Cinema
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…
Gripping, immersive and powerful: 1917 reviewed
Sam Mendes’s 1917 is the first world war drama that this week won the Golden Globe for best film and…
Clever, spirited, vigorous and intelligent: Little Women reviewed
There have already been several film adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved 1868 novel Little Women, and why not? After…
I’ve never seen a film like it: Ordinary Love reviewed
Ordinary Love stars Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson as a long-married couple whose lives are disrupted when she is diagnosed…
Wildly entertaining Pope-off: The Two Popes reviewed
The Two Popes stars Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce — that’s two reasons to buy a ticket, right there —…
Detailed and devastating: Marriage Story reviewed
Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is a drama about the breakdown of a marriage and it is, at times, devastatingly painful.…
Scorsese at his most leisurely, meandering and engrossing: The Irishman reviewed
The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic — a mobster-a-thon, you could say — starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino,…
