Our latest movie reviews

You’ll get several movies for the price of a single ticket in Ryan Coogler’s (Creed) period drama-thriller-romance-musical Sinners. And while some of these disparate elements are more successful than others, the combination is audacious enough to leave you simultaneously awed and overwhelmed by his outsized ambitions. All of this, remarkably, is packed into a single day in 1932 Mississippi, a place filled with cotton fields and Klan members. Maverick twins Smoke and Stack (both played skilfully by Coogler muse Michael B Jordan) have finally returned home after a law-eliding sojourn in Chicago. They’ve got money, liquor, and a dream: to open a juke joint for their friends and family, a place to safely connect, conspire and pitch a wang dang doodle on a Saturday night.  Everyone in their tight community plays a role, including their teenage cousin Sammie (musician Miles Caton), blues singer Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), Chinese-American grocers Grace and Bo (Li Jun Li, Yao), and the twins’ old flames Mary (an underserved Hailee Steinfeld) and Annie (standout Wunmi Mosaku). It might not be a Marvel movie but Coogler is making an epic here – and everyone is up to the task. The settings are stunning, the music stirring and the party scenes electric. In one gorgeous, metaphysical moment, Coogler draws across centuries and continents with breathtaking scope, passion, and poetry. See it in IMAX if you can, and stay for the credits. It might not be a Marvel movie, but Coogler is...

You’ve seen Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum. Now strap in for Bourne Yesterday. Meet Charlie Heller (Bohemian Rhapsody’s Rami Malek), a man who embarks on a mission of revenge with precisely none of the lethal skills he’ll need to carry it out. Not only can he not disarm an assassin with a rolled-up magazine or kill a man with a hand towel, the guy needs a YouTube video to help him break into a mark’s apartment.  That rare moment of levity runs against the grain of this straight-faced but enjoyably slick espionage thriller from director James Hawes. The British filmmaker is a veteran of Slow Horses, and while The Amateur lacks the rumpled élan and meticulous characterisation of the Gary Oldman streaming hit, it does deliver some of the same knottiness and unpredictability.   Its ‘slow horse’, Heller, is a CIA codebreaker and surveillance genius who’s allowed out of Langley’s sub-basement level for lunch breaks with his geeky work mates and not much else. Certainly not to defy his hulking Agency chief (Holt McCallany) and go on a one-man mission to avenge his wife (Rachel Brosnahan), murdered in a black-ops raid on a London hotel.   Asking you not to dwell on the massive coincidence that Heller’s otherwise unconnected wife has been randomly killed by privately contracted agents with direct links to his employers 5000 miles away, Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli’s screenplay (an update of Robert Littell’s 1981 novel) sets Heller on an off-the-books, trans-European mission...

In a surprising opening to a balls-to-the-wall combat movie, Warfare begins with Eric Prydz’s ‘Call On Me’ video (the one with the sexy ’80s aerobics sesh), as watched by a gang of grunts ogling, vibing and thrusting along to every gyration. They – and us, as an audience – need to hold onto the memory because it’s the last bit of fun anyone will be having for the next 90-odd minutes. Prydz always comes before a fall.   A military advisor on Alex Garland’s Civil War, former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza survived a full-on firefight that left his comrade Elliott Miller with a traumatic injury and no memory of the horror. Co-written and directed by Garland and Mendoza, Warfare is a forensic, immersive act of remembrance that catapults you into the heat of battle.  The pair aren’t interested in interpersonal relationships, character development or political points of view (this is very US-centric, but not tub-thumpingly patriotic). Instead, Warfare is intense, brutal, visceral, horrific. The squeamish need not apply.  The set-up is simple. On November 19, 2006 in Ramadi, Iraq, a squad of US Navy SEALs steal into an urban residential area controlled by Al-Qaeda forces under cover of night. Their mission? To clear a safe passage for the ground forces arriving the following day. For the film’s first stretch, very little happens. Warfare leaves in the bits most war films cut out, as we get to watch a squad going through their routines and protocols. There is boredom, a struggle to get a...

‘Painful to watch’ isn’t often a term of praise, but this action-comedy about a man who loses the ability to feel physical discomfort channels its unusual, nerve-numbing premise into a fun and oddly romantic ride. Thankfully, intrigue and swagger aren’t prerequisites for its unlucky hero, because introvert Nate Cain (Companion’s Jack Quaid) would be bang out of luck. It isn’t just his dull day job as an assistant manager at a bank; Nate has been born with a sensory condition that means that he’s unable to feel pain or discomfort. Great in theory; in reality, it means a liquid diet so that he doesn’t bite his tongue off and alarms set to remind himself to urinate, so that his bladder doesn’t explode.  Enter co-worker Sherry (Prey’s Amber Midthunder), whose lust for life coaxes him out of his shell. Their burgeoning opposites-attract love story is powered by two charming leads. Jack Quaid put a fun new spin on his shocked everyman in The Boys, and Midthunder is a natural as the free-spirited apple of Nate’s eye.But just as things seem to be hitting a groove, she’s kidnapped in front of Nate in a brutal bank robbery led by a delightfully unhinged Ray ‘son of Jack’ Nicholson. Instead of retreating into his man cave and licking his many, many wounds, Nate embarks on a crusade of vigilantism through San Diego to save her. But this is not Liam Neeson in Taken: his particular set of skills don’t extend much further than checking credit scores, administering first aid and never...

From Serpico to LA Confidential to Training Day, stories of straight-arrow cops navigating corruption on the force are a Hollywood staple. Will that cheeky free donut lead the principled officer spiralling into a life of backhanders and dodgy deals, or can they hold onto their morals and bring the big apples on the force to book? Ultimately, the good guy wins out – and it is invariably a guy. Sandhya Suri’s terrific slowburn drama is the non-Hollywoodised version of that story, depicting life as a woman in India’s rural police as a far murkier and less predictable affair. The British-Indian director diagnoses a problem far too deep-seated for one well-meaning, inexperienced young constable to solve, leading you into a maze of compromised ethics, police brutality, caste violence and misogyny, and refusing to point to the exit. That constable is Santosh, an emotionally bruised young woman played with tentative gumption by Shahana Goswami. When her husband of two years is killed policing a riot, she takes up the option of a so-called ‘compassionate appointment’, a real scheme in India that enables women to take up their deceased husband’s old jobs.  Suri’s sharp-edged screenplay doesn’t find much admirable in Santosh’s new police colleagues, a lazy, bribable bunch of layabouts. One bullying female officer takes particular delight in humiliating trysting couples, enforcing a strict moral code noticeably absent back at the station. The cops laugh over a meme comparing China and...

To the list of the world’s most dazzlingly imaginative animators – America’s Pixar and Laika, Japan’s Studio Ghibli, England’s Aardman, Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon – you can officially add a 30-year-old Latvian with a laptop. Flow’s Gints Zilbalodis is now a Latvian with a laptop and an Oscar, and boy, is it deserved. His DIY animation, made partly with freely-available open-source software, takes the promises of his eye-catching 2020 debut Away and fulfils it in spellbinding style. A survival epic full of mysteries and magic, it’s an animated epic worthy of Ghibli. Set in the aftermath of an inexorable, unexplained flood, it follows a small band of animals floating on a small sail boat towards an uncertain future. Its small posse of furry and feathered adventurers include a slinky, inquisitive cat; a ring-tailed lemur; an aloof secretary bird; and the hipster’s mammal of the moment, a capybara. It’s been ages since anything articulated the spirituality of the natural world as breathtakingly as this Their voyage is not Disney’s mushy The Incredible Journey redux and there’s no Life of Pi metaphor behind these characters – they behave like animals in a way that speaks to many hours’ studying at the local zoo (in one cheat, the capybara sounds were provided by a baby camel). But Flow still finds behaviourisms that are touchingly relatable. Teamwork, friendship, ingenuity and common interest are themes that run below the surface like one of the mythical whales that occasionally...

Obviously, it’s impossible to watch a Mob biopic directed by Barry Levinson (who also made Bugsy), written by Nicholas Pileggi (who co-wrote Goodfellas and Casino), produced by Irwin Winkler (Goodfellas and The Irishman), and starring Robert De Niro (surely you see where this is going) and not think about the genre-defining classics that came before it.  So let’s just acknowledge up top that comparisons won’t serve anyone well. But if you take The Alto Knights on its own terms – as an eccentric but engaging curio – there’s still plenty of fun to be had. This is particularly true regarding the two central characters: true-life Mafia frenemies Frank Costello, played by De Niro, and Vito Genovese, played by… De Niro. Though his double duty presence is an obvious gimmick, the actor remains invested enough to keep us watching all the way. De Niro imbues New York crime boss Costello with shrewd intelligence and an almost gentle gravitas, as though he genuinely wishes other people didn’t constantly require him to bribe, cheat and steal. And he plays the paranoid, hot-headed Genovese as though nobody was able to drag Joe Pesci out of retirement, so he figured he might as well just do it instead. The only thing left for De Niro to do is play warring gangsters all by himself Sure, it’s all a little quixotic, especially when the pair face off against each other. But it’s also entertaining, as long as you’re willing to go with it. And why wouldn’t you? At this point, it almost seems...

Disney’s animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was released almost 90 years ago, so it makes sense that it would need a fair bit of updating for this live-action remake. There’s a determined effort to make this story feel modern, but despite plenty of invention and some very spirited performances, this Snow White still feels peculiarly old-fashioned and ultimately quite confused.  Written by Erin Cressida Wilson (Girl on the Train) and directed by Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man) the retooled version still begins with a young princess, Snow White (Rachel Zegler), confined to a life of servitude when the widowed king marries a wicked sorceress (Gal Godot). After the king disappears, the evil queen, jealous of Snow White’s beauty, casts her stepdaughter into the forest to die. Instead, she’s taken in by a group of seven strangers. From here, it begins tying itself in knots trying to undo all the iffy outdated bits. Snow White is now a strong young woman who wants to reclaim her crown and lead her people, rather than a helpless naif who does housework for strangers while waiting for a prince to rescue her. Her songs about wishing for love have been replaced with new ones about simply wishing. The queen, however, is still driven by pure vanity and terror of ageing. Sexism is so baked into Snow White that you can’t eradicate it all without destroying the premise. Equally, Disney’s reluctance to use people with dwarfism for comic relief seems entirely right, but then...

I’m old enough to remember when every trip to the cinema involved not a barrage of adverts for mobile phones but a ten-fifteen minute short, usually a documentary on a subject of almost parodic dullness, like ‘cheese-making in France’. Louise Courvoisier’s debut Holy Cow takes that concept and runs with it, but the result is far from dull. Instead, what we get is a moving and humorous coming-of-age story which is told with brio, avoiding the usual divots of social realism misery. Totone (Clément Faveau) is a teenager, whose summer is full of fêtes, fights and hangovers until a sudden tragedy leaves him alone with his young sister (a phenomenally cute Luna Garret), and all the responsibility as the head of the house. Neighbours offer help but their offers are soon revealed to either be empty or compromised by Totone’s feud with the sons of another cheesemaker. His solution is to try to win a cheese-making competition which will pocket him 30,000 euros, with the help of his stock-car driving chums. There will be missteps and acrimony and an unsentimental romance that smells of dung and sex with Marie-Lise (Maïwenn Barthelemy), a much more capable young woman from a neighbouring farm and from whom he’ll learn self-discipline and cunnilingus. It’s a summer film of late nights and early mornings Holy Cow is set in the agricultural region of Jura, home of the Comté cheese which Totone is trying to make – and you can tell that the director is a local. Despite Elio Balezeaux’s...

‘Blue moon, you saw me standing alone’ runs the line from songwriting double-act Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s classic ballad. But as Boyhood director Richard Linklater’s bittersweet film about the estranged pair proves, you don’t have to be on your own to be alone. Linklater’s long-term collaborator Ethan Hawke transforms into the rumpled, melancholy Hart. He slouches in the washed-up man’s shrunken frame and balding crown. Down on his luck and drinking heavily, his once-grand writing partnership with Rodgers (a sharply tuxedoed Andrew Scott) has been dashed, thanks to his increasing unreliability. It hurts on a bone-deep level.  Slipping out of Oklahoma!’s opening night in March 1943, the semi-closeted Hart slinks round the corner to the afterparty at Broadway haunt Sardi’s to bitch about the musical. Blue Jasmine’s Bobby Cannavale plays a charismatic barman who listens to the older man’s grousing, while valiantly trying not to pour him whiskies. As they shoot the breeze while a young serviceman (Jonah Lees) playing piano, the subject of Casablanca crops up. You can expect Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman-like banter from Robert Kaplow’s finely-tuned screenplay, an expert evocation of the ‘40s.   Linklater knows how to draw the most intimate performances from Ethan Hawke The sense of theatricality fits the subject matter perfectly. Cinematographer Shane F Kelly’s camera slinks nimbly through Sardi’s confined spaces as Hart holds court. He’s mooning after The...