Reviews
How to approach Titane, Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to her bold debut Raw, without entering spoiler territory? It’s not so much a story as an exercise in shock reveals, of inappropriateness and transgression, delivered in the sort of cine-literate style that gets festival juries salivating. It won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. What can be said … Read more
British readers wondering why Tom Hanks is starring in a film about a defunct Rupert Murdoch newspaper – fondly known as The News of the Screws, because of its interest in kiss-and-tell stories – wonder no more. This western is called News of the World because that is the name of the novel it’s based … Read more
There’s a grimy directness to the Liverpool gangster drama which substitutes Scouse sarcasm for the lairiness of the mockney geezer equivalent. Made by debut director James Marquand and starring its co-writer, James McMartin, it’s the story of a washed-up boxer with a low sperm count who takes a job as a bouncer, falls out with his … Read more
Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is back, tasked with saving the world from a dastardly villain intent on unleashing a deadly virus – cackle, preen. The “this time it’s personal” angle comes from the fact that the villain is a former Impossible-ist himself, and also the former lover of the woman Mr Hunt is now in … Read more
Also known as The Contact Man, Alias Nick Beal is the much better title of this unusual political allegory meets supernatural drama. The Nick is Old Nick and the Beal is short for Beelzebub. Got it? A retelling of the Faust story is the idea, with Ray Milland as the Mephistopheles stand-in and Thomas Mitchell … Read more
What do you do when you’ve been in a high-profile relationship with Brad Pitt, only for it all to go spectacularly tits up? Jennifer Aniston went out and made a romcom about the perfect relationship and how it all went wrong. That might seem more than mere coincidence but anyone looking for coded digs at … Read more
When William Friedkin died in 2023, aged 87, the obituaries talked of the director of The Exorcist and the man who gave us The French Connection. The Boys in the Band, his groundbreaking film from 1970, which took dramas about gay men into the mainstream, got some bandwidth, as did Sorceror, his remake of Clouzot’s … Read more
First-world and real-world problems collide in Human Capital, which started life as an American novel, became an Italian movie (Il capitale umano) in 2013 and then returned to the US in 2019 for this English-language version. How best to describe all three? Bonfire of the Vanities meets The Ice Storm will about do it. In … Read more
Play nice is the ultimate message of Mārama, which the IMDb describes as “a Maori gothic revenge horror set in Victorian England, 1859”. You won’t find me disagreeing. The “revenge horror” takes a while to come, but there’s plenty of Maori gothic in the interim. Or plain old gothic, served up with a Maori central … Read more
On a filthy rainy South Korea night a young mother abandons her baby, leaving it in the “baby box” – designated for just this thing – attached to a church. The next day, having changed her mind, she heads back to the church, only to find that a pair of “baby brokers” got to the box before … Read more
There’s not much wrong with Yolanda and the Thief that a lot more dancing wouldn’t fix. It’s a 1945 Fred Astaire musical, and the first in a run of Technicolor movies that would prove director Vincente Minnelli to be a master of colour and motion. Though it was a flop, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with … Read more
A horror movie coming at the genre from three different directions, Reborn starts off in distinct tits’n’gore territory, jumps quickly into the supernatural and then eventually morphs into something altogether more psychological. Key asset is Kayleigh Gilbert, who has a big-eyed face and long physique built for the gothic. She plays the teenager who was … Read more