Film Reviews
Honey Don’t! review - film noir in the bright sunTuesday, 09 September 2025
The Coen brothers’ output has been so broad-ranging, and the duo so self-deprecating, that critics have long had difficulty getting their arms around them. Telling stories of distemper in the American heartland, with the occasional drive-by hit on Old Hollywood, they defined indie cinema for a generation and then perhaps single-handedly released it from its ghetto and merged it into the mainstream. Read more... |
The Courageous review - Ophélia Kolb excels as a single mother on the edgeFriday, 05 September 2025
“I never abandoned you,” says Jule (Ophélia Kolb; Call My Agent!) to her 10-year-old daughter Claire (Jasmine Kalisz Saurer), setting a fairly low bar as far as motherhood is concerned. Read more... |
Little Trouble Girls review - masterful debut breathes new life into a girl's sexual awakeningFriday, 29 August 2025
Taking its title from a Sonic Youth track whose lyrics describe someone who seems good on the outside but is bad inside, this debut feature from the Slovenian director Urska Djukic is a small miracle. Its 90 minutes deftly draw us into the psychology of pubescent teens in a fresh, often funny, always transporting way. Read more... |
Young Mothers review - the Dardennes explore teenage motherhood in compelling dramaFriday, 29 August 2025
“Not even an animal would do what she did.” Jessica (Babette Verbeek) is speaking about her biological mother, who abandoned her when she was a baby, leaving her to grow up in care. Now Jessica, a teenager, is pregnant, just as her mother was, and is obsessed with finding her. She demands answers, as well as love. Read more... |
Oslo Stories Trilogy: Sex review - sexual identity slips, hurts and healsSunday, 24 August 2025
Two chimney sweeps sit by a window. The boss (Thorbjørn Harr) recounts a dream meeting with David Bowie, who disconcertingly looks at him like he’s a woman. Funny thing, his friend (Jar Gunnar Røise) replies. Yesterday, a male client asked him to have sex, and he did. It felt good. He hasn’t told anyone else, apart from his wife. Read more... |
Sorry, Baby review - the healing power of friendship in the aftermath of sexual assaultFriday, 22 August 2025
“I have a baby in me,” says Lydie (Naomi Ackie; Mickey 17). “What? Right now?” says her friend Agnes (Eva Victor), who may not be entirely thrilled at the news. “Are you going to name it Agnes?” Read more... |
Oslo Stories Trilogy: Love review - freed loveSunday, 17 August 2025
Love was the Norwegian climax of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo trilogy, the most lovestruck vision of his city and boldest prophesy of how to live there, beyond borders and bonds of sexual identity and shame. Released here between Dreams’ meta-memories of swooning first love and Sex’s look at desire undefined by gender, it also settles in Oslo’s heart. Read more... |
Unmoored review - atmospheric Swedish noir set on ExmoorFriday, 15 August 2025
“When have you ever gone off alone?” scoffs Magnus (Thomas W Gabrielsson) when his wife, Maria (Mirja Turestedt), expresses the wish to go to England rather than Morocco for their joint sabbatical. Famous last words. Read more... |
Beating Hearts review - kiss kiss, slam slamThursday, 14 August 2025
Andrew Garfield was 29 when he played the teenage Spiderman and Jennifer Grey was 27 when she took on a decade-younger-than-her character called “Baby” in Dirty Dancing. So you’d think that directors and casting experts could find actors to advance on the screen through that kind of age gap readily enough. Read more... |
Materialists review - a misfiring romcom or an undercooked satire?Wednesday, 13 August 2025
The Canadian-Korean director Celine Song burst onto the scene with her debut feature, Past Lives, two years ago, a bittersweet film about a woman torn between her first love, a Korean, and her current one, her American husband. Song is back with another woman at a crossroads, but in Materialists her heroine’s decision is much less painful to make, and far less affecting. Read more... |
Freakier Friday review - body-swapping gone ballisticTuesday, 12 August 2025
Before Freakier Friday there were the two film versions of Freaky Friday based on Mary Rodgers’s lively, perceptive 1972 Young Adult novel, the foremother of all body-swap movie comedies (including Big). Read more... |
Eight Postcards from Utopia review - ads from the era when 1990s Romania embraced capitalismSunday, 10 August 2025
If you saw it blind, with no information about its origins, Eight Postcards from Utopia might look like 70 minutes of outtakes from lost Fast Show recordings, the bits where they lampooned the TV they had watched on foreign holidays and the spoof ads they concocted. Read more... |
The Kingdom review - coming of age as the body count risesSaturday, 09 August 2025
The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is the bitter message of The Kingdom. Director and co-writer Julien Colonna’s nerve-fraying drama about an adolescent girl’s sudden immersion in the brutal, uber-macho world of her father, a ruthless Corsican mafia boss, or caïd, builds inexorably to the only possible conclusion. It's still shocking; cathartic, too, but dispiritingly so. Read more... |
Weapons review - suffer the childrenSaturday, 09 August 2025
Weapons’ enigmatic title, as with Zach Cregger’s previous film Barbarian, reveals little of what follows. The smalltown Pied Piper premise is sufficiently alluring: at 2.17 am, all bar one of a primary school class leave their beds and sprint through night streets, arms flung back like fighter jets, before vanishing utterly. Read more... |
Oslo Stories Trilogy: Dreams review - love lessonsWednesday, 06 August 2025
Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy. Love and Sex complete the thematically interwoven sequence, which unpick assumptions about sexual identity with gentle irony. Read more... |
Late Shift review - life and death in an understaffed Swiss hospitalFriday, 01 August 2025
Floria (the superb Leonie Benesch: The Crown; The Teachers’ Lounge; September 5) is a nurse, working the severely understaffed night shift in a Zurich hospital. She is constantly doing three things at once, sanitising her hands, snapping her gloves on and off, measuring medications into syringes, finding veins for IVs and saying, endlessly, “Ich komme gleich” (I’ll be there soon) or “Have you pain on a scale of one to ten?” Read more... |
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