Our latest movie reviews

‘The living are always more dangerous than the dead,’ observes a character in this icy noir – and it’s one of this Icelandic-set film’s key themes. It’s the 1870s and psychological torment awaits after an isolated group makes a brutal choice: do they rescue the survivors of a shipwreck or do they prioritise their own survival? With food supplies dangerously low, you can guess where this goes, but it’s tense watching the fallout as each person wrestles with their conscience in punishing snowy conditions.  Shirley’s Odessa Young stars as Eva, a widow who runs a remote fishing outpost and has hired a crew for the winter, which is particularly harsh this year. Nobody really wants to be there, but they’ll take the money and share it with their loved ones when they get back home. If they get back home. After a very disturbing episode, the group starts to fret about ‘draugr’ – undead men who seek revenge. Draugr are a common feature in Icelandic folk tales and it’s slightly confusing that this is an English-language film with an international cast, yet the implication is that everyone is Icelandic. Do they rescue the survivors of a shipwreck or do they prioritise their own survival? Still, Icelandic director Thordur Palsson (The Valhalla Murders) steers the ship with a steady hand and each actor delivers the goods. Young is terrific as the grieving young woman who is naturally emotional but driven by pragmatism in extreme circumstances, and it's interesting that she is the one...

The Last Showgirl may begin – as its ever-romantic heroine exclaims – with a shiny celebration of ‘breasts and rhinestones and joy!’ But in Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) sensitive telling, the glitter swiftly disperses to reveal an elegiac meditation on memory and age, femininity and beauty.  If you’ve heard anything about Showgirl, it’s likely that Pamela Anderson has hit a professional high as Shelly, the Las Vegas dancer of the title. And while she is indeed wonderful, her raw turn is only the first of many intricate layers here. Unfortunately, the layers of Shelly’s carefully-constructed life are suddenly shedding with furious haste. She’s been a proud cast member of the topless casino revue Le Razzle Dazzle for nearly 30 years. But her old-fashioned, elaborately-choreographed cabaret is giving way to seedier, more explicit entertainment: a crude show called ‘The Dirty Circus’ is overtaking their theatre imminently, and the Dazzle dancers (including Brenda Song and Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka) will be unemployed in just two weeks. The news stuns them all, but 57-year-old Shelly is really left reeling. She protects herself emotionally with a mix of nostalgia and naivete, and she’s still striking enough to assume she remains the sparkling starlet who knocked ’em dead in the ’90s. But 21st century realities keep intruding. There are painfully brutal auditions, a resentful adult daughter (Billie Lourd), and a range of sexist double standards so common they’ve become mundane....

It rivals The Substance as 2024’s most arresting horror film – and it was a killer year for the genre – but you’d hesitate to call Robert Eggers’ deeply sinister, slow-burning new take on the vampire classic ‘fresh’ exactly. Plague, rats, death and moral degradation abound in a tale made with a coolness manifest by none of its out-of-their-depth characters.  The American auteur, crushing it in every film he makes, returns to his horror roots with an even darker vision. The Witch, his debut, a parable of evil penetrating a Puritan family unit in Colonial America, gave us the demonic and meme-able Black Phillip. Nosferatu gives us just blackness, shadows to get lost in (props to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s noir lighting) and an undercurrent of lurking villainy that’s articulated in the film’s lulling early stretches by the jittery strings of Robin Carolan’s impressive score.  As with FW Murnau’s 1922 silent adaptation of Henrik Galeen’s Dracula riff, a film spilling over with post-Great War dread, and Werner Herzog’s AIDS-era remake Nosferatu the Vampyre, the plot is set in motion by a humble real-estate deal. Wisborg realtor Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) sends his ambitious young agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) to the Carpathian castle of one Count Orlok, to complete his purchase of a new abode in their seafront town.  Wrong move. The man he meets has none of the doomed romanticism of Klaus Kinski’s vampire, a mole-toothed softboi who was prone to lamentations about...

How often do you watch something so original, it changes the way you think about image construction itself? Colson Whitehead’s source novel – winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – was widely regarded as ‘unfilmable’ due to heartbreaking twists that surely could not be translated to the screen. And yet Ross has done so using techniques that pose questions about the way cinema has represented racially-motivated violence. The place is Florida in the early 1960s. Jim Crow segregation is thriving despite civil rights actions and the rise of a charismatic young preacher named Martin Luther King. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a quiet, bright and idealistic student whose path to an all Black college is cut short when he hitches a ride with the wrong man. The open road of his future becomes a dead end as he is yanked from a loving home shared with grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and into a segregated reform school for boys.  Director and co-writer RaMell Ross has an uncanny ability to lead viewers into an image that turns out to be a narratively significant trick of the eye. The Nickel Academy where Elwood is taken in the back of a police car is all leafy, spacious grounds, for this is how its gatekeepers want it to be seen.  Miraculously, Nickel Boys goes against the grain of its own devastating trajectory Schoolmaster Spencer (Hamish Linklater – pure evil) explains the route to graduation is to play by the rules. Meanwhile life is lessons, chores and staying out...

Every love story is a tragedy. Every relationship ends, either in disaster or death, and the only question is how much joy you can wring out of it before that time comes. That, at least, is the message of director John Crowley’s latest film, the story of a relationship where the beginning, middle and end play out at more or less the same time. Andrew Garfield is Tobias, an anxious, emotional wreck whose first marriage has ended in disaster. He encounters Florence Pugh’s chef Almut at this lowest of low points and they make an initially unlikely connection, but their chemistry is so undeniable that they attempt a date. In another strand of their timeline, they’re an established couple facing parenthood and illness; in the final one, they’re facing a challenge that may be too much for their relationship to survive. It’s a structure that avoids some of the usual decline-and-fall beats of a romantic tragedy simply by virtue of moving them away from the end of the affair. That simple trick helps you consider the relationship in its totality rather than simply being left remembering its ultimate doom. The actual scenes and conversations probably wouldn’t feel revolutionary or original in chronological order, but the time hopping really does add something here. There are shades of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival: even if you know that things will go badly, devastatingly wrong, perhaps the journey is worth taking nevertheless. And Crowley and his editor, Justine Wright, have done a...

The instant you see a Martin Parr photograph, especially one in colour, you either love it or hate it. Are his renowned photographs of English holidaymakers condescending, exploitative and critical? Or witty, good-natured and humanistic? Lee Shulman’s enormously entertaining documentary naturally makes a persuasive case for the latter, following the perma-smiling Parr around New Brighton, Merseyside – the location for his seminal work, ‘The Last Resort’ – as his ‘candid camera’ continues to capture human nature, red in lipstick-stained tooth and nail-polished claw. Not everyone is a fan of the mirror Parr has held up to society for the past 50-odd years, and it’s a testament to his divisiveness that when the world-renowned Magnum photography collective considered inviting him to join, half the membership threatened to quit if he was allowed in, the other half if he wasn’t.  His status as one of the great social documentarians has long since been understood, and this documentary provides a persuasive case for it, taking an amiable stroll through his Cartier-Bresson-inspired monochrome period, to his embrace of colour photography – the format of fashion and advertising, not serious art – an artistic choice every bit as ‘scandalous’ as Bob Dylan going electric. Parr’s work is kinder, cleverer and funnier than anything in Little Britain Parr is both accessible and elusive, resisting self-analysis and preferring to let the work speak for itself; the closest the film gets to a...

It’s over 50 years since British filmmaker Mike Leigh made Bleak Moments – a debut title that set the tone for a career if ever there was one. Leigh is now 81, and his wise and painful new film, Hard Truths, is the story of a London woman, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a middle-aged wife and mother stuck in a cycle of anger and resentment that Leigh is not about to break simply because it would give us a sense of relief.  Pansy is played with remarkable power by Jean-Baptiste. Put simply: Pansy is a piece of work. She snaps constantly at her family, husband Curtley (David Webber) and adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), and both of them are near-mute in the wake of her constant, bitter hectoring. She picks arguments in shops and car parks. She doesn’t have a nice word to say about anyone. The only person to whom she shows vulnerability is her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser whose warm rapport with her own grown-up, confident, happy daughters is in sad contrast to the absence of any real connection in Pansy’s suburban London household. Bleak moments? There are too many here to count – so many, in fact, that they coalesce into an upsetting portrait of someone whose plunge into depression and self-loathing is deep. It also means the moments of joy and relief – and they’re here – are extremely welcome.  The moments of joy and relief are extremely welcome In scale, this is a small film for Leigh; it feels contained and restricted. But that feels appropriate...

There are few more divisive figures in music than Bob Dylan. To some, he is a magical mysterious minstrel, a poetic voice of a generation. To others, he is a nasal whine in sunglasses. Made with Dylan’s blessing, Walk the Line’s James Mangold’s biopic A Complete Unknown (a lyric from Like A Rolling Stone) lands closer to the former, serving up an entertaining if rarely gripping portrait of the artist as a young hipster.  It spans from Dylan’s (Timothée Chalamet) 1961 arrival in New York to his appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he shocked the beardy-weirdies by playing with – Gasp! Horror! – electric instruments. In between, we get Dylan drawn into the folk fold by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), his seemingly effortless rise to stardom, his relationships with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, playing a fictionalised version of Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo) and fellow singer-songwriter Joan Baez (Top Gun: Maverick’s Monica Barbaro), and a heavy-handed depiction of the singer dealing with being pigeonholed as an acoustic troubadour. To his credit, Mangold eschews the cliches of the typical musical biopic – no-one shouts ‘Hey, tambourine man!’ to Dylan in the street – but he never imbues the story with compelling conflicts or raw intensity. It may stick close to the facts, but the storytelling is one note – the times might be a-changin’ but the tone rarely does. He also never really finds a way to articulate Dylan’s interior life – there’s lots of Dylan...

Nostalgists love to talk about returning to ‘simpler’ times. But as Tim Fehlbaum’s riveting September 5 reminds us, humans have always found new ways to fuck things up.  Taking a big step back thematically – and forward artistically – from his 2021 dystopian fantasy The Colony (aka Tides), the Swiss director keeps things ultra-taut in his media drama: most of the movie takes place in an airless control room. And we can feel the rising panic just as palpably as we smell the stale coffee. When the action begins, a jokey ABC Sports team is gearing up for a day of volleyball coverage at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Young producer Geoff (Past Lives’ John Magaro) is handling oversight while his bosses grab some much-needed rest. Then word comes in: the Palestinian terrorist group Black September has taken the Israeli team hostage. Fehlbaum knows that audiences may have seen this story before – if not live, than via Steven Spielberg’s biopic Munich or Kevin Macdonald’s doc One Day in September. So he narrows in, while simultaneously keeping an eye on a bigger picture. Glory to every director who sacrifices ego for a precise, 94-minute cut  Cinematographer Markus Förderer’s camera stays tight on this tiny team, which also consists of Geoff’s tense manager Marvin (Ben Chaplin), overlooked translator Marianne (Babylon Berlin’s Leonie Benesch), and top dog producer Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard). It’s a mind-scramble, today, to watch people make such impactful decisions with so few...

Yes, singer Robbie Williams is a CGI simian in this wildly ambitious musical biopic. But what sounds like it should be buffoonery is actually one of the most inspired bits of casting of the year. Even more than with The Greatest Showman, director Michael Gracey has created a fun, bombastic, brilliant choreographed and totally enthralling film.  This time he takes us from Williams’ childhood in Stoke, and the shadow cast upon him by his crooning father, to his unhappy boy band years, the painful break-ups with Take That and All Saint Nicole Appleton, and, finally, redemption in the form of a solo career and success that Gary Barlow could only dream about.   The pacing is electrifying and there are plenty of thrilling dance sequences; one medley on London’s Regent Street is jaw-dropping. Williams is number three on the list of musicians with the most UK number one albums, with only The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in front of him. But when it comes to musical biopics, William’s might be out front on his own. Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody are just two of the lauded films left in the dust by Better Man.  It’s one of the most inspired bits of casting of the year Fans of Williams will point to his song Me and My Monkey as the inspiration for the movie – and not just because Williams is played (and voiced in dialogue) by Jonno Davies, via a simian CGI makeover by the VFX team behind Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The tune is all about Williams’ much-publicised...