Film
Helen Hawkins
Film festivals are a bran tub: what you find in them may be unexpected, and not always in a good way. Here are six I pulled out in my first week (minus one of my favourites, The Mastermind, which I will review when it goes on general release next week).Jay Kelly If the indie supremo Noah Baumbach hadn’t popped up in person in his new Netflix-produced film, as the director of a sex scene between the younger version of his protagonist and a lead actress who discreetly farts, I don’t think I would have guessed who made Jay Kelly. He seems at times to be channelling Richard Curtis. There are Read more ...
Justine Elias
The enduring image of the 1984-1985 Miners' Strike is that of men standing arm in arm against police and of mass protests devolving into mayhem – with protesters being beaten and knocked to the ground.But it wasn’t just men who were on the front lines, as Iron Ladies recalls. Directed by Daniel Draper, the documentary focuses on the essential and inspiring efforts of working-class women – some wives and daughters of miners, some neighbours – who organized as Women Against Pit Closures.Though some of the women had previous connections to local party politics, or to the CND and other protest Read more ...
graham.rickson
The best Ealing comedies are surely the three darkest: specifically Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Ladykillers and The Man in the White Suit. The latter pair were helmed by Alexander Mackendrick, a cosmopolitan director who’d arrived at the studios with a thorough understanding of trends in mainstream European and American cinema.Take the final act of The Man in the White Suit: watched with the sound turned down: it’s an expressionist noir thriller, Alec Guinness’s naïve scientist Sidney Stratton pursued through the streets at night by a vengeful mob, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe making Read more ...
Justine Elias
A fizzy mystery cocktail with a twist and a splash, The Woman in Cabin 10, based on Ruth Ware’s bestseller, sails along like the sleek superyacht that provides its deadly setting.A welcome blend of Scandinavian noir and Agatha Christie, this Netflix movie assembles a disparate cast of suspects led by a billionaire host (Guy Pearce, pictured below) and his cancer-stricken and even richer wife (Lisa Loven Kongsli). To promote their new cancer charity, the couple invites top donors, plus a rock star, influencers, and a random tech genius, aboard a three-day cruise across the North Sea.Along for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out MysteryThe third of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out mysteries finds Daniel Craig reprising his role of the sly and knowing sleuth Benoit Blanc (now sporting a deeper-than-ever Deep South accent), as he probes the baffling case of the death of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Played with brio by Josh Brolin, the Monsignor presides over his little rural parish of Chimney Rock, in upstate New York, with an iron hand, raging from his pulpit like an Old Testament prophet. Raining down fire and brimstone on his small coterie of disciples, subjecting them to a kind of Read more ...
James Saynor
People sometimes go to the movies for the violence and maybe even for the sex. Until recently they didn’t particularly buy a ticket for the bad language, but lately, British cinema has been making this a selling point. In Wicked Little Letters (2023), profanity-laced correspondence circulated among buttoned-up Brits; now we have I Swear, based on the life of John Davidson, who almost single-handedly taught Britain about the perils and inspirations of those with Tourette syndrome (or “Tourette’s”).Where Wicked Little Letters tried to elicit a tee-hee response to a rather boring chain of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Warren Ellis is Nick Cave’s wild-maned Bad Seeds right-hand man and The Dirty Three’s frenzied violinist. Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects meanwhile exist on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly.Ellis is the contrastingly loving renegade subject of Kurzel’s debut documentary Ellis Park, an escapee from suburban Ballarat who here journeys further out to the titular Sumatran wildlife sanctuary he helps fund, where he plays to animals like a shaman Dolittle in jungle mist.Ellis Park divides halfway between Ellis’s Read more ...
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 ...