Di another day
This week, an excellent film (Moving On) and a film that isn’t at all, but is entirely worth it as…
No cojones
It’s a hard heart that doesn’t warm to the musical drama Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I don’t have a hard…
Bricking it
Herself is an intensely powerful film about domestic violence that isn’t Nil By Mouth or The Killer Inside Me or…
Odd and odder
Leos Carax is the director whose films have always been wilfully odd. Ron and Russell Mael (the brothers from the…
Secrets and spies
The Courier is a Cold War spy thriller and the prospect of a Cold War spy thriller always makes my…
Growing pains
The biggest challenge in reviewing M. Night Shyamalan’s Old lies in describing its central idea without making the film sound…
Bring on the tissues
Not one, but two British films this week, one that’s only being screened at the cinema (if you’re brave enough)…
Good dogs v. lame jokes
Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer…
By Tove!
Tove is a biopic of the Finnish artist Tove Jansson who, most famously, created the Moomins, that gentle family of…
Men behaving drunkenly
Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round has been heaped with awards: an Oscar, a Bafta, it swept the European Film Awards. And…
Two men and their dog
At the time Supernova went into production one headline read: ‘What did we do to deserve a love story starring…
What a song and dance
In The Heights is an adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit stage musical — the one he wrote before Hamilton —…
Where is my mind?
The Father is an immensely powerful film about dementia starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, who was asleep in his bed in…
Land of milk and money
Kelly Reichardt’s First Cowstars John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, and a Jersey cow listed in the credits as ‘Evie’,…
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,…
