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Master Gardener
(2022)
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David Sexton
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This film is not just “a nasty gumbo”, as Schrader says proudly, and preposterous -- but also pretty much inexcusable. And yet I have to say that I loved it for being so distinct in its texture, so clearly part of a lifetime’s work.
Posted May 19, 2023
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Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
(2023)
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Leaf Arbuthnot
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The novel that Blume long prevented from being made into a film has finally received the big-screen treatment. The result, thank goodness, is lovely: tender, funny, at points very moving, and full of precise and careful performances.
Posted May 18, 2023
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Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me
(2023)
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Anna Bogutskaya
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While a sub-genre of documentaries reassessing the maligned women of the Noughties is thriving, Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me can barely contain its contempt for its subject matter.
Posted May 16, 2023
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Beau Is Afraid
(2023)
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Ryan Gilbey
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When everything is outlandish, nothing is. Beau Is Afraid should certainly be applauded for its originality and its confrontational tenor, but not its cartoonishly Freudian horror or the script’s meagre cod-psychology.
Posted May 16, 2023
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The Eight Mountains
(2022)
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David Sexton
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Wildly beautiful and tender, so infused with unspoken emotion that it’s a tearful watch even in its most idyllic moments.
Posted May 05, 2023
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A Thousand and One
(2023)
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Ryan Gilbey
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The director maps the contours of a destabilised existence. It is one thing to put us in Terry and Inez’s shoes, quite another to make us feel, as Rockwell does, the ground shifting unpredictably beneath them.
Posted May 01, 2023
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The Light We Carry: Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey
(2023)
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Rachel Cooke
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It’s little a bit Hallmark card, and it’s a little bit Susan “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway” Jeffers, and watching it, I’ve never felt more righteously British in my life.
Posted Apr 26, 2023
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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
(2022)
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David Sexton
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Lynch loves the Midwest landscapes and the good people Alvin meets, and the whole film feels at once both natural and utterly rich and strange -- truly miraculous, that pilgrimage. A better trip.
Posted Apr 24, 2023
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Sick of Myself
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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It is possible to construct provocative comedy around pitiful or reprehensible characters, but Sick of Myself never really builds.
Posted Apr 14, 2023
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The Night of the 12th
(2022)
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Jonathan Coe
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There is no doubting the grim authenticity of all of this. But that authenticity is sometimes at odds with the craftsmanship on display in the film’s several chilling suspense sequences and long, well-paced interrogation scenes.
Posted Apr 12, 2023
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God's Creatures
(2022)
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David Sexton
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God’s Creatures looks hard at its subjects, and makes you look and come to judgement too. Blarney, it’s not.
Posted Mar 27, 2023
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Pearl
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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Pearl wants so badly to be a star. Part of the film’s pleasure lies in realising that Goth already is.
Posted Mar 20, 2023
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Rye Lane
(2023)
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Ryan Gilbey
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The chasm between their curated selves and the shabbier reality is where much of the comedy and poignancy reside.
Posted Mar 10, 2023
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Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey
(2023)
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Ryan Gilbey
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Rather than being informed by a passion for the original characters, or the desire to tap into their unexplored subtext, it coasts opportunistically on the novelty value of placing them in a gruesome context.
Posted Mar 10, 2023
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Joyland
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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The 31-year-old Sadiq (who also wrote and edited the film) knows how to weigh every shot, every cut.
Posted Feb 23, 2023
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Women Talking
(2022)
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Megan Gibson
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It breaks free of the bleak narratives that have boxed in cinema’s rape victims over and over again. At the very least, it’s something we haven’t seen before.
Posted Feb 13, 2023
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The Son
(2022)
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David Sexton
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It’s plain torture, cruelly manipulative yet also hopelessly underwritten, once taken out of the theatre, into the light.
Posted Feb 10, 2023
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Magic Mike's Last Dance
(2023)
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Ann Manov
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Last Dance feels like little more than a cynical feature-length advertisement for the real-world stage show.
Posted Feb 10, 2023
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Consent
(2023)
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Sophie McBain
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The drama might be geared towards a younger audience, but I suspect that school students won’t learn as much from it as their parents, teachers or anyone else who works with young people might.
Posted Feb 10, 2023
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Women Talking
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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This has the makings of a waiting-game Western such as High Noon or Rio Bravo, as well as hints of Unforgiven... Whatever course of action is taken in Polley’s film, it will be the women who do it.
Posted Feb 03, 2023
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The Whale
(2022)
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David Sexton
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Brendan Fraser, cherished for his earlier roles as an endearing naïve, performs miracles in making Charlie likeable... Enduring such an awful play is a high price to pay to see some acting, though.
Posted Jan 27, 2023
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The Fabelmans
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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What a surprise to find Spielberg, the supreme sentimentalist, occupying that murky realm. We didn’t know he had it in him.
Posted Jan 23, 2023
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
(2022)
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Anna Leszkiewicz
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Poitras triumphantly dramatises how Goldin used her position to influence several galleries -- the National Gallery, the Met, the Louvre -- first to reject Sackler funding, then remove their names from the buildings entirely.
Posted Jan 20, 2023
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Babylon
(2022)
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David Sexton
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For a director skilled at mounting set-pieces, Chazelle is extraordinarily duff at managing structure on a larger scale: perhaps those talents don’t sit well together. Babylon has spectacular scenes yet is hopelessly unwieldy as a whole.
Posted Jan 17, 2023
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Tár
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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The film’s shifting tones create a Russian doll effect. Out of what appeared to be a character study pops a frigid comedy; from that emerges a horror movie and finally a bitter analysis of privilege and complacency.
Posted Jan 06, 2023
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Empire of Light
(2022)
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David Sexton
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The way to celebrate cinema is to make a good film, not to lecture about it in a bad one.
Posted Jan 03, 2023
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Bones and All
(2022)
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David Sexton
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Guadagnino has successfully melded here the taste for horror revealed in his re-make of Suspiria and the tender indulgence of Call Me By Your Name.
Posted Nov 29, 2022
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Lady Chatterley's Lover
(2022)
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Tomiwa Owolade
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This adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not terrible; it is too polished for that. But there is nothing at stake.
Posted Nov 29, 2022
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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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Glass Onion still has the edge over the year’s other whodunnits, if only because of the sublime Monáe.
Posted Nov 23, 2022
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The Wonder
(2022)
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Pippa Bailey
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The Wonder is entirely fresh -- and equally brilliant.
Posted Nov 23, 2022
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She Said
(2022)
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Ann Manov
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For all She Said employs crescendo strings, it is not a thriller: there is not one moment of tension or fear. What are the “stakes”, you ask? The leads worry Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article will come out first. With respect: are you kidding me?
Posted Nov 21, 2022
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Aftersun
(2022)
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David Sexton
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So memorable and moving the first time, Aftersun is all the more affecting seen again. And again. It deserves all the prizes.
Posted Nov 16, 2022
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No Bears
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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With the exception of the mournful Closed Curtain, No Bears is the gravest of Panahi’s post-arrest work. His usual puckish spirit is channelled here into a structure incorporating fragmented points of view.
Posted Nov 09, 2022
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Living
(2022)
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David Sexton
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It’s a great minimalist performance by Nighy, making the smallest escape of emotion significant -- and it works because you know just how quirky and scene-stealing Nighy can be when not thus repressed.
Posted Nov 02, 2022
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Sidney
(2022)
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Colin Grant
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Though far from hagiography, Sidney is laudatory, and given to a kind of soft-focus sentimentality, especially when a lachrymose Winfrey is interviewed. The tone is set by the inclusion of extracts of film archive, and Poitier’s calm, dignified voice.
Posted Nov 02, 2022
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Triangle of Sadness
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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When a director’s brand is cynicism, every choice can seem calculated for effect over meaning.
Posted Oct 26, 2022
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The Thief of Bagdad
(1924)
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Desmond MacCarthy
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This is the kind of thing that the cinema, and only the cinema, can do.
Posted Oct 21, 2022
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The Banshees of Inisherin
(2022)
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David Sexton
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The Banshees of Inisherin, the last in a trilogy of plays by McDonagh set in the islands, is a work of great purity, beautifully made.
Posted Oct 20, 2022
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White Noise
(2022)
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Pippa Bailey
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White Noise is maximalist, funny, abrasive satire that resists interpretation.
Posted Oct 12, 2022
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Emily
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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[Reduces] artistic inspiration to book-group talking points and dreamy what-ifs. But this debut feature from the actor-turned-director Frances O’Connor still contains striking material amid the poppycock, and even ’fesses up to its own futility.
Posted Oct 12, 2022
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The Lost King
(2022)
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David Sexton
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Stephen Frears’s direction is agile, sly and entertaining as ever. Like all his films, it’s innately subversive of authority, sympathetic to the outsider, relishing peculiarity.
Posted Oct 05, 2022
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Blonde
(2022)
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Tanya Gold
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Watching Blonde, it feels like Oates and Dominik hate Marilyn Monroe. In this film’s telling, she is doomed from the beginning, made of pain. You watch Ana de Armas’s Marilyn and think: where is the drive that must have existed?
Posted Oct 03, 2022
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Don't Worry Darling
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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It is just possible that there is a snappier, less derivative little thriller somewhere inside Wilde’s movie. Like the inhabitants of the Victory project, however, it is in dire need of liberation from its gilded, airless prison.
Posted Sep 28, 2022
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Catherine Called Birdy
(2022)
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David Sexton
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Catherine Called Birdy is indeed Dunham’s story, as much as anything she has made, a successful reversion. It may be overtly a YA movie -- but then what else was Girls ever but young adult?
Posted Sep 21, 2022
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Moonage Daydream
(2022)
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Fergal Kinney
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In its uncritical and estate-sanctioned hagiography, the documentary film diminishes, rather than enhances, our understanding of a 20th-century master.
Posted Sep 16, 2022
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Moonage Daydream
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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It is the use of Bowie’s interviews sewn together into a commentary as soporific as any podcast that turns Morgen’s cinematic valentine into a sort of poison-pen letter.
Posted Sep 14, 2022
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Crimes of the Future
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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Crimes of the Future feels like a weary summing-up, or a singles compilation from a once-pioneering band.
Posted Sep 07, 2022
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The Forgiven
(2021)
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David Sexton
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The Forgiven is film noir, tough and unrelenting, making no effort to charm. It is superbly acted, particularly by Fiennes, and makes effective use of these extreme landscapes, including their silence.
Posted Aug 29, 2022
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Official Competition
(2021)
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Ryan Gilbey
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Official Competition appears at first to be a standard movie-business takedown à la The Player, but it has far more faith in the art form than that. Among its tastiest pleasures is the chance to see Cruz and Banderas sparking together on screen at last.
Posted Aug 24, 2022
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Nope
(2022)
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Ryan Gilbey
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Meanings in Nope spring eternal, and they are surely too numerous to be absorbed in one go. A repeat viewing, then? I wouldn’t say nope.
Posted Aug 17, 2022
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