Popular Reviews
The Duellists
The Duellists is Ridley Scott’s feature debut and premiered in 1977, four years after his famous advert for Hovis bread (voted the UK’s favourite TV advert in a 2006 poll). Both are picturesque evocations of a world long gone – pre-War England, in the 45-second advert’s case, the world of post-Revolutionary France in the case of the solid 100 minutes of The Duellists. The story is a true one – about two men in Napoleon’s army who fought a series of around 30 grudge duels over 19 years. Joseph Conrad had used the facts as the basis for a novella, and Scott’s screenwriter, Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, adapts them further with his screenplay, reducing the … Read more
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell
A night at the theatre in London’s West End is not always an evening of total entertainment: the ticket price, the discomfort of the seats, the warm G&T at the interval. But here’s an easy way to experience a play that was murder to get a ticket for when it was playing at the Old Vic. An affectionate tribute to professional drunk Jeffrey Bernard, it is the ultimate “stagey” film – as in we are literally watching the performance on the stage of the Apollo (where the play had its London debut), with a live audience, boomy acoustics, the lot. It’s perfect for fans of high-grade thespianism, louche yarns, ridiculous japes and, of … Read more
Branded to Kill
Branded to Kill is a crime thriller with so much style it’s absurd. Clearly aiming for the ridiculous it is deliberately style over content. Hashed out on the hoof by eight different writers who were clearly egging each other on, it’s a mad tumble of French New Wave crash edits and film noir poses, all held together – if it is held together at all – by a jazzy, jerky, atonal score. Nikkatsu, the Japanese studio that made it, thought it was a mess and wouldn’t release it. Its director, Seijun Suzuki, thought they just didn’t understand what they’d been given and sued them. And won. The film got its release but Suzuki’s … Read more
Sixty Six
Bernie, a London Jewish boy who sees his barmitzvah as the very peak of his young life, suddenly realises it’s taking place on the same day as the 1966 football (soccer) World Cup final. Will anyone come, especially once the home team start morphing from total no-hopers to potential giant-killers? Helena Bonham Carter, Peter Serafinowicz, Eddie Marsan and Catherine Tate are among the familiar British faces helping young Gregg Sulkin towards his big day in a likeable but small-scale comedy which pins its hopes on the footballing names Bobby Moore, Nobby Stiles et al to give it back-of-the-net appeal. This of course makes for very parochial comedy indeed, but director Paul Weiland, apparently basing … Read more
Sentimental Value
Imagine a standing ovation lasting for 19 minutes – enough time to have a bath. That’s what Sentimental Value got when it was shown at Cannes. Where, admittedly, they like this sort of thing – European, dense, non-genre, self-referential, serious, full of unsympathetic characters and recalling auteurs of the past. Bergman most obviously, and Persona in particular, a high point in his career of high points. There is a story, though it’s a jumping-off point for a series of meditations rather than a plot. After their mother dies, two sisters, Nora and Agnes, are slightly surprised and perturbed when estranged father, a cinema auteur whose best days are probably behind him, re-appears. Gustav, it … Read more
Interrogation
It took real courage to make Interrogation. Known as Przesluchanie in the original Polish, it looked like career suicide for everyone involved in the making of it. Even given the easier political situation in Poland once the Solidarity union had started making headway from 1980 onwards, the film’s message – that the regime was inhumane, Nazi even – was never going to be tolerated by the authorities. And it wasn’t. Banned before it appeared in 1982, it was nevertheless widely seen in Poland, thanks to pirate tapes played on VHS machines, which had only recently been introduced to Poland. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 it finally got its official release and … Read more
Murina
Martin Scorsese must be asked to lend his name to films by unknowns all the time. Murina obviously impressed him – he’s on board as an executive producer. It also won the Caméra d’Or, the gong handed out at Cannes to the best film by a debut director. Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic is that director and her film is a brilliant, tightly wound study of a family falling apart. It would be ugly if it weren’t set on the coast of Croatia, an idyll where grouchy Ante (Leon Lucev), his pretty wife Nela (Danica Curcic) and their lithe, sporty daughter Julija (Gracija Filipovic) live a simple life, catching fish to eat to supplement their … Read more
10 Best Films of 2025
In a year packed with 1990s revivalism, noir resuscitation and franchise exhaustion, these are the films I liked the most in 2025. I’ve attempted to avoid the obvious but not be wilfully obscure and have probably succeeded at neither. Without further ado, with links to full reviews, here goes – in 1-10 order. Dying (dir: Matthias Glasner) A German black comedy so bleak you might laugh out of desperation, following a pair of oldsters as they reach the end of the road, and their two appalling adult children. Superbly underplayed by a top-notch cast, it’s a novelistic, dense, all-enveloping wallow in human misery, three hours long and worth every minute of the grief. … Read more
Still Alice
A super confident woman, top of her game, a linguistics professor, one day discovers herself grasping for a word while she’s giving a lecture. This being the movies, where a cough in one scene leads to coughing up blood in the next, we automatically suspect she’s got Alzheimer’s. The title providing another nudge (why Still?). And so it turns out, in a movie that seems determined to put a polish on the disease of the week movie, and largely succeeds. Polish number one is that it’s not just any old Alzheimer’s but familial Alzheimer’s, in which the gene – should you have been unlucky enough to have inherited it from an affected parent … Read more
The Lure
So how about a horror movie featuring sexy mermaids who become disco singers in 1980s Poland? The Lure (Córki dancingu) is the film you’re after, so grabby as a concept that it went straight into the Criterion Collection after its release in 2015, which isn’t bad considering that’s where Kurosawa, Truffaut, Bergman and Claire Denis all hang out together. In the words of Criterion, this is where “important classic and contemporary films” are to be found. It’s also not bad for a debut feature, by Agnieszka Smoczyńska, who’s recently grabbed more attention with her The Silent Twins, another story of two isolated sisters leaning on each other for support. But not like this. … Read more
Evil Dead Rise
Who’s been watching The Exorcist? Writer/director Lee Cronin has, and Evil Dead Rise, the fifth instalment in the Evil Dead franchise, is thick with references to William Friedkin’s seminal 1973 horror movie. No bad thing in itself and just for fun Cronin chucks in an amusing reference to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining at one point, just to keep things lively. Comedy has been part of the mix in the Evil Dead series, going back to halfway through the second instalment when director Sam Raimi suddenly pushed the ick factor so far beyond overload that it became funny. It seemed unintentional, a misjudgement, at first. But going repeatedly too far proved Raimi meant it … Read more
Viva
The IMDb plot keywords for Viva include “large breasts” and “limp penis”, a rough indicator of what’s being served up in Anna Biller’s debut, a relentlessly accurate and grim pastiche of the pornified world of the 1970s sexploitation movie, or 1970s society itself. Biller wrote, directed, produced, edited, wrote some of the songs, designed the clothes and sets, painted the paintings, did the animated sequence and even played the organ. She also plays the main character. You could say it’s her film. What a world she’s conjured. Barbi (Biller), a suburban wife who we meet in her bath, tits prominent, smoking, drinking wine and looking pretty morose as she flicks through a magazine. … Read more
