It’s the summer vacation and eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) and her three brothers have moved into a new house on Vancouver Island with their Hungarian parents. The kids trampoline, visit a wildlife preserve with their mother, walk on the beach, make paper boats and sail them in the kitchen sink. Dappled sunlight is filtered through trees. There’s a feeling of boredom and of time passing slowly. Their father (Adam Tompa) silently films everything on his video camera.Jeremy (an impressive Erik Beddoes, pictured below), a teenager, is several years older than the other three and a lanky, Read more ...

Modesty is the last refuge of fantasy franchises once too big to fail. Much like The Mandalorian and Grogu and Captain America: Brave New World, Supergirl is a scaled-back sf story with minor-league villains and a manageable quest. Two films into James Gunn’s DC Extended Universe reboot, it already feels like a fill-in.It’s still a long way from last orders in the pub crawl glimpsed when Kara Zor-El/Supergirl (Milly Alcock) cameoed in Superman as she continues her interstellar 23rd birthday party. The cousin of Kal-El/Superman (David Corenswet) is more like his surly kid sister, exasperated Read more ...

If screwball noir is a subgenre (encompassing Something Wild,  Fargo, The Long  Kiss Goodnight,  Wild at Heart, After Hours), then Anders Thomas Jensen is its Danish proponent.  The Last Viking is a highwire act in which throwaway comic barbs delivered at a clip are interrupted by brutal violence, ostensibly with the aim of keeping the audience ricocheting between laughs and gasps.  Whether it works here is another question, but it looks like the cast, most of whom have worked with Jensen before and will be familiar to fans of Scandinavian cinema, were having a very Read more ...

Nineteen-ninety-five was the dawn of the internet for most people, and the same year saw the release of the first Toy Story movie. Yet cyberspace and “tech” has rarely intruded into the frantic playroom of the Toy Story characters. Toy Story 3 (2010) was at one stage due to have them searching for one of their kin on the web until that script was ditched. (It was a brief time when the franchise was taken away from Pixar, the legendary outfit that pioneered cartoons done by computer chip.)Today, though, our zombieland of bleary eyes and stressed scrolling on small screens can no longer be Read more ...

Fans of classic Hollywood movies are liable to suffer a stab of frustration these days, when polls or vox pops canvas people’s favourite films. Selections seem to skew towards the worthy; there’s a performative whiff to a lot of it. Those Criterion Closet Pick videos are a case in point: “Pixie Buttermore, breakout star of Slithering Zombies 4, selects Woman in the Dunes”. God forbid somebody should pick something from the Golden Age.In this context, Some Like it Hot  – now playing nationally as part of the celebrations around Marilyn Monroe’s centenary – stands out in the top 50 of Read more ...

Madfabulous, director Celyn Jones’ retelling of the true story of an heir who bankrupted a peerage, is a truly beautiful film – worth a watch if only for the excellent outfits worn by its iconic queer antagonist (played by Callum Scott Howells). Sailing into his new life, wearing his mother’s burgundy dress, Henry Paget, fifth Marquess of Anglesey (Ynys Môn), "Toppy" (as he is nicknamed), has come to live by his mother’s rule: “always be true to yourself, Henry, it’s the greatest gift you have.” However, tragedy is already near at hand – Toppy coughs into a handkerchief in the first Read more ...

You’d watch Hamnet for the visuals alone, director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal flooding the screen with lush greens and browns, 16th century rural England brought to physical life with an eye-popping attention to detail. We first meet Jessie Buckley’s Agnes in dense woodland gathering plants, a gift for falconry signalling her otherness. Though the locals whisper that she’s the daughter of a witch, she proves irresistible to glove maker and Latin tutor William (Paul Mescal). He charms her with his storytelling abilities and she reciprocates by reading his palm, hinting at a Read more ...

Spielberg’s new close encounter of the third kind asks for faith in humanity and extraterrestrial life which it struggles to earn, his old sense of wonder only fitfully sparking as he argues that, whether contemplating our neighbours or the cosmos, we are not alone.Jaws, Close Encounters and Spielberg’s later Munich all borrowed from the Seventies conspiracy thriller, and Disclosure Day too begins as Daniel (Josh O’Connor) pilfers copious buried alien evidence from the US government’s secret Wardex Corporation, taking startled girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) along on his flight from company boss Read more ...

Charli xcx’s cinema blitz includes seven acting roles and Wuthering Heights’ soundtrack, reinforcing her cultural ubiquity since 2024’s Brat summer. Film remains an adjunct to her sensational avant-electropop, not yet following Lady Gaga’s transition to Oscar-winner and pop part-timer. Pete Ohs’ micro-budget Erupcja anyway trades minimally on her persona, trusting her charisma to underwrite a character who credibly triggers volcanos.Bethany (Charli xcx) is in Warsaw from London for a weekend during which boyfriend Rob (Will Madden, pictured below left with Charli xcx) means to propose, a Read more ...

Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert is one of those albums that transcends its genre; it’s not only the best-selling jazz solo album of all time, but the best-selling piano album of any kind. And aside from its almost transcendental quality, this success reflects the mythical reputation of the one-off concert that it records.Ido Fluk’s film is a fictionalised account of that concert, which took place in Köln’s opera house in 1975, late at night, for a packed crowd of jazz afficionados. The legend of the performance lies in the fact that it should not have taken place: on the night, Jarrett Read more ...

Freshly-exhumed from the vaults, this latest Children's Film Foundation selection follows an established template. We get nine pacy short features taken from different eras in the CFF’s existence (in this case, between 1954 and 1980), along with a selection of choice extras. BFI producer and film historian Vic Pratt’s booklet notes are worth this set’s purchase price alone: that “CFF films were good, clean, fast-moving fun: short, sweet, high on kid-based comedy hi-jinks and straightforward adventure; low on boring grown-ups’ stuff like romance or overly complicated plots” pretty much sums up Read more ...

Steve Martin famously said that writing about music was like trying to dance architecture, so maybe making a movie about painting is like – I don’t know – trying to chant ceramics. But this Britain-New Zealand co-production has a go at following in the footsteps of films such as The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991), both of which got us more than half-interested in the deeply mundane and scarily intense business of daubing paint.It tells of the very extended process by which supermodel Kate Moss was limned by postwar portraiture colossus Lucian Freud in 2001. So Read more ...