film reviews
Adam Sweeting

The price of fame and the value of artistic truth are among the topics probed in Danny Boyle’s irresistible comedy, a beguiling magical mystery tour of an upside-down world where The Beatles suddenly never existed.

Tom Baily

How could this story be told again? Director Todd Douglas Miller has found a way: strip away narrative and give the audience the purity of original record. The result is a gripping non-fiction experience that sits in a unique space between documentary, art, drama and dream.

Owen Richards

Mari is one part kitchen sink drama, one part dance performance, bringing a refreshing take on bereavement and family. Dancer Charlotte joins her mother and sister at her dying grandmother’s bedside, and tensions rise as cabin fever sets in.

Saskia Baron

Making it to the fourth film in a series and maintaining quality is a feat pulled off by very few franchises, (see last week’s dreary Men in Black: International). But Pixar has done it with Toy Story 4. It might not have quite as many nifty gags without its originator John Lasseter at the helm, but the quality of animation has reached new heights and the story reduced me both to tears and helpless laughter. 

Nick Hasted

The botched 1973 hostage incident which inspired the term Stockholm syndrome comes to flatly comic life here, the strange psychological phenomenon of captives falling for their captors over time being reduced to an absurd caper.

Joseph Walsh

There's something unsatisfying about the fact that Asif Kapadia's new documentary on the controversial 1980s sporting legend Diego Maradona has a two-word title. It would have created a neat synchronicity with his previous two films (Amy and Senna), but we soon learn why this is the case.

Saskia Baron

The best joke in Men in Black: International happens before the film starts, when the iconic Columbia Pictures lady in a toga whips out a pair of familiar dark glasses. It’s a nifty, witty gag that doesn’t outstay its welcome, which is more than can be said for the feature that follows. The original stars are absent and there’s an absence too of the screwball humour that made the first film, back in 1997 such a hit. 

Adam Sweeting

A starring role for Scrabble is one of the things that sets this small-scale but deceptively affecting film apart. Writer Frank Cottrell Boyce (a regular collaborator with Michael Winterbottom) based his script on his own short story, Triple Word Score, and with director Carl Hunter has developed it into a beautifully crafted meditation on loss and learning to live with your mistakes.

Markie Robson-Scott

“When we were brothers we wanted more: more volume, more muscles, us three, us kings.” So begins documentary-maker Jeremiah Zagar’s faithful but watered-down adaptation of Justin Torres’s autobiographical coming-out novel, set in the 1990s.

Tim Cumming

Tomorrow, Martin Scorsese delivers, via Netflix, two hours and 22 minutes of screen time devoted to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, following on from the release last week of the latest Bootleg Series boxed set, 14 CDs covering five full concerts from November and December 1975, as well as rehearsals and sundry soundboard cuts from