Our latest movie reviews

With this quick-witted and sexually supercharged espionage caper, Steven Soderbergh and his screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) have just remade Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the Industry generation.  Cerebral rather than action-packed, it’s like a classic le Carré (or, with its Harry Palmer allusions, Len Deighton) thriller, brought bang up to date with stylish direction, outrageously thirsty acting, and some bone-dry wit. There’s also a Ukraine invasion subplot to keep things uncomfortably topical.Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett are married couple George and Kathryn Woodhouse – a pair of British spies who bring far too much work home with them. He has the calm, measured air (and glasses) of his namesake George Smiley, and a fastidiousness that’s perfect for his job but could be deeply annoying on date night. She’s cool with it – she’s cool, generally. The so-called ‘black bag’, a metaphorical mechanism employed by spooks to keep some semblance of work/life balance, helps keep the intel and intimacy apart. At least, it should. But a slick opening Steadicam sequence through a Mayfair nightclub sees George learning that there’s a traitor in his team’s midst – and Kathryn’s name is firmly on the shortlist. It’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the Industry generation Soderbergh gathers all the suspects – agency shrink Zoe (Naomie Harris), tech whiz Clarissa (Marisa Abela), cocky field agent James (Regé-Jean Page) and morally compromised veteran Freddie (Tom Burke) –...

What’s the difference between a cult of celebrity and a plain old cult? Not that much, according to writer-director Mark Anthony Green’s debut film, which casts a reclusive pop star as a cult leader and sends a cub reporter through a terrifying ordeal. It’s a solid premise for a thriller, but this film barely engages with the meat of the question, instead indulging in a series of only mildly creepy scenes before a rush to the finish. That’s a shame because Green, who has written for GQ, presumably knows the surreal feeling of being a hungry young writer thrust into the surreal world inhabited by megastars and the super-rich: two categories to which this movie’s Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich) decidedly belongs. The reclusive Moretti is bringing out his first new album in 27 years, and a small group of reporters and influencers are invited to a listening party at his remote desert ranch. Ayo Edebiri’s Ariel is among them, to her own surprise, but hopes it will be her big break – if her domineering boss Stan (Murray Bartlett) allows. The film telegraphs its intentions early and often but never fully establishes its ‘why’: why these people, why this moment. Perhaps coherence isn’t the point. Malkovich, after all, makes an unlikely candidate for the 1990’s biggest pop star, when his stage style seems more early Elton John, so that the audience has to immediately suspend disbelief.  Malkovich makes an unlikely candidate for the ’90’s biggest pop star Then again, the incongruity...

Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald’s (One Day in September) new film takes its title – and a few electrifying performances – from John Lennon’s only full-length post-Beatles concert, a benefit for a children’s mental hospital. But it’s no concert movie. It’s 1971, and while Bob Dylan and many other of his contemporaries have abandoned politics for music, John is in a revolutionary mood, despite the growing sense of apathy in post-’60s America. ‘Flower power didn’t work,’ he says, speaking from his adopted home in New York’s village. ‘So what? We start again.’ Drawing on televised interviews, taped phone calls with agents and managers, and personal film footage – much of it new to this film – Macdonald charts the couple’s determination to fight for any worthy cause that crosses their eyeline, from the Vietnam War to fundraising for remanded prisoners unable to afford bail. The pair’s artistry, individually and collectively, seems to be matched only by their energy and moral clarity. Two things elevate One to One beyond the sum of its fly-on-the-wall intimacy, revolutionary spirit and musical performances (overseen by the couple’s son, Sean Ono Lennon).  The first is its expansive perspective: although chronologically arranged, spanning the year or so leading up to the August 30, 1972 concert, Macdonald places John and Yoko’s personal struggles – death threats, a custody battle, a hostile justice department – within a wider cultural and historical context. He intercuts with news...

Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty, The Hand of God) is known for making wonderfully cinematic films, typically with male protagonists, so it’s refreshing to see him focus on a female hero in this languorous, gorgeous-looking period piece.  Parthenope is born in Naples, 1950, and grows into a conventionally beautiful young woman (newcomers Celeste Dalla Porta). So beautiful that she’s getting flirty looks from her own brother, Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo), as well as friend Sandrino (Dario Aita). Imagine the chaos when this threesome heads to Capri, the playground of the rich and famous. Heads turn wherever Parthenope goes. Acting agents scout her. Men in helicopters invite her for picnics. An intelligent anthropology student, Parthenope navigates this with grace and humour, choosing to hang out with a drunken novelist, John Cheever (Gary Oldman), who prefers boys. An incident in Capri changes Parthenope’s life forever, and we follow her over the ensuing years as she meets an array of eccentric characters. Parthenope is split into chronological sections, and the superior early chapters have shades of everything from Death In Venice to The Dreamers. Porta puts in an enjoyable performance, whether delivering sharp one-liners or affecting that glassy straight-ahead look that all pretty young women must – especially in 1970s Italy.  It’s refreshing to see Sorrentino focusing on a female hero Given that context, the attention Parthenope receives seems...

If you’re still wondering what exactly you achieved in lockdown, this isn’t going to help: this impressive, gently trippy, dialogue-free animation was made entirely in a home studio by Latvian first-time feature filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis. The images, the music, everything – it’s all him, as he tells the mysterious, slowly revealing story of a young man who lands with a parachute on an apparently deserted tropical island. From there, it’s a quest, partly one for survival, although partly it feels like a spiritual journey, as a deathly giant black figure stalks our blank-faced hero as he encounters overwhelming beautiful and oppressive landscapes, a crowd of cats, elephants, a geyser and more. Sometimes he walks, sometimes he runs, sometimes he rides a motorbike, like a kid lost in a computer-game digi-scape. Our hero’s face is curiously blank – you can barely see his mouth and nose – which only stresses this tale as one of formative awakening. The one-man-show production story behind Away might explain why its style of computer animation can feel simple at times (although it’s also an incredible advert for what can be achieved if you couple DIY digital animation technology with clear talent). It has a blocky, work-in-progress look to it, which grows on you as the film unfolds, helped by Zilbalodis’s woozy ambient electronic score. Away has the mild rush of a coming-of-age dream, the sort that lodges in your memory as symbolic and significant as you pass from one stage of...

The belligerent beep of an unattended fridge door can set nerves on edge quicker than an irksome family member at Christmas. This delirium-inducing tone is a constant clarion call for Rose Byrne’s harried mum and professional therapist, Linda, in Mary Bronstein’s anxiety-inducingly frenetic and fantastic feature about the impossible trials of motherhood.An all-pervading beep emits from the drip that’s hooked up to the tummy of Linda’s heard but largely unseen daughter (voiced by Delaney Quinn), who wheedles from offscreen. Linda’s always on, with the neverending need to replace the drip’s bags of nutrient goop a source of near-panic. To add to the general air of paranoia, her daughter’s social worker battles her over the mysterious treatment, arguing that it’s all unnecessary. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You showcases the daily bullshit that mothers have to put up with from loved ones and strangers alike. Bronstein crafts a thriller of teeth-grinding magnificence centred on Byrne as the indefatigable figure at the centre of this whirlwind of unsolicited advice.  To compound things, Linda must fight many maddening battles while trying to keep her shit together after a gaping hole erupts, like a biblical flood, through her bedroom ceiling – a catastrophe that has her and her daughter relocating to a seedy motel. Trying to score alcohol after hours, she hits up the receptionist (an excellent A$AP Rocky), who fixes her up with cocaine and yet more mothering advice.  Rose Byrne...

Director Bong Joon Ho’s post-Parasite return is a spectacular if uneven sci-fi romp offering two stellar Robert Pattinson performances for the price of one. It’s 2054 when the eponymous Mickey (Pattinson) wakes up badly injured, stuck in a frozen crevice on far-off Planet Niflheim. As the eponymous numerical surname hints he’s already been ‘reprinted’ – the term the film and Edward Ashton’s source novel use for cloning – 16 times. A spaceship docks and untrustworthy pal Timo (Steven Yeun) appears – but leaves Mickey at the whims of the creepers, gross slug-like alien creatures ostensibly preparing to eat him.  A funny, mysterious and unusual opening, the sequence is characteristic of the remaining compelling but slightly overlong running time. We learn in flashback that Mickey and Timo escaped from earth on a four-year journey to Niflheim having unwisely borrowed money from a dubious businessman with a habit of chainsawing his debtors. Mickey volunteers to become an expendable: an astronaut willing to die, memories intact and be reprinted forever more, with the lengthy journey passing sweetly for Mickey as he meets and falls in love with Nasha (an uber-cool Naomi Ackie).  On Niflheim, the colony run by failed senator Kenneth Marshall (a bizarre, gurning turn from Mark Ruffalo that’s even more oily than his character in Poor Things) and his similarly OTT wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) unspools into disarray after an extra Mickey is erroneously reprinted and the creepers mobilise...

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy Review ‘Fourquels’ are usually where film franchises start to flirt with rock bottom. From Matrix Resurrections to Die Hard 4.0 to Batman & Robin and – shudder – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, they love to coast along on past glories and creaky story beats. One of them even gave us the phrase ‘nuking the fridge’, the perfect shorthand for a movie series blowing itself into orbit.    It’s a joy to report, then, that Mad About the Boy is comfortably the best Bridget Jones outing since Bridget Jones’s Diary. In fact, there’s barely a Silk Cut filter between this and that delightfully goofy first screen incarnation of Helen Fielding’s great singleton.  And there is absolutely no nuking Bridget Jones’ fancy new Smeg fridge. For Renée Zellweger’s still klutzy but now wiser Bridge, living in cosy Hampstead, the singleton Borough era is a distant memory. Ciggies and Chardonnay have been dispensed with (okay, ciggies have been dispensed with), replaced with a big dose of lingering grief for lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Her partner, and dad to her kids, was killed four years previously on a humanitarian mission to Sudan.  Via the attentive direction of Michael Morris (To Leslie) and a fab Zellweger turn, the push-and-pull of Bridget’s new reality – two young children needing their mum, a bunch of old pals, led by the still mouthy Shazzer (Sally Phillips), encouraging her to ‘get back out there’ – is laid out in an immaculate...

The latest gem from Australian stop-motion maestro Adam Elliot (Harvie Krumpet) comes with the same funny, macabre, bittersweet edge that runs throughout his films. With 2010’s Mary & Max, he turned a real-life friendship into a dark comedy framed in striking black-and-white animation. Like that film, Memoir of a Snail smudges the line between reality and fiction in deeply moving ways by drawing on its own director’s life. Grace Pudel is a snail-collecting youngster in 1970s Melbourne. Voiced by Succession’s Sarah Snook, she tells her story delicately but matter-of-factly. The tales of friends, like the adventurous and eccentric Pinky (Jacki Weaver) and the other less charitable folks who try to exploit her, are told with equal gentleness.  Time carries her from one misfortune or cruelty to the next. It starts with the death of her stop-motion animator father, leading her and her brother Gideon (Kodi Smit-McPhee) being sent to separate foster homes, where the latter being subjected to abuse at the hands of devout Christians. The film’s eccentric framing device has Grace telling all of this to her pet snails, whom she’s in the process of freeing, telling all while they slowly creep away. It could easily be a relentlessly miserable affair. But Elliot finds dark comedy in the awful circumstances of Grace’s life, whether that’s the visual gags of a bus with the apt number plate ‘YRUSAD’ carting off her brother to a separate home, or a social worker’s badge photo showing them...

Imagine if the kids in Skins celebrated leaving school by making itineraries and heading off on a graduation adventure. That’s the world brought to us by London filmmaker Sasha Nathwani in his feature debut, a touching – if often stereotypical – look at Gen Z-ers heading into adulthood, complete with voice notes, astrophysics, and a crippling fear of living through uncertain times. Deba Hekmat gives a nuanced performance as Ziba, an Iranian-British teen struggling to find meaning in the face of a life-altering revelation. It’s A-level results day and Ziba and her eclectic group of friends are celebrating their freedom by attempting to control the existential dread of adulthood with a celebratory itinerary. Travelling from one London landmark to the next, it’s an ideal tourist’s day out; Portobello Road, Hampstead Heath, Billionaires’ Row and finally, Primrose Hill.  Nathwani’s Indian-Iranian heritage gives his depiction of merging cultures an authentic and refreshing twist – the opening scene cleverly questions what society expects from a non-white teenage girl without being overly moralising. Ziba’s relationship with her unwaveringly affectionate mother (Narges Rashidi) is genuinely touching, a rejection of the austere immigrant parent stereotype. There’s no shortage of intimate moments, particularly in the case of young footballer Malcolm (scene-stealing newcomer Denzel Baidoo). He’s a friend of a friend reluctantly allowed to tag along for reasons that are superficial...