saturday night.  Everyone in their tight community plays a role, including their teenage cousin Sammie (musician Miles Caton), blues singer Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), Chinese-American grocers Grace and Bo (Li Jun Li, Yao), and the twins’ old flames Mary (an underserved Hailee Steinfeld) and Annie (standout Wunmi Mosaku). It might not be a Marvel movie but Coogler is making an epic here – and everyone is up to the task. The settings are stunning, the music stirring and the party scenes electric. In one gorgeous, metaphysical moment, Coogler draws across centuries and continents with breathtaking scope, passion, and poetry. See it in IMAX if you can, and stay for the credits. It might not be a Marvel movie, but Coogler is...

You’ve seen Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum. Now strap in for Bourne Yesterday. Meet Charlie Heller (Bohemian Rhapsody’s Rami Malek), a man who embarks on a mission of revenge with precisely none of the lethal skills he’ll need to carry it out. Not only can he not disarm an assassin with a rolled-up magazine or kill a man with a hand towel, the guy needs a YouTube video to help him break into a mark’s apartment.  That rare moment of levity runs against the grain of this straight-faced but enjoyably slick espionage thriller from director James Hawes. The British filmmaker is a veteran of Slow Horses, and while The Amateur lacks the rumpled élan and meticulous characterisation of the Gary Oldman streaming hit, it does deliver some of the same knottiness and unpredictability.   Its ‘slow horse’, Heller, is a CIA codebreaker and surveillance genius who’s allowed out of Langley’s sub-basement level for lunch breaks with his geeky work mates and not much else. Certainly not to defy his hulking Agency chief (Holt McCallany) and go on a one-man mission to avenge his wife (Rachel Brosnahan), murdered in a black-ops raid on a London hotel.   Asking you not to dwell on the massive coincidence that Heller’s otherwise unconnected wife has been randomly killed by privately contracted agents with direct links to his employers 5000 miles away, Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli’s screenplay (an update of Robert Littell’s 1981 novel) sets Heller on an off-the-books, trans-European mission...

In a surprising opening to a balls-to-the-wall combat movie, Warfare begins with Eric Prydz’s ‘Call On Me’ video (the one with the sexy ’80s aerobics sesh), as watched by a gang of grunts ogling, vibing and thrusting along to every gyration. They – and us, as an audience – need to hold onto the memory because it’s the last bit of fun anyone will be having for the next 90-odd minutes. Prydz always comes before a fall.   A military advisor on Alex Garland’s Civil War, former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza survived a full-on firefight that left his comrade Elliott Miller with a traumatic injury and no memory of the horror. Co-written and directed by Garland and Mendoza, Warfare is a forensic, immersive act of remembrance that catapults you into the heat of battle.  The pair aren’t interested in interpersonal relationships, character development or political points of view (this is very US-centric, but not tub-thumpingly patriotic). Instead, Warfare is intense, brutal, visceral, horrific. The squeamish need not apply.  The set-up is simple. On November 19, 2006 in Ramadi, Iraq, a squad of US Navy SEALs steal into an urban residential area controlled by Al-Qaeda forces under cover of night. Their mission? To clear a safe passage for the ground forces arriving the following day. For the film’s first stretch, very little happens. Warfare leaves in the bits most war films cut out, as we get to watch a squad going through their routines and protocols. There is boredom, a struggle to get a...

‘Painful to watch’ isn’t often a term of praise, but this action-comedy about a man who loses the ability to feel physical discomfort channels its unusual, nerve-numbing premise into a fun and oddly romantic ride. Thankfully, intrigue and swagger aren’t prerequisites for its unlucky hero, because introvert Nate Cain (Companion’s Jack Quaid) would be bang out of luck. It isn’t just his dull day job as an assistant manager at a bank; Nate has been born with a sensory condition that means that he’s unable to feel pain or discomfort. Great in theory; in reality, it means a liquid diet so that he doesn’t bite his tongue off and alarms set to remind himself to urinate, so that his bladder doesn’t explode.  Enter co-worker Sherry (Prey’s Amber Midthunder), whose lust for life coaxes him out of his shell. Their burgeoning opposites-attract love story is powered by two charming leads. Jack Quaid put a fun new spin on his shocked everyman in The Boys, and Midthunder is a natural as the free-spirited apple of Nate’s eye.But just as things seem to be hitting a groove, she’s kidnapped in front of Nate in a brutal bank robbery led by a delightfully unhinged Ray ‘son of Jack’ Nicholson. Instead of retreating into his man cave and licking his many, many wounds, Nate embarks on a crusade of vigilantism through San Diego to save her. But this is not Liam Neeson in Taken: his particular set of skills don’t extend much further than checking credit scores, administering first aid and never...

From Serpico to LA Confidential to Training Day, stories of straight-arrow cops navigating corruption on the force are a Hollywood staple. Will that cheeky free donut lead the principled officer spiralling into a life of backhanders and dodgy deals, or can they hold onto their morals and bring the big apples on the force to book? Ultimately, the good guy wins out – and it is invariably a guy. Sandhya Suri’s terrific slowburn drama is the non-Hollywoodised version of that story, depicting life as a woman in India’s rural police as a far murkier and less predictable affair. The British-Indian director diagnoses a problem far too deep-seated for one well-meaning, inexperienced young constable to solve, leading you into a maze of compromised ethics, police brutality, caste violence and misogyny, and refusing to point to the exit. That constable is Santosh, an emotionally bruised young woman played with tentative gumption by Shahana Goswami. When her husband of two years is killed policing a riot, she takes up the option of a so-called ‘compassionate appointment’, a real scheme in India that enables women to take up their deceased husband’s old jobs.  Suri’s sharp-edged screenplay doesn’t find much admirable in Santosh’s new police colleagues, a lazy, bribable bunch of layabouts. One bullying female officer takes particular delight in humiliating trysting couples, enforcing a strict moral code noticeably absent back at the station. The cops laugh over a meme comparing China and...

To the list of the world’s most dazzlingly imaginative animators – America’s Pixar and Laika, Japan’s Studio Ghibli, England’s Aardman, Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon – you can officially add a 30-year-old Latvian with a laptop. Flow’s Gints Zilbalodis is now a Latvian with a laptop and an Oscar, and boy, is it deserved. His DIY animation, made partly with freely-available open-source software, takes the promises of his eye-catching 2020 debut Away and fulfils it in spellbinding style. A survival epic full of mysteries and magic, it’s an animated epic worthy of Ghibli. Set in the aftermath of an inexorable, unexplained flood, it follows a small band of animals floating on a small sail boat towards an uncertain future. Its small posse of furry and feathered adventurers include a slinky, inquisitive cat; a ring-tailed lemur; an aloof secretary bird; and the hipster’s mammal of the moment, a capybara. It’s been ages since anything articulated the spirituality of the natural world as breathtakingly as this Their voyage is not Disney’s mushy The Incredible Journey redux and there’s no Life of Pi metaphor behind these characters – they behave like animals in a way that speaks to many hours’ studying at the local zoo (in one cheat, the capybara sounds were provided by a baby camel). But Flow still finds behaviourisms that are touchingly relatable. Teamwork, friendship, ingenuity and common interest are themes that run below the surface like one of the mythical whales that occasionally...

Obviously, it’s impossible to watch a Mob biopic directed by Barry Levinson (who also made Bugsy), written by Nicholas Pileggi (who co-wrote Goodfellas and Casino), produced by Irwin Winkler (Goodfellas and The Irishman), and starring Robert De Niro (surely you see where this is going) and not think about the genre-defining classics that came before it.  So let’s just acknowledge up top that comparisons won’t serve anyone well. But if you take The Alto Knights on its own terms – as an eccentric but engaging curio – there’s still plenty of fun to be had. This is particularly true regarding the two central characters: true-life Mafia frenemies Frank Costello, played by De Niro, and Vito Genovese, played by… De Niro. Though his double duty presence is an obvious gimmick, the actor remains invested enough to keep us watching all the way. De Niro imbues New York crime boss Costello with shrewd intelligence and an almost gentle gravitas, as though he genuinely wishes other people didn’t constantly require him to bribe, cheat and steal. And he plays the paranoid, hot-headed Genovese as though nobody was able to drag Joe Pesci out of retirement, so he figured he might as well just do it instead. The only thing left for De Niro to do is play warring gangsters all by himself Sure, it’s all a little quixotic, especially when the pair face off against each other. But it’s also entertaining, as long as you’re willing to go with it. And why wouldn’t you? At this point, it almost seems...