Film Reviews

★★★★☆ The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive. Those words, uttered by Private Joker, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam war film, Full Metal Jacket, echo in Mark Jenkins’ horror oddity, Enys Men. The Cornish director’s latest work is a committed avant-garde experiment, guided as much by Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and At Land (1944) as it is British classic The Wicker Man (1973), John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) or Herk Harvey’s Carnival...

★★★★★ It feels like the double Palme d'Or winning Dardenne brothers are falling out of critical fashion. Even though they continue making essential movies, tell stories that need to be told, tackle modern social issues from a left-wing perspective and with their customary nonjudgement and nuance. To quote a popular internet Simpsons meme: no, it’s the critics who are wrong. As per recent developments regarding their aesthetic, the Liège-based siblings again infuse their latest, Tori and Lokita (2022), with a...

★★★★☆ In recent times the acclaimed American indie auteur, James Gray, has opted for epic spectacles taking place in 1920s New York (The Immigrant, 2013), the Amazon jungle (The Lost City of Z, 2016) and outer space (Ad Astra, 2019). His latest, though set in early 1980s Queens, is a return of sorts to the family-focused dramas which made his name. Young Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) is a daydreamer. At school, he gets into trouble for drawing instead of...

★★★★★ Ruben Östlund’s The Square won the Palme d’Or in 2017. A social satirist, he loves nothing better than to skewer bourgeois pretentions, his past targets include masculinity and the art world. In his new film, Triangle of Sadness (2022), the Swedish director takes a bunch of brash and manipulative 1%ers on a voyage across the high seas and uses the framing device to explore class oppression and what happens when the elites don't get their way. Told in three...

★★★★★ Humans are changing. Humans are … evolving. In David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, people have started to grow extra organs in their bodies, whose functions are yet to be discerned. Some, like Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), have used this biological development for a new type of performance art. Along with Caprice (Lea Seydoux), a former surgeon turned fellow artist, Tenser allows his collaborator to cut open his body with a biotechnological machine, probe around and extract tumours and...

★★☆☆☆ George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) is such a tedious grind from start to finish, it feels three thousand years long in running time. A ponderous and flat entry in the Australian maestro’s slim filmography, which outside of the Mad Max franchise has always been a bit hit and miss, this homage to storytelling and the power of love is a cringey dud. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a narratologist. That mean she spends her life studying...

★★★★☆ There is such a thing as too famous. Elvis Presley, king of rock ‘n’ roll, was too famous. In Baz Luhrmann’s excellent new film, the life of the 20th century icon of American culture and music is viewed through the eyes of unreliable narrator, the so-called "Colonel" Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). A former conman and freak show operator turned music promoter, this thoroughly mysterious chap singlehandedly turned the unknown Elvis into the biggest music star on the planet. Elvis...

★★☆☆☆ Spanish director Albert Serra’s so-called "anti-thriller" takes place in French Polynesia. In it, the island’s High Commissioner, De Roller (Benoit Magimel), begins to hear rumours about France resuming nuclear testing in the area. He does see signs of movement too; engineers showing up, the navy, but isn’t sure if he’s misinterpreting their presence. The native islanders get antsy and pester De Roller for information. It’s a headache De Roller doesn’t need and he's sensitive to French Polynesia being a...

★★★★☆ Are you ready to feel the need for speed again? Top Gun: Maverick (2022), arriving 36 years after the Tony Scott original, is a fly into the danger zone you won’t forget in a hurry. While it’s had more delays than a Ryanair flight to Malaga, the wait is definitely worth it. If when Covid hit, Hollywood studios panicked, and put tentpole blockbusters out as Video On Demand releases, Cruise, as the film’s producer and a powerful industry figure,...