mon 31/03/2025

Film Reviews

The End review - surreality in the salt mine

India Lewis

The End, a quasi-musical from Joshua Oppenheimer, who has previously only produced documentaries, is a surreal examination of a group of individuals isolated from the chaos of a collapsing external world. Sheltered (or trapped?) in an eerily beautiful salt mine are a mother (Tilda Swinton), father (Michael Shannon), son (George MacKay), their doctor (Lennie James), butler (Tim McInnerny), and friend (Bronagh Gallagher).

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La Cocina review - New York restaurant drama lingers too long

Saskia Baron

La Cocina is one of those films that cuts an excellent trailer, succinctly delivering just enough characters, plot and visual flair to entice an audience that enjoyed recent dramas set in restaurant kitchens like The Bear, Boiling Point and The Menu.

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Brief History of a Family review - glossy Chinese psychological thriller feels shallow

Saskia Baron

Brief History of a Family is a psychological thriller with a story familiar to anyone who has seen Ripley, Saltburn or Six Degrees of Separation. A clever young man with low social status infiltrates a far more privileged family, with devastating results. The difference here is that it's set not among American or European elites but in the booming economy of China with its high-tech citadels and international aspirations. 

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Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other review - a portrait of photographer Joel Meyerowitz

Saskia Baron

Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other is a documentary portrait of photographer Joel Meyerowitz, acclaimed for his pioneering use of colour in the 1960s when only black and white images were taken seriously as an art form. My European Trip: Photographs from the Car,  his debut show at MOMA in 1968 was a breakthrough.  Hugely successful gallery shows around the world and countless books have followed. 

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The Alto Knights review - double dose of De Niro doesn't hit the spot

Adam Sweeting

The power struggle between New York crime bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello is one of the foundational stories of the American Mafia, though perhaps asking Robert De Niro to play both of them was a trifle over-optimistic.

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theartsdesk Q&A: director François Ozon on 'When Autumn Falls'

Nick Hasted

François Ozon is France’s master of sly secrets, burying hard truths in often dazzling surfaces, from Swimming Pool’s erotic mystery of writing and murder in 2003 to the teenage boy cuckooing his way into his middle-aged mentor’s life in In the House (2012).

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Santosh review - powerful study of prejudice and police corruption

Helen Hawkins

Held up by the censors in India though screened at Cannes and nominated for an International Oscar, Sandhya Suri’s 2024 film Santosh serves as a bookend to Payal Kapadia’s poignant All We Imagine As Light, about women in Mumbai experiencing less hassled lives outside the city. Suri’s heroine moves in the reverse direction. 

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Flow review - come the apocalypse, cue the animals

Saskia Baron

I so wanted to like Flow. I’d heard good things from usually reliable critic friends who’d seen it already and told me it had enchanted them and their pets.

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Opus review - the press trip from hell, starring John Malkovich and Ayo Edebiri

Markie Robson-Scott

Writer Ariel (Ayo Edebiri; The Bear) has worked at a music magazine for three years but in spite of coming up with great ideas, she never gets assigned stories.

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All Happy Families review - unhappy in their own way

John Carvill

Director Haroula Rose’s gentle, good-hearted new comedy-drama All Happy Families takes its title from the famous first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

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Black Bag review - lies, spies and unpleasant surprises

Adam Sweeting

Michael Fassbender recently starred in Paramount+’s rather laborious spy drama The Agency, but here he finds himself at the centre of a much more sly and streamlined operation.

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Sister Midnight review - the runaway bridegroom

James Saynor

Marriage is not often presented in cinema as a bowl of mangoes, but it’s rarely shown as so morbidly strange as in this reckless corker of a debut feature written and directed by Karan Kandhari, and backed by Film4.

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Bonhoeffer review - flawed biopic of a saintly man of courage

Sebastian Scotney

The German theologian, pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a saintly, courageous figure, of major historical significance. Those are good reasons to ensure that his story gets told and becomes better known. At a time when fanatical violent nationalism is on the rise and religion has been commandeered to support it, Bonhoeffer's work and his contribution to ideas have a renewed relevance.

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Twiggy review - portrait of a supermodel who branched out

Markie Robson-Scott

When Twiggy burst on to the scene in 1966, she was a beacon of hope for all flat-chested, short-haired, skinny girls. Of course we couldn’t look as fabulous as she did, with her enormous eyes and high forehead and long legs, but we could try.

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On Falling review - human cogs in a merciless machine

Graham Fuller

Alienation, isolation, and instability are the fruits of working as a “picker” in the chilling labour drama On Falling. The first feature written and directed by the Porto-born, Edinburgh-based filmmaker Laura Carreira presents post-industrial gig economy work as a dystopia.

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The Last Showgirl review - Pamela Anderson stars as a middle-aged Vegas dancer

Markie Robson-Scott

Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is a dancer. She’s been with Le Razzle Dazzle, an outdated Las Vegas show that’s full of “breasts, rhinestones and joy”, in her words, for 30 years. And now it’s closing. Where can she go, at the age of 57?

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