Film
Markie Robson-Scott
Babyteeth gets off to a terrific start. A semi-naked, manic Moses (Toby Wallace, full of scabby charisma) almost pushes 15-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen; Sharp Objects, Little Women) on to the Sydney train tracks as she waits on the platform in her school uniform, carrying her violin. It’s a thunderclap: she’s smitten. The next scene is just as intriguing, with Ben Mendelsohn (The Outsider, Bloodline, Animal Kingdom) on fantastic form as Henry, a psychiatrist, eating a sandwich and having sex with Anna (Essie Davis; The Babadook, True History of the Kelly Gang) in his consulting room.The fact Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
What if there was a pill you could pop that gave you superpowers? The only catch is that, while it might make you invisible or bullet-proof, it might also boil your brain or make you explode with just one hit.That’s the premise of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s serviceable new sci-fi thriller by Mattson Tomlin. The concept isn’t as original as it needs to be, and it has a lot in common with 2011’s Limitless or Luc Besson’s Lucy, combined with the extreme violence of Deadpool.Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jamie Foxx might get top-billing, but the real star is Dominique Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Allergic to that word “influencer”? Afraid that social media is the death of civilisation as we’ve known it? Then this movie may be for you.Despite its overt absurdity and compulsive over-the-topness, director Eugene Wobble Palace Kotlyarenko has delivered a cortex-frazzling alarm about the hazards of living a life wholly defined by touchscreens, emojis, tweets, selfies and narcissistic self-obsession. Goofy, floppy-haired Kurt Kunkle (Stranger Things’ Joe Keery) drives a cab for the Uber-like service Spree, and meanwhile has been failing miserably to build himself an online following as @ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This seems a perfect project for Matteo Garrone, a director who has found new ways to conjure old Italian dreams, and invests even his most grimly realistic films with fairy tale logic and wonder. Carlo Collodi’s 1883 story is here returned to its local time and place, as Pinocchio’s picaresque journey of experience unfolds in a deliberately traditional, lovingly crafted children’s film.Roberto Benigni’s Geppetto, pictured below, adds Spielbergian sentiment and expert comic business to early scenes, and touching frailty later. Garrone’s two best-known features, the sociological gangster Read more ...
graham.rickson
Every great artist can have an off day, and the the best moments in Eureka’s latest collection of Buster Keaton features are good enough to make one forgive the patchier stretches. Keaton’s first feature length comedy was the 1923 DW Griffith spoof Three Ages, deliberately structured into three self-contained acts so that the film could be cut into separate shorts if audiences stayed away. Its success allowed Keaton to make Our Hospitality later the same year, the first film in which he was able to exercise much greater creative control. A loose retelling of a notorious late 19th century feud Read more ...
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 ...