Our latest movie reviews

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...

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...

The long shadow of a tragic accident looms over the story of two feuding farming families in this gripping debut from director Christopher Andrews. Years ago, Peggy (Susan Lynch) chose an inopportune moment – a country drive – to announce to her children, Michael (Christopher Abbott) and Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), that she was going to live with her sister, leading to a crash that killed her and left Caroline with a terrible facial scar. Since then, Michael, the driver on that fateful day, has transmuted his guilt into loyalty to his ailing, Gaelic-speaking father Ray (Colm Meaney) and their struggling sheep farm. Caroline has married Ray’s nemesis Gary (Paul Ready), but is now planning her own departure, hoping to take their wayward son, Jack (Barry Keoghan), to start a new life in Cork.  But simmering tensions, resentments and grievances between the two families are about to explode into a cycle of violence. It’s sparked by Jack’s theft of two of Ray and Michael’s rams, and a spate of horrific sheep mutilations that have decimated their prized flock.  What unfolds in Andrews’ screenplay, co-written with Jonathan Hourigan, has the grim inevitability of a Greek tragedy, no less violent than the feud at the centre of The Banshees of Inisherin, albeit without that film’s Irish black humour. Although set in rural Ireland, rather than Appalachia, this tale of feuding farmers puts one in mind of the legendary rivalry between the Hatfield and McCoy families, whose bitter blood...

In the month Elon Musk joined the White House staff and US tech giants unveiled a new $500bn AI initiative, director Drew Hancock releases his debut film, Companion. Talk about timely. His feminist comedy-horror dives headfirst into a world involving a sentient sexbot going violently rogue. Which, right now, feels like next Tuesday. Heretic’s Sophie Thatcher is Iris, the robot at the story's centre. She meets Josh (The Boys’ Jack Quaid) in classic romcom fashion: he knocks over a display of tangerines near her at the supermarket. But the meet-cute is short-lived, as Josh whisks her away to a luxurious but isolated mansion where she discovers the truth: she’s not human.  A devoted ‘companion’, or rather ‘emotional support robot that fucks,’ Iris is controlled via a mobile app that Josh has jailbroken to override her programmed limits, making her dangerously unpredictable. When she inevitably gains control of his phone – and by extension, her autonomy – shit hits the fan. There’s satisfaction in watching a controlling man get his ass handed to him by a sexbot What follows is a whirlwind of campy, comedic mayhem as Iris finds herself embroiled in accidental murders and a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with Josh. The cast is rounded out by a who’s who of rising Hollywood talent, including Smile 2’s Lukas Gage and Megan Suri, as well Rupert Friend as a flamboyant Russian millionaire complete with mullet, handlebar moustache and wildly dodgy accent.The film successfully leans into...

One of the great joys of Steven Soderbergh is you never know what you’re going to get. He has his slumps, but any time it looks like he might just have lost it, he comes back with something thrillingly playful. And so, after a dull run, culminating in 2023’s limp Magic Mike’s Last Dance, he’s on the upswing again with this highly original ghost story. Actually, ‘ghost story’ may not be entirely apt. It is, as the title says, about a non-specific presence. We view everything from the perspective of something that’s confined to an empty house. It’s not clear how long it’s been there, nor what it wants, but through Soderbergh’s creeping camera we see everything it sees. And what it mostly sees is a family suppressing ghosts of their own. Rebekah (Lucy Liu), Chris (The Knick’s Chris Sullivan), and their two children, Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang), move into the house, apparently driven to relocate after one of Chloe’s friends died in horrible circumstances. Chris is worried that Chloe isn’t dealing with her pain. Rebekah is more focused on her beloved son and his school athletic career, as well as staying out of trouble for some unspecified illegal activity connected to her work. Chloe is quietly going on with her life, but the presence seems fixated on her, watching her from her closet and moving her things around. It’s the most exciting thing Soderbergh’s done in some time If you’re expecting something akin to Poltergeist or The Conjuring, that’s not what...

If you have claws and an insatiable craving for human flesh, can you still be a great dad? That’s the theme underpinning Leigh Whannell’s latest go at dragging a Universal Monster into the cold light of the 2020s, a more hard-bitten and demanding age than the one Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man prowled – and a lot harder to scare. Obviously, the answer is ‘no’ – werewolves fall down in so many key parenting categories – but the Aussie horror auteur behind Saw and 2020’s terrific The Invisible Man deserves some credit for bringing a new prism to the furry critter first made famous by Chaney in 1941.  Christopher Abbott, often excellent in supporting roles, steps up in a lead role once earmarked for Ryan Gosling. He’s Blake, a country kid who’s grown up to appreciate his big-city life with workaholic journalist wife Charlotte (Ozark’s Julia Garner) and moppet of a daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). A writer who’s ‘between jobs’ and worried about his marriage, Blake pours himself into parenting, inadvertently mirroring the overprotective tendencies of his own dad – set up in flashback, along with the movie’s wolfman mythology, via a great prelude sequence. There are one or two genuinely disgusting moments of body horror here Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck’s screenplay helpfully twice-underlines the impending twist – ‘Sometimes as a daddy, you get so scared of your kids getting scars that you become the thing that scars them,’ Blake tells Ginger – before the trio head for his old...