Geoff Andrew

Cartoons aren’t just for kids, of course. But for most kids, cartoons are where a love of movies often starts. No matter how highfalutin your taste in movies as an adult, chances are, your first cinematic obsession was an animation – whether it was a classic of Disney’s Golden Age or its ‘90s renaissance period, a Pixar heart-tugger or perhaps even a Studio Ghibli masterpiece. It’s a love most of us never never fully grow out of, either. Ask any parent about the joys of early child-rearing and they’ll undoubtedly tell you about showing their kids a cartoon they loved as a young’un. It’s a magical experience you get from few other forms of entertainment.   But the best animated movies don’t just appeal to kids, nor childhood nostalgia. They work on multiple levels, for broad audiences and age groups. In composing this list of the greatest animated movies ever made, we polled Time Out writers and experts including Fantastic Mr Fox’s Wes Anderson and Wallace and Gromit’s Nick Park, and the results run the gamut, from from those Disney, Pixar and Ghibli no-brainers to stop-motion nightmares, psychedelic headtrips, illustrated documentaries and bizarre experimental features that are decidedly for adults only. The movies on this list may make you feel like a kid again – but they may also blow your grown-up mind in ways you never expected.  Written by Trevor Johnston, David Ehrlich, Joshua Rothkoph, Tom Huddleston, Andy Kryza, Guy Lodge, Dave Calhoun, Keith Uhlich, Cath Clarke and M

British cinema is as diverse and ever-shifting as the country itself. In 2024, it encompasses everything from David Lean’s historical epics to Ken Loach’s socialist missives, and Steve McQueen’s muscular biographical dramas to Joanna Hogg’s intimate mood pieces. Danny Boyle’s pitch-black comedy ‘Trainspotting’ is a quintessential British film – but so too, in another way, is the Richard Curtis-penned romcom ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. And more recent dazzling recent such as Charlotte Wells' aching coming-of-age tale ‘Aftersun’ and Molly Branning Walker's prickly, ambiguous ‘How to Have Sex’ are pushing the medium into bold, bracing new territory. In compiling this list of the best British movies of all-time, we surveyed a diverse array of actors, directors, writers, producers, critics and industry heavyweights, including Wes Anderson, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Sam Mendes, David Morrissey, Sally Hawkins, Thandiwe Newton and the late Terence Davies. Unsurprisingly, it’s a richly varied and fascinating collection of must-see movies. Written by Dave Calhoun, Tom Huddleston, David Jenkins, Derek Adams, Geoff Andrew, Adam Lee Davies, Paul Fairclough, Wally Hammond, Alim Kheraj, Matthew Singer & Phil de Semlyen Recommended: 💂 50 great British actors🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🎥 The 100 best movies of the 20th century so far🇬🇧 The 100 best London songs 

O potencial cinematográfico (e não só) da ficção científica é quase infinito. É nestes filmes que os nossos maiores pesadelos podem tornar-se realidade e os nossos sonhos concretizar-se, ao mesmo tempo que é dito e posto em causa algo sobre o nosso presente. E o género sempre fez as delícias do público, desde o tempo dos efeitos especiais básicos e rudimentares dos filmes mudos ao excesso digital dos blockbusters contemporâneos. Hoje, no entanto, é a própria crítica quem aplaude e celebra muitos destes filmes, tal como acontece com os super-heróis e o terror. A pensar nisso, elegemos os 100 melhores filmes de ficção científica de sempre. Recomendado: Filmes em cartaz esta semana

Ens trobem davant d’un dels majors assoliments del veterà director Marco Bellocchio. El drama retrata Tommaso Buscetta, un soldat de la màfia siciliana que decideix sincerar-se als tribunals sobre les activitats il·lícites dels seus companys. La trama comença a Palerm, a inicis dels anys 80, quan dues famílies rivals de la Cosa Nostra pacten un acord per distribuir-se els beneficis del tràfic d’heroïna. Fart de la vida de gàngster, Buscetta opta per deixar de banda el crim. Desafortunadament, és detingut al Brasil poc després i extradit a Itàlia, on explica a un jutge els secrets de la màfia siciliana. Com era d’esperar, el protagonista –sotmès a un programa de protecció de testimonis– es veurà amenaçat de mort pels seus antics companys de la Cosa Nostra. Pel que fa al gènere, és possible que no hi hagi res especialment destacable; però la pel·lícula brilla amb força en la majoria dels seus aspectes. El cineasta italià mostra una gran habilitat a l’hora d’alternar un drama loquaç (però sempre entretingut) a la sala dels tribunals amb vívides escenes d’enfrontaments entre rivals mafiosos, i fa una gran labor convertint una narració complexa de múltiples personatges en un film lúcid i temptador. La interpretació superlativa de Pierfrancesco Favino fa que el drama guanyi molts punts; Buscetta emprèn un inesperat camí cap a la redempció moral i emocional que porta El traidor més enllà del seu propi gènere, transformant-lo en una cosa gratificant.

Though the veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio has had a long, prolific and very distinguished career, it must be said that it is also somewhat uneven – perhaps hardly surprising given that he’s ranged so widely in terms of material. Happily, this portrait of Tommaso Buscetta, a soldier in Sicily’s Cosa Nostra who in the 1980s decided to come clean in court about the activities of many mobster colleagues, is one of his best films; indeed, it may well be his finest achievement in some years. It begins in Palermo in the early ’80s, as two rival Mafia families get together to celebrate their having apparently come to an agreement on how to divide up the increasingly profitable heroin trade. Soon after, Buscetta, tired of his life of crime, decides to move with his wife to Rio de Janeiro, leaving behind two sons by a previous marriage. When all hell breaks out between the two clans, among the many executed are his sons and his brother. Buscetta is arrested by the Brazilian police for trafficking drugs – a charge he resolutely denies even under torture – and extradited to Italy, where the judge Falcone eventually persuades him to tell the truth about who’s who in the local Cosa Nostra. This, naturally, immediately earns him the hatred of his former colleagues, who brand him an informer and threaten him and his family – living secretly abroad under a witness protection plan – with death. In terms of genre, there may be nothing especially remarkable about Bellocchio’s film – t

Since French writer-director Arnaud Desplechin first made a splash at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival with his feature debut ‘La Sentinelle’, he has established himself – in his native country, at any rate – as a filmmaker of ambition and insight. At the same time, his work has often been a tad too idiosyncratic, even whimsical, to gain widespread international recognition. This latest could be accused of neither flaw; indeed, in some respects, in its straightforward, robustly realist look at the daily working lives of a couple of cops in Roubaix, an impoverished town in northern France, it might be regarded by some as his most conventional movie to date. It begins with Captain Daoud (Roschdy Zem) and his team – which includes newcomer Louis (Antoine Reinartz), to some degree a surrogate for the audience – responding to a range of incidents: domestic violence, fraudulent insurance claims, rape, a missing-persons case and arson – before it comes to focus on the sordid murder of an elderly woman. Eventually, two female suspects are singled out, and Daoud and his colleagues set about trying to find out what, precisely, occurred, and who did what. For all that it might initially seem a little old-fashioned, Desplechin’s film is more unusual than it appears. He’s unconcerned with generating suspense or, indeed, any real sense of mystery; it’s soon clear than the suspects (played by Léa Seydoux and Sara Forestier) are probably guilty, and that the ‘answers’ provided by the many inter

Novelist-turned-writer-director Lee Chang-dong may not be the most prolific filmmaker around – he made his last film, ‘Poetry’, back in 2010 ­– but when he does get to work, the results are usually highly impressive and this, his sixth feature, is no exception. Inspired by a short story by Haruki Murakami (which was itself inspired by a story by William Faulkner), it centres on Jong-soo, a farmer’s son-turned-deliveryman who dreams of becoming a writer. One day in Seoul he meets Haemi, a girl he half-remembers from school. Soon she’s asking him to feed her cat while she travels to Africa, then seducing him. So when she asks him to meet her at the airport, he’s put out to find her in the company of wealthy sophisticate Ben, who immediately treats them to a meal. Soon, Jong-soo is wondering if they’re more than friends. It’s just the first mystery in a movie rich in teasing ambiguities and possible lies. When Haemi suddenly disappears from Jong-soo’s life, he naturally suspects Ben of having something to do with it. Might the handsome hotshot, who during one weed-fuelled conversation boasted about his bizarre hobby of burning down greenhouses, have murdered the young woman? Lee’s interest lies not in crime-solving but in exploring Jongsu’s emotional confusion. He takes against Ben partly out of sexual jealousy, partly because he inhabits a world the farmboy barely knew existed. Jong-soo’s increasing torment allows the filmmaker to touch subtly on the current social, economic a

While widely regarded as one of the finest Japanese directors working today, Hirokazu Kore-eda has a somewhat uneven body of work to his name, notwithstanding the fact that his measured pacing, gentle tone and uncluttered visuals make his style unusually distinctive. His best films, almost without exception, have been those about families – real or surrogate – so that titles like ‘Nobody Knows’, ‘Still Walking’ (arguably his masterpiece), and ‘Like Father, Like Son’ have earned him something of a reputation as an heir to the great Yasujiro Ozu. If ‘Shoplifters’ isn’t quite up there with his greatest work, it’s nevertheless very satisfying. The focus this time around is not on a real family but on a group of impoverished people of various ages living together in a run-down hovel and trying to get by the best they can. Shoplifting is practised by a middle-aged construction worker and the young boy he treats (and has trained) like a son; the labourer’s wife works on a job-share scheme in a laundry; another young woman performs in a  peep-show parlour; while the eldest of the makeshift ‘family’ lives off her former husband’s pension and other more mysterious sources of income. It’s not an easy existence, so when a small girl is found and brought home, she’s initially regarded as yet another unwelcome mouth to feed - till the scars on her body convince everyone that perhaps she ought not be returned to her mother and her lover. The film rewards on a number of levels. First, in dep

A menudo se habla de Hirokazu Kore-eda como el heredero natural de Ozu, sobre todo en lo que tiene que ver con el retrato de la familia como institución vertebradora del relato. Hay, sin embargo, una diferencia fundamental entre los dos cineastas, determinada por la época en que desarrolla su discurso: no tiene nada que ver el Japón de la posguerra, con la familia tradicional sometida a las primeras vibraciones de la modernidad, con Japón del siglo XXI, que, abrazado a las exigencias del capitalismo neoliberal, ha asumido la disfuncionalidad como uno de sus rasgos identitarios. Las mejores películas de Kore-eda (como 'Nadie sabe' o esta misma) hacen visible la marginalidad de estas familias postizas y empobrecidas, que sobreviven a la hostilidad del entorno estableciendo intensos lazos emocionales, sin caer en el panfleto de denuncia o en la lágrima fácil, sin ceder a los tópicos del cine social. Así pues, la primera parte de 'Un asunto de familia' consigue normalizar una situación dramática sin banalizarla, celebrando los delitos que ayudan a subsistir este grupo de desclasados. Cuando llega la tragedia, Kore-eda nos ha enternecido tanto la mirada que el cambio de registro resulta de lo más honesto y natural, lo que agranda la fuerza de un gesto que corrobora la dignidad de los desfavorecidos ante la ceguera de la ley.

With this impressionistic and often daringly enigmatic thriller taken from a short novel by Jonathan Ames, British fimmaker Lynne Ramsay (‘Ratcatcher’, ‘Morvern Callar’) is back on top form with a vengeance – quite literally, though that emotion is not hers but part of the story. ‘You Were Never Really Here’ centres on burly, big-bearded, taciturn hitman Joe (Joaquin Phoenix in determinedly unglamorous mode), whom we encounter in the opening scene already carrying out a contract – though we never find out who’s the victim or what it’s all about. In fact, Ramsay’s film gives mere visual and aural hints as to Joe’s backstory, motives and character. The briefest of flashbacks suggest he’s been in the military and the police, and that as a child he suffered a brutal father. But apart from seeing him carry out his work – his preferred weapon a hammer – all we know about Joe is that he lives with and cares for his elderly mother. Still, we do witness his dealings with a contractor, who lines up a job for him: to discover the whereabouts of and return to her politician father an underage girl abducted into sex slavery. All this may bring to mind ‘Taxi Driver’, but Ramsay’s film is very different. Not wanting to distract us with the precise details of the storyline, or those of the world Joe inhabits, she focuses instead on his inner life. She uses Phoenix’s subtly expressive face and body language, a complex soundtrack, an elastic editing style and Thomas Townend’s wonderful cinemat

Veteran French writer-director Jacques Doillon was apparently approached by producers suggesting he make a documentary to mark the centenary of the birth of Auguste Rodin. Though Doillon was by his own admission no devotee of the great sculptor’s work, he initially accepted the assignment but soon decided it would be better to make a fiction feature instead. Perhaps, however, he should have avoided the subject altogether. ‘Rodin’ is elegantly shot (by Christophe Beaucarne) and designed, but it is also plodding and unilluminating. It begins in 1880, when Rodin (the estimable but here unremarkable Vincent Lindon) has just received his first state commission to create ‘The Gates of Hell’, based on Dante’s ‘Inferno’. His pupil, assistant and, pretty soon, his mistress is Camille Claudel (Izïa Higelin), an artist of no mean talent herself but one who will eventually be undone not only by her own psychological/emotional turmoil but by the lack of recognition afforded her as a woman working in the shadow of the increasingly famous Rodin. The film sort of deals with the rise and fall of their relationship – but then again it doesn’t, really. Indeed, the script – chronologically linear yet disjointed, averse to melodrama yet often clichéd in a ‘hello Monet, hello Rilke’ kind of way – is deeply inadequate. It never sheds sufficient light on the Rodin-Claudel relationship, on the personality of either individual, on the society they lived in, or on the creative process itself. Yes, we’r

O estimável Jacques Doillon assina aqui um dos filmes mais portentosamente chatos já feitos sobre artistas e arte, um longo, monocórdico e entediante cliché de quase duas horas (que mais parecem ser quatro) sobre o labor criativo,
 os dilemas e as relações íntimas de Rodin, na altura em que ele estava a esculpir uma controversa estátua de Balzac e andava às turras com a sua assistente e amante, Camille Claudel. O canastrão Vincent
 Lindon, um dos piores e mais convencidos actores franceses, interpreta Rodin em estilo mumblecore e mesmo quem souber francês terá dificuldade em perceber o que ele está a dizer. Iza Higelin, no papel de Camille Claudel, parece uma aluna do primeiro ano do Conservatório sem a menor vocação para representar, mas a quem foi dado um papel importante num filme de destaque. Rodin é uma fita exasperante e profundamente verbosa, monótona e sob anestesia
geral das emoções, pior que o mais convencional telefilme, maçudamente académica, que envergonharia até o mais modesto tarefeiro do tempo do cinéma de papa. Como antídoto a esta poderosa estopada, recomenda-se Camille Claudel, de Bruno Nuytten (1988), que tem Gérard Depardieu e Isabelle Adjani bem vivos em vez de empalhados nos papéis de Rodin e Camille Claudel, e mais drama e paixão em cinco minutos do que este em 120. Por Eurico de Barros

The title of this supremely fresh, witty and thought-provoking new film by Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund ('Force Majeure') refers mainly to a new exhibit on display at a museum of contemporary art: a neon-bordered bit of brick flooring of some 16 square metres described by its creator as ‘a sanctuary of trust and caring’ where we all ‘share equal rights and obligations’. But the word might also refer to the city square Christian – the museum’s head curator – is crossing when he becomes the victim of a scam that relieves him of his wallet and phone. To recover them he’s reluctantly persuaded by an assistant to adopt a strategy which has unexpected consequences not only for himself but for colleagues and even complete strangers. Then there’s possibly a third meaning to the title, since the film is about different sorts of metaphorical space. As we follow the intelligent, pleasant, perfectly well-intentioned Christian (Claes Bang in a nicely judged performance) in his increasingly difficult dealings with the press – notably an American journalist played by Elisabeth Moss – the museum’s marketing department, sponsors, artists (one played by Dominic West), his daughters and the aforementioned strangers, the film explores the limits of responsibility, culpability, connectivity, even humanity. (There’s some fascinating stuff to do with primates, although it's best not to ruin that surprise.) It’s one thing for a well-off liberal to wax lyrical about equality, community, a fa

La premisa del segundo largometraje de Kleber Mendonça Filho, el guionista y director brasileño de Neighboiring Sounds, luce como una receta para el sentimentalismo y triunfo demacrado. Cuando Clara (Sonia Braga), una viuda de 65 años y retirada crítica de música, rechaza vender su amado departamento en la playa, en donde vivió sus mejores años, se confronta, no sólo al ataque de una poderosa compañía inmobiliaria, también de sus amigos de antaño e incluso familiares, quienes cuestionan sus decisiones. Mendonça Filho libra felizmente las trampas del cine sensacionalista al crear un drama creíble, complejo y satisfactorio. La clave para esta exitosa evasión del cliché es la actuación de Sonia Braga, cuya evidente fuerza, inteligencia y vitalidad son esenciales para su acosado pero terco personaje, Clara. A pesar de haber sido golpeada por el cáncer de mama en los ochenta y haber perdido a su esposo, Clara ha criado a una familia, se ha hecho un nombre como escritora y ha mantenido su entusiasmo por la música en particular, y la vida en general. La carismática actuación de Braga garantiza que nunca nos compadeceremos de Clara, simplemente deja con la esperanza de que logre sobrevivir a las tácticas cada vez agresivas de una compañía obstinada en comprarla –o, tal vez, comprobarle lo inseguro que puede ser para una persona de su edad vivir sola en un edificio deteriorado y al que casi cualquier persona puede entrar–. Conforme la historia avanza, también se expande. A la par de q

The premise of this second feature from Kleber Mendonça Filho, the Brazilian writer-director of 'Neighboring Sounds', sounds like a recipe for sentimentality and hollow triumphalism. When Clara, a 65-year-old widow and retired music critic, refuses to sell the beloved beach apartment she’s lived in for most of her life, she finds herself under attack not only from a powerful property company but from former friends; even members of her own family question her judgment. Happily, Mendonça Filho avoids the pitfalls of feelgood cinema, creating a drama that’s credible, complex and very satisfying. Key to his successful sidestepping of cliché is the casting of Sonia Braga, whose evident strength, intelligence and vitality are essential to the character of the embattled but stubborn Clara. Despite having been stricken by breast cancer back in the 1980s (the setting for a brief prologue that reveals her attachment to the same apartment) and lost her husband, she has raised a family, made a name for herself as a writer and retained her enthusiasm for music in particular and life in general. Braga’s charismatic performance ensures that we never pity Clara but merely hope that she’ll manage to survive the increasingly aggressive tactics of the company determined to buy her out—or, perhaps, prove to her just how unsafe it can be for a person of her age to live alone in a run-down building almost anybody can walk into. As the story unfolds, it also expands; besides being a study of a wom