Reviews
After the success of 2019’s First Cow, you might have expected Kelly Reichardt’s 2022 follow-up, Showing Up, to be a bigger hit than it was. Critics liked it; audiences not so much. It seems that Reichardt most hits the target with paying punters when she delivers westerns. See also Meek’s Cutoff. But all her films … Read more
First Ant-Man, then Ant-Man and the Wasp and now Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, an element added to the title each time, the films also getting longer on each new iteration. Longer, busier, more sclerotic, this could be the worst Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to date, and that’s including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the … Read more
Paul Verhoeven’s erotic drama The Fourth Man (De vierde Man) opens, to ominous Wagnerian rumbling, on a black screen and then as the credits roll Verhoeven dramatically reveals a spider in close-up, first stunning a fly caught in its web and then cocooning it in silk. The whole process, in agonising detail. What Verhoeven treats … Read more
You’ll probably enjoy Pacifiction if you go for Graham Greene stories about shady white guys in white suits hitting the moral buffers in some sweaty colonial sump. It’s a familiar screen sub-genre. Most obviously there’s The Quiet American (either version) or 1967’s The Comedians, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But Greene’s complex-hero-abroad scenario turns … Read more
If you were idly flicking through the TV channels on a wet afternoon and hit upon Family Plot, chances are you wouldn’t immediately think it was a Hitchcock movie – it looks more like an episode of Columbo. That bright TV lighting, those mid-range actors who look like they’re trying not to be fingered as this … Read more
Memory stars Liam Neeson as a guy with a very particular set of skills… oh, you’ve gone. No, come back. He’s a hitman and it’s a one last job affair and… It doesn’t sound very promising, does it? After all by this point (2022) Neeson has been in how many of these – since Taken … Read more
Things go technological in the 12th episode of series two – The Big Thinker – a tale of a big brain computer called Plato and the scientists who minister to it like Delphic virgins in white lab coats. Hanging on like grim death to the notion that Britain was still at the forefront of things cyber … Read more
The terminal-illness weepie needs a firm hand or it can run off all over the place. Nowhere Special is a great case in point. Writer and director Uberto Pasolini keeps a tight grip, and James Norton’s impassioned but restrained performance is a thing of wonder. It’s so good that – as happens with proper acting – … Read more
There aren’t many films called El Cochecito. That’s the Spanish title. In English it goes by the title The Wheelchair. There aren’t many films with that title either. A wheelchair is not aspirational, it’s not something people covet. (As for The Little Coach, which the film sometimes flies by, no one even knows what that … Read more
I’m amazed at how many of “the best films of 2025” have left me pretty cold. Die My Love joins the list alongside the likes of Sinners, The Mastermind and Bugonia – everyone loves them, but I thought they were just OK. I did like Die My Love, though, particularly the florid performance by Jennifer … Read more
Can you believe there are still people out there who don’t know that all-conquering smash musical Wicked is the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. I know this because I met one of them just the other night. Relief: he did know what The Wizard of Oz … Read more
If you’ve ever wondered where RRR came from, or how come Tollywood became bigger than Bollywood, Baahubali: The Beginning is the answer to both questions. RRR was the crossover all-action spectacular that forced the rest of the world to take notice of Tollywood in 2022, and finally pushed it to the number one position in … Read more