Cinema
Blue notes
This documentary about Billie Holiday is transfixing. Not just because it’s about Billie Holiday — I am not into jazz…
A star is reborn
The Life Ahead stars Sophia Loren, and if there is one reason to see The Life Ahead it is this:…
Riveting twosome
This week, two electrifying performances in two excellent films rather than two mediocre performances in the one mediocre film —…
Bros your mind
The Climb is, essentially, a bickering bromance as two longtime pals bicker bromantically down the years, and it doesn’t sound…
Haunted by Hitchcock
Rebecca is a new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic, twisted, never-out-of-print tale of sexual jealousy. It’s directed by Ben…
Saints and sinners
Saint Maud is a first feature from writer-director Rose Glass and it’s being billed as a horror film. But it’s…
Zinger ping pong
Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 — don’t worry, you haven’t missed six earlier films — is a…
Dumb and dumber
I think I am supposed to say that Bill & Ted Face the Music, the third in a franchise about…
Savage beauty
The Painted Bird opens with a young boy (Jewish) running through a forest and clutching his pet ferret. He is…
To cut a long story short
Tenet is the latest high-concept, time-bending blockbuster from Christopher Nolan and it’s the film that (unofficially) reopens cinemas in the…
His dark materials
Matteo Garrone’s live-action version of Pinocchio is visually sumptuous and there are some enchanting characters (my favourite: Snail). And unlike…
Half baked
Some cinemas have reopened, with the rest to follow by the end of the month, thankfully. But the big, hotly…
Georgia on my mind
The film you want to see this week that you mightn’t have seen if you weren’t stuck at home is…
Untruthful
To tell you the truth about The Truth, even though it stars Catherine Deneuve at her most Catherine Deneuve-ish (i.e.…
Gross receipts
Film-makers are increasingly turning to the violent, provocatively slow or viscerally repulsive.What is driving this rise in extreme cinema? asks Francesca Steele
Difficult women
The director of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, talks to Sarah Ditum about her new biopic of Marie Curie, exile from Iran and her fears for the future of democracy
When perving was the norm
Misbehaviour is a film about the 1970 Miss World contest that was disrupted by ‘bloody women’s libbers’ — that’s what…
Sisters are doing it for themselves
Military Wives is a British comedy drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan. It is based on the true…
What a scorcher
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set on a remote, windswept Brittany island in the late 18th…
Greed is bad
Greed is Michael Winterbottom’s satire on the obscenely rich and, in particular, a billionaire, asset-stripping retail tycoon whose resemblance to…
Tinkerbell Regency
‘Too pretty,’ blithers Miss Bates in the Highbury haberdasher as she plucks at a silken tassel. ‘Too pretty’ goes for…
Space invaders
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Bafta for best foreign film and is up for six Oscars and it is an…
Curdled foreskin
The Lighthouse stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson (and a very nasty seagull) in a gothic thriller set off the…
Let there be light
Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is a romp told at a lick, and while it’s fun and……
One of those films that never seems to end: A Hidden Life reviewed
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a historical drama based on the true story of Franz Jäggerstätter, an Austrian who…
