Rabbit redux
The cinemas finally reopened this week and what better way to celebrate than with Peter Rabbit 2? You’ll probably be…
Utopia or Pleasantville?
Some Kind of Heaven is a documentary set in The Villages, Florida, which is often described as a ‘Disneyland for…
A grief observed
Nomadland won multiple Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, and if there’d been an award for Best…
Down the rabbit hole
Black Bear is one of those indie dramas that is meta on so many levels you can either sit with…
A dish served very hot
Promising Young Woman is a rape-revenge-thriller that has already proved divisive but is a wonderfully clever, darkly funny, stomach-knotting —…
Life after deaf
The multi-Oscar-nominated Sound of Metalstars Riz Ahmed as a heavy-metal drummer whose life is in freefall after losing his hearing.…
Mad about the boy
In the summer of 2018, when film-maker Lee Isaac Chung was on the brink of giving up filmmaking and had…
Frolics and fossils
Ammonite is writer-director Francis Lee’s second film after God’s Own Country, one of the best films of 2017, and possibly…
He loves me, he loves me not
The premise for the unsnappily titled Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is this: a Hungarian…
Thriller instinct
Judas and the Black Messiah is a biopic about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but it’s not your regular biopic…
The kids are not alright
Raya and the Last Dragon has everything you might want nowadays from a major Disney film — feisty kick-ass heroine,…
Nothing personal
Pelé is a two-hour documentary about the great Brazilian footballer — the greatest footballer ever, some would say — who…
Deliciously dark
I Care a Lot is a deliciously dark comic thriller that You’ll Enjoy a Lot. It’s heartless. It’s vicious. It’s…
Trigger happy
In this line of business you receive many emails from PRs ‘reaching out’ about their particular film, which I really…
Lowering the baa
Rams is an average film with a better film trying to get out, and you may already have seen that…
What lies beneath
Just before the outbreak of the second world war a discovery was made in a riverside field at Sutton Hoo…
Think twice
The White Tiger is adapted from the Booker-prize winning novel (2008) by Aravind Adiga. It is directed by Ramin Bahrani…
They wouldn’t let it lie
The comedy Blithe Spiritwas written by Noël Coward in 1941. It is, essentially, about a séance going wrong and a…
The secret history
Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! is based on a true event and set in 1962 in the Russian city of Novocherkassk…
A fine romance
Sylvie’s Love is an exquisitely styled, swooning, old-school, period Hollywood romance and while it has been described as ‘glib’ in…
Pandemic panto
This pantomime was filmed by ‘legendary Blue Peter presenter’ Peter Duncan in his back garden over the summer. It was…
This will hurt
County Lines is the kind of social realism that the British do so well, if not too well. In other…
It’ll blow you away
When I recommend this documentary to people, telling them it follows the journalistic investigation into a fire that broke out…
Whiplash
Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story.…
Blue notes
This documentary about Billie Holiday is transfixing. Not just because it’s about Billie Holiday — I am not into jazz…
