Our latest movie reviews

Disney’s live-action remakes thus far have mostly focused on the stone-cold classics; the big sweeping epics. 2002’s animated Lilo & Stitch is not one of the studio’s most glittering jewels. It’s a sweet, funny, simple story with a cute central duo and modest scale (thanks to a smaller than typical budget). It turns out to be an excellent candidate for a do-over, able to establish a personality of its own without the original looming over it. In live-action mode, Lilo & Stitch has some of the charm of an ’80s Amblin movie, like E.T. or Gremlins. Lilo (Maia Kealoha) is an orphaned Hawaiian kid who keeps accidentally getting in trouble. Her elder sister, Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong), is trying to keep her on the straight and narrow after the death of their parents. Stitch (voiced by Chris Sanders, director of the 2002 film) is a genetically engineered alien. When he’s banished from his home planet, considered too dangerous to live, he escapes to Earth, envisaging a reign of destruction. Instead, he has to pose as a dog and move in with Lilo to evade the aliens tailing him. As Stitch tries to avoid capture and Lilo risks being taken away by social services, these two misfits form an unlikely bond. It bounces along energetically under the direction of Dean Fleischer Camp, who made 2024’s adorable Marcel: The Shell With Shoes On. This is a very different proposition to that film, but Fleischer-Camp shows the same ability to quickly establish a beating heart to his story. The...

Imagine George Clooney being coerced into playing Donald Trump in a straight-faced hagiography – perhaps directed by one of White House’s new Special Ambassadors – and you’ve got the predicament faced by the Egyptian movie star at the heart of Swedish-Egyptian director Tarik Saleh’s new thriller. George Fahmy (Fares Fares), the so-called ‘Pharaoh of the Screen’, is a much-loved fiftysomething actor carving out a comfortable, westernised living on Cairo’s soundstages and in its members’ bars, parroting Samuel Beckett quotes to the much younger girlfriend (Lyna Khoudri) who looks to him for a career leg-up. But under the repressive rule of real-life president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, that feckless lifestyle leaves him wide open to blackmail. It’s made clear that if he wants to continue having a career and keep his student son out of jail, he’ll have to don el-Sisi’s old military uniform for a propaganda film called The Will of the People. He’s already a cliché, they want to make him a tool too. ‘Nothing is for free,’ he’s told. Including his freedom.  Fares, star of the two previous films in Saleh’s ‘Cairo trilogy’, The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) and The Cairo Conspiracy (2023), is a hoot as an egotistical dilettante whose dreams of an easy life in a difficult country are scuppered in brutal fashion.  It’s an Armando Iannucci-esque send-up of something deadly serious Saleh uses the first half to poke fun at both the regime and the actor, before hairpinning into a final...

No one who’s fallen for the timeless and charmingly antic worlds of Sylvain Chomet will be disappointed by this poignant eulogy to one of France’s great, if now decidedly uncool 20th century artists. Here, the French animator swaps the escapist fantasias of The Triplets of Belleville (2003) and The Illusionist (2010) for a biopic that, while more conventional, still holds wonders of its own in its depiction of an extraordinary career and 60-odd eventful years of French history. The life in question belongs to inventor, teacher, playwright, novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol (voiced by Laurent Lafitte). Best know outside the Republic as the author of Jean de Florette and Manon de Sources, but a fixture on school syllabuses in his homeland, he’s introduced receiving a smattering of applause in a sparsely attended Parisian theatre in 1956. Well-meaning friends note that soaring petrol prices caused by the Suez crisis are keeping people at home. Pagnol, though, knows his star is waned. ‘The young will sweep us under the carpet,’ he later laments at a soirée at his home, a grand Parisian pile taking on the air of a mausoleum. An artist confronted by his own obsolescence, Pagnol is reluctantly forced into one final act of creation: a memoir that’s to be serialised by Elle magazine. Flashbacks to the eventful chapters he jots down make up the meat of the film. It’s a framing device you’ve seen a hundred times before, but Chomet freshens it up by introducing the younger Pagnol...

A bold new voice is born with this story of a dad and his two sons set over a single day in Nigeria as it teeters on the edge of a coup. Nigerian-British filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr taps into universal feelings – of wide-eyed childhood discovery, parental responsibility and a feeling of a world spinning out of control – and backdrops it with an immersive sense of controlled chaos.  Written by the director and his older brother Wade and fuelled with their childhood memories, the result is touching, contemplative and unsettling – a film with the gentle impressionist gaze of Moonlight, the hard-scrabble edge of Bicycle Thieves, and a fourth-wall-breaking daring all of its own. My Father’s Shadow is also coming-of-age story – an unusual one for focusing as much on its struggling but well-intentioned dad, Folarin (Gangs of London’s Sope Dirisu), striving to be a better man, as his two boys, 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) and eight-year-old Akin (Godwin Egbo).  It’s 1993 and Nigeria has gone to the polls to elect a new president. Folarin hopes it will be social democrat MKO Abiola, but as he travels with his sons into Lagos, word spreads of a spate of killings by a military regime looking to cling to power. The country is divided. Petrol is scarce. Tension throbs from the frame. ‘Nigeria needs discipline,’ mutters a passenger on their bus ride into the city, advocating for the jackbooted junta to come.  Davies Jr’s bold debut speaks with a murmur and beats like a...

There’s no slow build in British filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, an artistically exciting and deeply uncomfortable portrait of a marriage and mind in free fall.  The film is an adaptation of a France-set, Spanish-language novel by Ariana Harwicz, and Ramsay (We Need to Talk about Kevin) moves its story to rural Montana, where young married couple, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), have moved from New York City to take over his dead uncle’s spacious but decrepit house and be nearer his parents, Pam (Sissy Spacek) and Harry (Nick Nolte). Loud and frenetic, it crunches up and down through various gears, all of them intense and rattling and never abandoning a punkish sense of anarchy and abandon while keeping a compassionate eye firmly on the woman at its core. The film’s still, long opening shot of the couple exploring their beaten-up new home is immediately unsettling: there’s the sound of rats scratching around upstairs and Seamus McGarvey’s camera – the photography throughout is stunning – feels like the ghost in the room. Straightaway there’s a raw passion and energy to Grace and Jackson’s relationship, a sense of danger, but that turns darker when a baby comes along.  The black-comic, big-hearted spirit pulls you through the despair Much of the film serves as a jumpy, fiery, fragmented impression of Grace’s mental and physical breakdown after giving birth to their son. Grace crawls through the grass with a knife; sex becomes a weapon; a...

If being locked in the Criterion Closet for a couple of hours sounds like heaven, Richard Linklater has made the perfect film for you. It’s a playful, black-and-white making-of story for Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave classic Breathless – ‘À Bout de Souffle’ to the cinephile crowd – that captures a revolutionary moment in cinema history with reverence and a touch of cheek. You’ll probably know movies that backdrop the story: Godard’s 1960 crime drama Breathless is the key text, of course, but Truffaut’s Cannes premiere of The 400 Blows is also recreated with a wink to contemporary Cannes-goers, and Linklater offers access-all-areas visits to the sets of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket and Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic noir Bob le Flambeur too. But chronology is king here. When he’s introduced, coolly intellectual behind his ever-present shades, Godard (played with distracted charisma by Parisian photographer Guillaume Marbeck) has yet to put someone else’s money where his sizeable mouth is. The French New Wave has begun and his fellow critics at film mag Cahiers du Cinéma, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and his best pal François Truffaut, have begun to establish themselves as filmmakers. Godard is in danger of being left behind, a kind of chic troll snarking from the sidelines. But as Godard famously said, all you need to make a film is a gun and a girl. His opportunity comes via the sponsorship of his soon-to-be long-suffering producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno...

A painting by the 19th century French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir appears only fleetingly in this sweet and meandering 1980s story of an imaginative schoolgirl navigating change and tragedy in her small family. But maybe the nod to Renoir’s La Petite Irène says something about Chie Hayakawa’s ambitions to get at the truth of what’s going through the head of 11-year-old Fuki (Yui Suzuki) as her father Keiji (Lily Franky) confronts serious illness and her mother Utako (Hikari Ishida) juggles work with the increasingly pressures of home life. Maybe the Japanese writer-director is nodding to the ’80s as a time of huge change in Japan, too, just as Renoir was the house painter of industrialisation and urbanisation in his time. Renoir is young Fuki’s story, and it’s her worldview that Hayakawa leans into, with young actress Suzuki an intriguing presence throughout. We’re led to believe that Fuki has been murdered right at the start, only to learn that it’s a flight of her imagination – a suggestion that not everything we see and hear will be strictly true.  It’s as interesting for what it doesn’t show as for what it does Mostly, though, this is a humanist portrait of the relationships within a family and what impending grief is doing to them, individually and collectively. Each has their own coping mechanism: mum goes to a fortune teller; dad is persuaded to invest in some health quackery; and the little girl starts to call a phone dating service, leading to a chilling...

Kristen Stewart reveals a deft directorial hand and a distinct, languid, echoing style in her vividly made, emotionally visceral exploration of the life and times of American novelist Lidia Yuknavitch.  Filmed on 16mm, split into five literary-style chapters across Lidia’s life and matching the prose of the memoir it’s adapted from, The Chronology of Water is a story of trauma, resilience, the dispelling of female shame, and gynephilic fascination. Yuknavitch is a woman who, by anyone’s definition, has had more than her fair share of suffering. In her 2011 memoir, she recounts an upbringing in ’80s Florida by a complicit mother and a sexually abusive father who continually raped both her and her older sister. She grows up to be a near-champion swimmer, but her past won’t leave her alone.  Lidia – played by Imogen Poots as a straw-haired whirlwind who barrels into adult life with a vengeful desperation for freedom and a self-destructive desire for sensation – is a force of nature.  She develops substance abuse problems, flunks out of college, gets pregnant, suffers a devastating stillbirth; she flits between relationships with men and women, using sex and drugs to fill the void. And, most importantly, she writes her heart out, growing a career in the literary world both because – and in spite of – the whirling trauma of her memories.  Eventually, she finds some hard-won stability, through her writing most of all. All of these experiences are rendered by Stewart in...

However you feel about Bono before seeing this slick, souped-up ‘audience with’ doc will probably be reinforced by the time the credits roll. If you love him, the doc will brighten his messianic glow. If you loathe him, you’ll easily find reasons to throw tomatoes. If you couldn’t care less about the pint-sized Irish rocker and activist, it’s hard to imagine why you’d be watching it in the first place.  Whether it’s Bono’s enormous success or his attempts to make a difference in the world (or most likely a mix of the two), Bono inspires strong reactions, and you can feel him here trying to bring the whole enterprise of his life a little closer to Earth. He called on Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly) to film his one-man show at New York’s Beacon Theater in 2023, perhaps attracted by the New Zealand filmmaker’s work with Nick Cave. It’s a performance that’s self-consciously stripped back, with just a few chairs and a table on stage, with Bono recounting stories of his childhood, mother, father, wife and band mates and regularly breaking into song, with renditions here of hits including ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’. Dominik layers on a silvery black-and-white glamour, delivering a multi-angle magic act that lends a constant sense of movement and energy to the film.  This good-natured hagiography isn’t anywhere near free of pomposity The most endearing and interesting stretches of the film feature Bono discussing his parents. His mother Iris died...

This French queer coming-of-age story, adapted from a novel by Fatima Daas, is intriguing from start to finish in how it depicts one teenage woman navigating conflicting worlds of family, religion, school, sex and love.  Such stories of awakening are frequent on film, yet The Little Sister (aka La Petite Dernière) is unusual in that Fatima (Nadia Melliti), who we first meet praying alone, is a French-Algerian Muslim from the rougher side of Paris. Her high-school world is one of homophobic bullying and banter, and her home life, where she’s the youngest of three girls, is one where there’s a quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) assumption that she’ll follow her parents by marrying, starting a family and looking after a husband and kids. Put simply: that’s simply not happening. But that’s easier said than done, and this entire film, told over four seasons as Fatima finishes school and starts university, depicts the pull of conformity and the hard push of change and adaptation. Fatima’s awakening of her sexual identity is the main focus: as her school career is coming to an end, she hits the apps; she meets women at first almost like a journalist on assignment, quizzing one amused older women on the exact details of lesbian sex; she starts to fall in love with Ji-Na (Park Ji-Min), a French-Korean medic who she meets at a workshop for her asthma, although Ji-Na’s mental health challenges get in the way. Sex is a new frontier, but so are words Sex is a new frontier, but so too...