|
4/5
|
Bird
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
It’s a fragile but beautiful vision, and marks the strongest blend yet of Andrea Arnold’s primary directives as a filmmaker.
Posted Nov 08, 2024
|
|
3/5
|
Paddington in Peru
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Really, all you can do is take what joy you can from Paddington in Peru, because its pleasures are rarer but still sweet.
Posted Nov 04, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Heretic
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
While Beck and Woods flirt with convention in the film’s later stages, as it grows wilder and more gruesome, Heretic is a wordy horror that holds up surprisingly well under scrutiny.
Posted Oct 31, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Anora
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Anora is a small film that feels much larger, elevated by humour, chaos, and human tenderness.
Posted Oct 31, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Vengeance Most Fowl is proof the traditional can still thrive – not only in how a film looks, but even in the barrage of puns and corny dad jokes.
Posted Oct 30, 2024
|
|
2/5
|
The Room Next Door
(2024)
|
Adam White
|
Despite such promise, the film is also didactic, strained and unsure of itself.
Posted Oct 28, 2024
|
|
3/5
|
Venom: The Last Dance
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
It’s hard to say how these films will be remembered in the grand scheme of comic book history, but, with The Last Dance, we can at least be reminded that sometimes they actually managed to have fun with these things.
Posted Oct 23, 2024
|
|
3/5
|
Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare
(2024)
|
Katie Rosseinsky
|
This is a solid, sensitively made introduction to a jaw-dropping tale. But for the most part, it serves as a feature-length trailer for a much more comprehensive -- and much more compelling -- podcast.
Posted Oct 17, 2024
|
|
3/5
|
Woman of the Hour
(2023)
|
Annabel Nugent
|
The storytelling here is sensitive, and the killer's most heinous acts take place off screen. Elsewhere, though, that sense of white-knuckle control can exude extreme self-consciousness.
Posted Oct 17, 2024
|
|
3/5
|
The Apprentice
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
The Apprentice’s most effective takedown of Donald Trump is how unremarkable it makes him seem. This may render Ali Abbasi’s portrait... a little monotonous, but it makes its point succinctly.
Posted Oct 17, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
The Wild Robot
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Such dark humour is a rare sign of respect for its pint-sized audience, whose intelligence and curiosity have increasingly been undermined by major studios.
Posted Oct 17, 2024
|
|
|
Scream
(1996)
|
Adam Mars-Jones
|
Craven does a better job exploring -- and exploding -- stereotypes.
Posted Oct 12, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Timestalker
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Lowe lets all these ideas brew in a frothy, funny, pastel-tinged concoction.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
|
|
5/5
|
Blitz
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
It’s a period documented, honoured, and reinterpreted a hundred times on screen before. Yet it’s what [Steve McQueen] sees and how he sees it, as one of Britain’s most extraordinary filmmakers, that makes Blitz feel monumental.
Posted Oct 09, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
A Different Man
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Pearson commandeers the frame, possessing an immaculate British cordiality, of the intellectual who never takes himself all too seriously.
Posted Oct 04, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
The Outrun
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
The Outrun’s true tether, however, is Ronan, and here she works to all her greatest strengths. The film wraps entirely around her, yet she’s far too honest an actor to ever play up to the audience’s expectations of a woman in crisis.
Posted Sep 26, 2024
|
|
|
Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval
(2024)
|
Adam White
|
For Your Approval renders DeGeneres an unimpeachable victim to an angry mob, her failings largely inconsequential, her imminent departure from the spotlight a tragedy. “Look what you’ve done,” it seems to insist.
Posted Sep 26, 2024
|
|
|
Bram Stoker's Dracula
(1992)
|
Anthony Quinn
|
This beguiling, inventive, slightly hysterical box of tricks isn't really Bram Stoker's Dracula, so call it something else -- Coppola's One Through the Heart.
Posted Sep 26, 2024
|
|
3/5
|
The Substance
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
The Substance doesn’t quite gel as it should, but it’s potent... Cinema can only benefit from having a figure like Fargeat within its ranks. Sometimes, all that’s needed in art is an unfiltered, guttural scream.
Posted Sep 20, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
His Three Daughters
(2023)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Maybe the movies will never get it quite right, but His Three Daughters is as honest about grief as one can be.
Posted Sep 20, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Will & Harper
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Nothing here is inauthentic or dishonest, but both subjects are storytellers by nature, and they’re never fully disconnected from the camera in front of them. They know the kind of story that needs to be told, and what vulnerability is demanded from them.
Posted Sep 13, 2024
|
|
2/5
|
The Critic
(2023)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
I wouldn’t expect relatability in this case, but I do expect substance. Here, it’s largely absent.
Posted Sep 13, 2024
|
|
3/5
|
Speak No Evil
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
While this might be a flashy, American production, it’s also the distinctly observational work of a British writer-director. And then there’s McAvoy, delivering one of the most impressively repugnant performances of the year.
Posted Sep 10, 2024
|
|
3/5
|
Starve Acre
(2023)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
It lacks the intimate and the specific. But, hell, Starve Acre does end with one of the oddest, most off-putting images you’ll see at the cinema this year.
Posted Sep 07, 2024
|
|
3/5
|
Firebrand
(2023)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Firebrand exceeds in capturing the way mundanity can slip so easily into terror; how a feast or a jest... can descend into hell at the turn of one man’s emotions.
Posted Sep 07, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Joker: Folie à Deux
(2024)
|
Geoffrey Macnab
|
Overall Folie à Deux is just as edgy and disturbing as its forerunner, replicating the idea of modern American cities as terrifying powder kegs perpetually on the cusp of explosion.
Posted Sep 04, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Maria
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Larraín has a way to make what feels absurd on paper read as poignant on screen. Edward Lachman’s cinematography allows the transitions between reality and unreality, colour and black and white, to melt into one beautiful, sad dream.
Posted Aug 29, 2024
|
|
2/5
|
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
(2024)
|
Geoffrey Macnab
|
There are wonderful gags and some enjoyably grotesque clowning from star Michael Keaton, while Burton’s visual inventiveness hasn’t deserted him. But his ability to tell a coherent story is very much in doubt.
Posted Aug 29, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Kneecap
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
It’s a film that not only signals a major musical arrival, but ends up feeling a lot bigger than the conventional (and often confining) boundaries of the “music biopic”.
Posted Aug 22, 2024
|
|
2/5
|
Blink Twice
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
For a film that’s so explicit in how it tackles trauma, it makes for a frustrating experience.
Posted Aug 22, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Cuckoo
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Singer shoots it all with a puppet master’s tightness of control, never pushing a single sequence too far, and leaving room for the monstrous chill of suggestion.
Posted Aug 22, 2024
|
|
|
Beetlejuice
(1988)
|
Kevin Jackson
|
The comedy that follows is often more spectacular than funny, though Betelgeuse himself is a beguiling slob in the John Belushi mode.
Posted Aug 21, 2024
|
|
3/5
|
Alien: Romulus
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Alien: Romulus has the capacity for greatness. If you could somehow surgically extract its strongest sequences, you’d see that beautiful, blood-quivering harmony between old-school practical effects and modern horror verve.
Posted Aug 14, 2024
|
|
1/5
|
Borderlands
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
It’s dragged us back to a time when studios used to make these with all the grace and acuity of a drunk person attempting to place a 3am chicken nugget order.
Posted Aug 08, 2024
|
|
2/5
|
It Ends With Us
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
It Ends with Us is capable of poignancy. Yet it’s also entirely ill-equipped to square such sensitive material up against scenes of diamanté boots being sensually rolled down.
Posted Aug 07, 2024
|
|
3/4
|
The Tango Lesson
(1997)
|
Ryan Gilbey
|
The Tango Lesson proves beyond doubt that Potter is adept at breaking down established boundaries between artist and audience.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
|
|
|
Def Jam's How to Be a Player
(1997)
|
Ryan Gilbey
|
[An] infantile sex comedy.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
|
|
1/4
|
A Merry War
(1997)
|
Ryan Gilbey
|
The picture feels awfully insubstantial.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
|
|
2/4
|
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag
(1997)
|
Ryan Gilbey
|
Pesci's breathless psycho routine can be wearing, but the script offers the odd sparkling lines.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
|
|
3/4
|
The Myth of Fingerprints
(1997)
|
Ryan Gilbey
|
It's the underrated Roy Schneider and the ever-brilliant Julianne Moore who really make this worth seeing.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
|
|
3/4
|
Under the Skin
(1997)
|
Ryan Gilbey
|
At times, the atmosphere of claustrophobic sexual tension is overwhelming, but there's real sadness and sensitivity here, as well as a desperately poignant performance from Morton.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
|
|
3/4
|
One Night Stand
(1997)
|
Ryan Gilbey
|
Instead of emotional hyperbole, Figgis strikes a paradoxical note of hushed melodrama.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
|
|
4/4
|
Alien Resurrection
(1997)
|
Ryan Gilbey
|
It's the same old story, but it has verve and pizzazz to spare. The progression of the character of Ripley is also ingenious.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Dìdi
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
It’s all the better for feeling so immediate. Dìdi is a memory with barely a scratch on it.
Posted Aug 01, 2024
|
|
2/5
|
NBC's Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony in IMAX
(2024)
|
Nick Hilton
|
Too much filler, too little killer. And whoever decided to predicate the visual success of the ceremony on the Parisian weather displayed either intense hubris or a baffling lack of guile.
Posted Jul 29, 2024
|
|
5/5
|
I Saw the TV Glow
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Good allegories, of course, feel infinite. And I Saw the TV Glow speaks so powerfully to the curse of denial that the words “there is still time”, scrubbed in chalk on a suburban street, can have an almost magical effect on the viewer.
Posted Jul 26, 2024
|
|
2/5
|
Deadpool & Wolverine
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
Deadpool & Wolverine is as much fun as you can conceivably have at a corporate merger meeting.
Posted Jul 23, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Janet Planet
(2023)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
We understand every word and action here to have symbolic value, and Janet Planet is not afraid of its own artificiality. It’s sparse in narrative, but thick with implications.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
Twister
(1996)
|
Adam Mars-Jones
|
The film tries to keep a straight face about the terrible damage done by tornadoes, the need t give people more warning, but joy in mayhem is just too strong.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
4/5
|
Longlegs
(2024)
|
Clarisse Loughrey
|
For my (perhaps already cursed) sensibilities, Longlegs isn’t some unshakeable artefact of malevolence, and more like a knife in the back -- nasty, precise, and unexpected.
Posted Jul 12, 2024
|
>