film reviews
Markie Robson-Scott

“Hey guys, it’s Kayla, back with another video. So, the topic of today’s video is being yourself.” Kayla Day (the wonderful Elsie Fisher, nominated for a Golden Globe and also heard as the voice of Agnes in Despicable Me) is in her last week of eighth grade in upstate New York, compounding the horror of being 13 years old by making self-help YouTube videos in her bedroom. “As always, make sure to share and subscribe to my channel. Gucci!” she signs off chirpily, with Enya’s Orinoco Flow as surprisingly effective background music. But is anyone watching?

Matt Wolf

The decades-long stage relationship between Judi Dench and Trevor Nunn translates to surprisingly little with Red Joan. This is veteran theatre director Nunn's first film since Twelfth Night in 1996.

David Nice

"Them" - the "loro" of the title (with a further play on “l’oro”, gold) - denotes the mostly sleazy opportunists willing to use and be used by "him" ("lui"), "Presidente" Silvio Berlusconi in his septuagenarian bid for an extended sexual and political life.

Nick Hasted

Mel Gibson’s vile drunken rants a decade ago, his 63 years and the price of both inform his role as cop Brett Ridgeman. Writer-director S. Craig Zahler won’t comment.

Demetrios Matheou

Isabelle Huppert is famed for the chilly intensity of many of her performances, and a willingness to mine all manner of darkness and perversity – her recent, award-laden turn in Elle being a good example. So it’s surprising how rarely she’s played unequivocal villains. But now, 24 years after her shotgun-wielding psycho postmistress in La Cérémonie, the French legend is again letting her hair down.  

Nick Hasted

No one was waiting for another Hellboy film, but here this rude, crude reboot is anyway, stomping all over Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 original with freewheeling energy.

Adam Sweeting

It was the fabled Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard who commented that country music is “three chords and the truth”. Rose-Lynn, the protagonist of Wild Rose, just happens to have the surname Harlan, and she has the “three chords” motto tattooed on her forearm. 

Graham Fuller

There’s an admirable modesty in the way Jonah Hill has approached his first film as writer-director.

Adam Sweeting

The wilds of Maine have been favourite country for novelist Stephen King, and they form the setting for this new version of his 1983 supernatural thriller (previously filmed in 1989). Dr Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) moves his wife and two kids from big-city Boston and his stressful job as an ER medic to a rambling house in Ludlow, looking for more family time and a better quality of life. Dream on, doc.

mark.kidel

Italy has a romance with rural grit and innocence and – perhaps not surprising in a country where the links between village and city are still very strong: Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro Felice) isn’t in any way derivative, but revisits some of the same territory as Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) and the Taviani Brothers’ Padre Padrone (1977) and Kaos (1984), all classics of the genre.