John Wick’s simple story of a man and his dog became a bonkers, baroque franchise in record time, converting Keanu Reeves’ limited acting into Zen killer cool. Now Ana de Armas extends her delightful No Time to Die cameo as a high-kicking, cocktail-dressed MI6 agent into her own heroic assassin.
“Do you know the name of the propaganda minister of England, or America, or even Stalin? No. But Joseph Goebbels? Everyone knows him.” The cynical, grinning Dr Goebbels (Robert Stadlober), perhaps the first master of fake news, is not short on confidence.
I think The Ballad of Wallis Island is the best British romcom since I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), which it closely resembles.
“I can’t move my arms or legs, but apart from that I’m good to go.” Moth (Jason Isaacs) has to be pulled out of the tent in his sleeping bag by his wife Ray (Gillian Anderson). And this is only the second day of their 630-mile walk, split into two summers, along the south-west coastal path from Minehead to South Haven Point.
Director Ben Rivers is primarily an artist, and it shows. Every frame of Bogancloch is treated as a work of art and the viewer is given ample time to relish the beauty of the framing, lighting and composition. Many of the shots fall into traditional categories such as still life, landscape and portraiture and would work equally well as photographs.
Grief takes unexpected turns over the course of a long Icelandic day in Rúnar Rúnarsson’s romantic tragedy, a Prix Un Certain Regard contender at last year’s Cannes.
There is a dark, spectral quality to this compassionate film about Southeast Asian migrant workers in rural Taiwan. At the centre of this story is Oom, played with quiet stoicism by Wanlop Rungkumjad, who is one of many Thai, Cambodian and Myanmar nationals who have entered Taiwan illegally to find care work in its remote mountainous regions.
It’s not what he says, it’s the way he says it. Few filmmakers have bent the term “auteur” to their own ends more boldly than Wes Anderson, whose arresting visual style, oblique wit and skill in picking actors who can mould themselves to the unique demands of Wes-world is surely unequalled.
Whether it is or isn’t the final Mission: Impossible film, there’s a distinct fin-de-siècle feel about this eighth instalment, and not only because of its title. An early scene brings a nostalgic recap of highlights from the series’ history (which stretches back to 1996), with a voice-over from Angela Bassett’s President Sloane (pictured below) pleading with Ethan Hunt to return to save the world one more time.
There’s nothing more healthy than dissing your own dad, and filmmaker Amalia Ulman says that her old man was “a Gen X deadbeat edgelord skater” when she was growing up in the 1990s. The phrase brings the half-forgotten world of Generation X back to us from the mists of time, with its slackers and Douglas Coupland books and mumbling evasions.