Film
Nick Hasted
Armageddon is here again, as Kathryn Bigelow’s first film in eight years examines the minutes before a nuclear missile hits Chicago from multiple perspectives, finding no hope anywhere.Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is our first witness, clocking on as normal in the White House Situation Room, where a missile launch at a febrile international moment is at first logged as inconsequential. When it sickeningly dips from orbit towards the US, Ferguson’s patrician cool exudes the comforting professionalism you’d wish for at the potential end of the world, till she calls her husband and Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Idris Elba has only just appeared as the British Prime Minister in the action comedy Heads of State (2025) – now he's portraying the American President in Kathryn Bigelow's tense political thriller A House of Dynamite.The White House Situation Room is on red alert, and Elba's President must avert a nuclear escalation. He runs through theoretical emergency scenarios with his staff at hand yet ultimately has to act alone by making the critical decision.That's the setup of Bigelow's film, which plays out like a triptych, with the imminent nuclear strike repeated three times from different Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Urchin feels like a genuine moment in British cinema. Thematically, it offers a highly original, thoughtful, affecting account of the endless cycle of misfortune and institutional ineptness that can trap someone in homelessness. At the same time, it marks the coming of age in the careers of two brilliant young talents. Harris Dickinson has been quietly asserting himself as an actor over the last few years, with a diversity of roles in films including Beach Rats, Triangle of Sadness, Scrapper and Babygirl, and in the TV mini-series A Murder at the End of the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This genial oddity – its pithier French title is Complètement Cramé, meaning something along the lines of completely burnt out – stars John Malkovich and Fanny Ardant and is directed by best-selling author Gilles Legardinier, who adapted it from his own novel. Its goofiness works, some of the time, partly because of Malkovich’s French, which is fluent yet delivered in a halting drawl with an English/American accent so bad it’s almost good.Still, he does bring a strange zest to the unlikely role of Andrew Blake, a successful English businessman whose French wife died recently. He longs to Read more ...
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight review - vivid adaptation of a memoir about a Rhodesian childhood
Helen Hawkins
Fans of Alexandra Fuller’s fine memoir of her childhood in Africa may be wary of this film adaptation by the actress Embeth Davidtz, her directing debut. But they should not be. This is an equally fine, sensitive rendering of Fuller’s story, with a miraculous performance by seven-year-old Lexi Venter at its heart.The setting is Rhodesia as it evolves into Zimbabwe after the Bush War ends and, in 1980, the socialist Zanu PF leader, Robert Mugabe, is elected prime minister. The Fullers have a cattle farm near Umtali in the east, near the Mozambique border. They and the other local whites live a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paul Thomas Anderson’s frantic One Battle After Another is a storm warning for a fascist America and both a lament and a rallying call for revolutionary fervour.Unfurling in the early Obama years and the near future, it’s a late ‘60s/early ‘70s West Coast throwback that channels a gutsy female Black Panthers vibe, Bullitt-style car chases, and an Altmanesque gallery of fanatics and smooth operators on either side of the political divide. It might be the best Hollywood film of 2025; ahead of next year’s Midterm Elections, nothing can touch it as the movie of the historical moment.Extrapolated Read more ...
Justine Elias
What's going wrong with teenage boys and young men? Like the lauded Netflix series Adolescence, Steve – the second film collaboration between star-producer Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants – takes a bold and intriguing approach in its search for answers.Adapted from Max Porter's novella Shy, the film focuses on teachers as well as students, and it's an apt vehicle for Murphy, whose parents are both veteran educators. Where Adolescence found fault with toxic social media and an education system that treats students like prisoners, Steve is set in pre-social media 1996 at the fictional Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Some time in the not too distant future, there are only two films on offer: Duck Soup, and, if you order the DVD in advance, Zoolander. And you have to watch them in a museum.Canadian director Ann Marie Fleming’s unusual, semi-dystopian fantasy is shot by C Kim Miles in the gorgeous Powell River area of British Columbia. In spite of excellent performances from the two leads, Sandra Oh and Keira Jang, it fails to come to life and has a clunky, didactic feel, though it looks very pretty.Ellie (Oh) lives with her daughter Kiah (Jang) in a charming wooden house with a beautiful garden where she Read more ...
James Saynor
Perhaps only in Japan might it be thought the height of delinquency for a bunch of schoolkids is to spend the night sneaking back to school, climbing in and hanging out in a music room. Happyend, a Japanese teen-rebellion story, shows its central posse of disaffected sixth-formers carrying out just such a wild and crazy stunt near the start.And then a couple of them – the facetious Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and the moodier Kou (Yukito Hidaka) – pull off a scallywag move that’s positively Dada-ist: they haul the principal’s prized marigold car onto its backside in the parking lot, like a “car Read more ...
James Saynor
Somehow both rugged and smooth, embodying American values yet often turning up his collar against them, Robert Redford – who died on 16 September, aged 89 – was one of the biggest movie stars of the post-war period, as well as a stalwart, transformative supporter of independent film.These two sides to his movie career seem strangely at odds, for many of the Young Turk directors his Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival heroically fostered were unlikely to want to cast him in many of their films. Square-jawed, blue-eyed and bronze-haired, with an impossible-to-resist grin and a limited Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In the summer of 2005, Robert Redford, who died this week, attended the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, to collect a life achievement award. And his appearance in front of the media coincided with a startling news story that was rippling around the world. Just a week before, Mark Felt, a former deputy director of the FBI, admitted that he was the mysterious Deep Throat – the anonymous source who, in the 1970s, had offered Washington Post reporters information about Watergate, the conspiracy that would lead to the fall of President Richard Nixon. This Read more ...
graham.rickson
Westerns had long been popular with German cinema audiences, some of the most successful being early 1960s West German adaptations of novels by Karl May, a slippery late-19th writer whose books were hugely admired by Hitler. East Germany’s state-run studio DEFA responded by producing The Sons of Great Bear (Die Söhne der großen Bärin) in 1966, the first of East Germany’s "Indianerfilme".Offering an alternative, anti-imperialist take on the American frontier myth, producer Hans Malich explained that DEFA’s film would portray white settlers as oppressors, Native Americans (still referred to as Read more ...