Film
Matt Wolf
We first see Leigh (Frankie Box), the cheeky heroine of Scottish writer-director Eva Riley’s debut feature Perfect 10, hanging upside down during a gymnastics workout. The image is appropriate given that the teenager’s Sussex life – an aimless routine given what vague shape it has by her athletic interests – is about to be turned upside down by the unexpected arrival in her midst of an older half-brother, Joe (Alfie Deegan), whom she’s not known before.What transpires is a tale that locates real sweetness within the sullen as the duo form a bond, however shortlived, that takes them both by Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Seth Rogen offers up double the laughs by taking on both lead roles in a time-hopping, Rip-Van-Winkle screwball comedy, but with an oddly mixed conservative message about the merits of family and religion.The screenplay is based on a four-part New Yorker short story called Sell-Out by Simon Rich. That piece of writing along with other short stories earned him a reputation as a modern-day PG Wodehouse, not to mention being SNL’s youngest ever writer and polishing scripts for Pixar. Rich’s writing is sharp, often high-concept, and very, very funny. But the story has lost some of its Read more ...
Owen Richards
Belgian filmmaking duo the Dardenne Brothers have long been darlings of Cannes Film Festival, winning awards for hardhitting dramas like La Promesse, Le Silence de Lorna and The Kid with the Bike. Their latest offering Young Ahmed is no different, a domestic terrorist tale which won them Best Director at 2019’s festival. Surely by beating Bong Joon-Ho, Celine Sciamma and Ken Loach, the film would stand up to scrutiny?The titular Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi, pictured above right) is an introspective teenager, thoroughly devoted to his imam’s strict interpretation of the Qu’ran. Both his Muslim Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Queen, performances and production design drive this campest, funniest and sexiest of the post-Star Wars space boom. Flash Gordon is a film about a classic American comic-strip hero made by a cynical English director, Mike Hodges, and dreamy Italian producer, Dino De Laurentiis. As this 4K fortieth-anniversary edition makes clear, American leads Sam Jones and Melody Anderson were innocents abroad among arch British character actors and extravagantly erotic Italians, almost as much as their characters Flash and Dale Arden are on Mongo’s moons.The plot is straight from Alex Raymond’s 1934 comic Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This sober French space movie is concerned with what a female astronaut leaves behind on Earth, not what she finds in the cosmic dark. Sarah (Eva Green) has been selected for a European Space Agency mission towards Mars, realising a childhood dream. Punishing training prepares her for separation from Earth, and from eight-year-old daughter Stella (Zelié Boulant-Lemesle).Green’s layered performance of female strength rebukes Hollywood's erotic exotic typecasting, letting rage and tears ripple through her then striding on. Men aren’t Sarah’s enemies, but privileged, different and to be Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Minutes into Make Up, Claire Oakley’s auspicious first feature as writer-director, unearthly sounds welcome unwitting Ruth (Molly Windsor) to her intimidating baptismal adventure as an 18-year-old who's not so much bi-curious as bi-phobic. A nail-biter to begin with, she’s soon hearing and seeing portents of horror everywhere, not least on the tips of her fingers.An adolescent-seeming Derby woman, Ruth has travelled by coach and taxi to a coastal Cornwall caravan site to join her longtime boyfriend Tom (Joseph Quinn), a regular winter worker there. The sly middle-aged manager Shirley (Lisa Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may be one of the first movies to be shown in cinemas post-lockdown, but Unhinged is a pale ghost of some much better movies. Its headlining hook is the presence of Russell Crowe in the central role of a road-rage vigilante itching to find victims upon whom to vent his spleen – at one point he gives his name as Tom Cooper, but it probably isn’t – yet Crowe is barely recognisable as the star who bossed Gladiator or rocked the house in LA Confidential. You could almost imagine he picked this role because they paid him to loom large on screen while having to learn hardly any dialogue.Director Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like a sub-par Natural Born Killers for Gen Z, director-screenwriter Joshua Caldwell’s latest film, featuring Disney-child-star-turned-porn-director Bella Thorne, tackles the perils of social media like a parent trying to navigate TikTok. Arielle (Thorne) is a provocative Florida teen whose sole desire is to become famous any way she can. After a video of Arielle beating up a girl in a night club goes viral, she sees her road to stardom lies in making videos of violent acts to boost her online profile. Having dragged reluctant ex-con Dean (Jake Manley) along for the ride, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
RKO’s Dance, Girl, Dance was remarkable as a vehicle for two emerging stars, Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball, that stealthily radicalised its backstage setting and tried to slap moviegoers out of their comfort zone – probably the reason it failed commercially on release in August 1940.The fifteenth and penultimate feature directed by Dorothy Arzner, Hollywood’s only female director of the 1930s and 1940s, turned a routine comic melodrama about rival hoofers into a vexed appraisal of the compromises faced by women performers striving for success, whether financially or creatively, in the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s no accident that the eponymous young antihero of Coincoin and the Extra-Humans loses his virginity to the daughter of a French white nationalist in a field close to a sewage farm. The stench of racism pervades the hilarity of Bruce Dumont’s follow-up to his 2014 miniseries Le P’tit Quinquin, which happily features the same principal cast members. Available in four 52-minute episodes but more hypnotic when watched in one sitting, Coincoin is a deceptively gentle polemical comedy so rich in ideas it deserves its own sequel. Hopefully, the story of the Pas-de-Calais farmer’s son Read more ...
mark.kidel
The tortuous drama of James M Cain’s 1940’s thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice has inspired many films: the slow-burning mix of erotic desire, temptation, murder and guilt was ideally suited to American film noir, so it’s in some ways surprising to find is as the source of inspiration for Michelangelo Antonioni’s first full-length film (Cronaca di un Amore – Story of a Love Affair) a kind of counterblast to the neo-realism that dominated Italian cinema in 1950, the year of the film’s release.The story is only loosely based on the Cain classic, more the tawdry spirit than the thrilling Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’m for sure getting rid of it,” 34-year-old Bridget (cool, understated Kelly O’Sullivan, who also wrote the script; she was creatively inspired by Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird) tells her younger, casual boyfriend Jace (an endearing Max Lipchitz) when she finds out she’s pregnant.Alex Thompson’s realistic debut feature, full of fine performances from relatively unknown actors and acclaimed at SXSW in 2019, busts taboos with a light touch. There will be blood: menstrual blood, lots of it from the start, more consistently featured than in I May Destroy You. After Jace and Bridget have sex – period Read more ...