Film
Adam Sweeting
Anyone who learned to love Bob Odenkirk from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul (let alone his stints with Ben Stiller and Larry Sanders) was surely wrong-footed (but in a good way) when he appeared as a reclusive but lethal all-action dynamo in Nobody and Nobody 2. It was as if somebody had cast Harry Enfield as Ethan Hunt.In Normal, under the firm directorial hand of Billericay’s own Ben Wheatley, Odenkirk deftly extends his range a little further as Sheriff Ulysses Richardson. In a story Odenkirk penned with co-writer Derek Kolstad (who created the John Wick franchise and wrote both Nobody Read more ...
graham.rickson
Though set in a Czech village during the last months of World War Two, armed conflict is peripheral in Karel Kachyňa’s Long Live the Republic! (Ať žije republika). We do see the chaotic departure of German troops in an early scene, and though their actions are pivotal to the plot, the struggles which Kachyňa depicts are the everyday ones experienced by his young protagonist Oldřich. Kachyňa worked on the screenplay with his long-term collaborator Jan Procházka, who described his source novel as about “how I saw and experienced the end of the great war… my happy, painful, already so distant Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Billie Eilish’s second concert film joins a newly lucrative genre, following Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’s $267 million box-office. Both are marketed as participatory filmgoing, turning cinemas into cut-price venues where fans can relive or imagine communing with their heroes. James Cameron’s co-direction with Eilish in his favoured 3D format adds supposed stature, but this remains incurious star-sanctioned product. Eilish is the visual opposite of Swift’s traditionally glamorous feminine persona. The latter’s arch, “Oh, hi!” as she opened her Eras act in silver and red showgirl finery Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan) has, he says, painted nothing but shit in 30 years and nothing at all for 20. In the Sixties he was a major star of the British art scene. Now he’s reduced to making personalised video messages for fans (apparently he still has plenty), wearing a blue beret for an authentically artistic look. £149 a pop, £249 “if I sign”.This is prolific director Steven Soderbergh’s fourth collaboration with screenwriter Ed Solomon (Mosaic, No Sudden Move, Full Circle) and they created it with McKellan and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You), who plays an art forger, specifically in Read more ...
James Saynor
If you seek a filmmaker to create the fine grain of 20th-century Europe at its most traumatised, you can’t do better than Hungary’s László Nemes. The textures of his grinding Holocaust movie, Son of Saul (2015), are hard to dispel from the mind. His new film is set in a broken Budapest a year after the failed uprising against communism in 1956, and anyone with even a folk memory of the 1950s will recognise the scruffy streets, weathered rooms and dilapidated lifestyle items of that time.Each corner of the screen is filled with décor, props and clothes that archive austerity –everything Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In a notable case of nominative determinism, the 2025 film about a kabuki star, Kokuho – meaning “national treasure” – became just that in Japan, a box-office smash. The keening voices and ultra-stylised mannerisms of the genre are not staples of Western entertainment, so a three-hour feature film about a kabuki actor sounds like a tough proposition here. But the time is well spent and flies past.Kokuho’s storyline is the familiar one of the isolating life that supremely gifted artists face and the people they sacrifice along the way in their pursuit of perfection. Think virtually any biopic Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Carla Simón’s latest autofiction disinters the post-Franco plague of heroin and AIDS which killed her parents and that of Marina (Llúcia Garcia), her indefatigable 18-year-old surrogate in this lyrical story of shame, memory and love.Simón was orphaned by AIDS contracted from sharing needles by the time she was six, and Marina shares this biography, being raised in Barcelona by her mum’s family. Discovering a document she requires for a scholarship to study cinema states her dad had no child, she contacts his Galician family for the first time since his death. The quest to correct the legal Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
In Rose of Nevada, written and directed by Mark Jenkin, George MacKay plays Nick, a family man living in an impoverished present-day Cornish fishing village. He joins a trip on a once-lost trawler because he needs money to repair his roof. When the boat returns with a big catch, Nick and his colleague Liam (Callum Turner) are calmly greeted by the villagers as members of the crew that had disappeared a few years before Nick's birth. Stuck in the vanished but more plentiful world of 1993, Nick and the morally laxer Liam respond in different ways. With typical understatement, MacKay Read more ...
johncarvill
Akira Kurosawa coulda been a contender. He used to be canon. Some of the critical sheen flaked off a while back, though. He hasn’t had a film in the top 10 of the Sight & Sound critics’ poll since 1982, the cognoscenti having pivoted to other Japanese masters such as Ozu, or Mizoguchi. Kurosawa is docked points for being too grabby, too Western, too prone to bourgeois sentimentality. His films commit the ultimate sin: they pander.No polemics here, but if you wanted to take up a critical katana on Kurosawa’s behalf, you could do worse than adduce Red Beard. The director himself called it “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sky Atlantic’s new thriller, Prisoner, is a tense and twisty story involving a sinister crime syndicate called Pegasus, whose boss is a sneery tycoon called Harrison Dempsey. This bunch are planning to cause mayhem and chaos across Europe.However, there is one man who might be able to throw a spanner in Pegasus’s works. He is Tibor Stone, a professional hitman who worked for Pegasus, and is said to have killed at least 47 victims. Now, assisted by dogged prison guard Amber Todd (Izuka Hoyle), he’s prepared to give evidence in court which could bring down Dempsey and scupper the Pegasus Read more ...
James Saynor
We tend to indulge hagiography when it comes to biopics of pop icons. To get the rights to their music, producers often have to let the icons themselves pull the strings. It’s a pact much like the compromises we make all our lives with the music industry – becoming fans of a world riddled with rip-offs, scams and scandals. We’ll only pay to see the film if we’re given the music, as we’re only half-interested in the life.At the same time, stories of addiction and frailty and romantic fiascos, only to be overcome, are carefully laundered into the movie: they serve to bolster the cool of the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In Mark Jenkin’s Cornish cinema, lost boats, drowned men and ways of life wash back in with the tide, nothing truly gone. Where his feature debut Bait (2019) tackled the violence stirred by second-home gentrification in a humiliated fisherman and Enys Men (2022) found elliptical folk-horror in tin mine echoes, Rose of Nevada falls through time in a fishing village which is barely hanging on.The new work is Jenkin’s biggest production by far, but still homemade in mainstream terms. Two name actors, George MacKay and Callum Turner, lead his cast for the first time, fitting happily into his Read more ...