Film Reviews
Ed Atkins, Tate Britain review - hiding behind computer generated doppelgängersFriday, 04 April 2025
The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is to start at the end by watching Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me, a film he has just completed. It lasts nearly two hours but is worth the investment since it reveals what the rest of the work tries hard to avoid openly confronting – grief. Read more... |
Misericordia review - mushroom-gathering and murder in rural FranceWednesday, 02 April 2025
“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” The Aesop-ian maxim roughly applies to Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) in Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia. Though unemployed Toulouse baker Jérémie doesn’t acquire the business that was run by his deceased mentor Jean-Pierre, the film’s ambiguous ending suggests he might still share it with the widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Unless or until the gendarmes come calling. Read more... |
A Working Man - Jason Statham deconstructs villains againMonday, 31 March 2025
The typical Jason Statham movie character – muscular, resourceful, drily humorous – could probably carve an army into mincemeat using a few odds and ends nicked from the local Hobbycraft. In A Working Man, Statham’s second collaboration with writer-director David Ayer (The Beekeeper), the star defends the helpless with pickaxes and sledgehammers. And then he gets really violent. Read more... |
The End review - surreality in the salt mineFriday, 28 March 2025
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). Read more... |
La Cocina review - New York restaurant drama lingers too longWednesday, 26 March 2025
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. Read more... |
Brief History of a Family review - glossy Chinese psychological thriller feels shallowSaturday, 22 March 2025
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. Read more... |
Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other review - a portrait of photographer Joel MeyerowitzFriday, 21 March 2025
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. Read more... |
The Alto Knights review - double dose of De Niro doesn't hit the spotFriday, 21 March 2025
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. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: director François Ozon on 'When Autumn Falls'Thursday, 20 March 2025
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). Read more... |
Santosh review - powerful study of prejudice and police corruptionThursday, 20 March 2025
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. Read more... |
Flow review - come the apocalypse, cue the animalsWednesday, 19 March 2025
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. Read more... |
Opus review - the press trip from hell, starring John Malkovich and Ayo EdebiriMonday, 17 March 2025
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. Read more... |
All Happy Families review - unhappy in their own waySaturday, 15 March 2025
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.” Read more... |
Black Bag review - lies, spies and unpleasant surprisesFriday, 14 March 2025
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. Read more... |
Sister Midnight review - the runaway bridegroomThursday, 13 March 2025
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. |
Bonhoeffer review - flawed biopic of a saintly man of courageSaturday, 08 March 2025
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. Read more... |
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