fri 29/03/2024

Film Reviews

Argylle review - Matthew Vaughn's secret agent fantasy dares you to deny it

Adam Sweeting

Mystery surrounds the provenance of Matthew Vaughn’s new spy fantasy, Argylle. Allegedly, it’s based on the debut novel of the same name by Elly Conway, with Bryce Dallas Howard playing a novelist called Elly Conway in the film. But evidence of the existence of a real-life Conway is hard to find, though there was a rumour that it was a pseudonym used by Taylor Swift (who denies it).

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This Blessed Plot review - a right old English carry on

Graham Fuller

The hefty Essex builder Keith Martin, who plays a version of himself, as do most of the non-professional actors in Mark Isaacs' comic docufiction This Blessed Plot, is no Olivier or Branagh. But he puts brio and a touch of bombast into the dying John of Gaunt’s famous monologue lauding his ailing England in Richard II.

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The Color Purple review - sensational second time round for Alice Walker's novel on screen

Matt Wolf

How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.

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All of Us Strangers review - a haunting story about the power of love, masterfully told

Helen Hawkins

Andrew Haigh’s films come at you like stealth bombers, presenting everyday scenes in a spare narrative style, and then using them to blitz you with unexpected emotions. His latest is no exception. 

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The End We Start From review - watery apocalyptic drama with star turn

Saskia Baron

The End We Start From couldn’t be more timely, opening in cinemas after weeks of heavy rain and flooding dominated UK news. But the film’s release has also coincided with the ITV police drama After the Flood and it’s too tempting to compare the two.

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The Holdovers review - a perfectly formed comedy that wears its perfection lightly

Helen Hawkins

Twenty years ago Alexander Payne put Paul Giamatti on the map in Sideways; here he is again, as another punctilious expert, this time not in the field of viniculture but plain old culture, of the old-fashioned classical kind. And his adversary is not a roguish friend but a spiky pupil at the boys’ school in New England where he teaches classics.

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Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer review - the visionary director's extraordinary career

Markie Robson-Scott

“It’s an injustice of nature that I haven’t become an athlete and it’s an injustice of nature that we do not have wings,” says German director Werner Herzog, aged 81, sounding characteristically intense.

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The Disappearance of Shere Hite review - the rise and fall of a woman who dared to explore female sexuality

Sarah Kent

When it was published in 1976, “The Hite Report” caused such a sensation that it was translated into 19 languages and flew off the shelves in 36 countries to become the 30th best selling book of all time. Yet it’s author, Shere Hite was treated as Public Enemy Number One.

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The Boys in the Boat review - a Boy’s Own true story told in formulaic style

Helen Hawkins

Seabiscuit, Creed, Rocky, The Full Monty, Chariots of Fire… George Clooney’s latest directorial project is in the same vein as these earlier films, but swap Seabiscuit et al for a rowing eight. 

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Poor Things review - other-worldly adaptation of Alasdair Gray's novel

Adam Sweeting

Following their award-scooping collaboration on 2018’s The Favourite, Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos return with this mind-bending adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s eponymous novel. Also on board is screenwriter Tony McNamara, who wrote (with Deborah Davis) The Favourite’s screenplay.

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Scala!!! review - a grindhouse cinema remembers

Nick Hasted

This week, the makers of Scala!!! threw a party in what remains of its subject – a notorious, beloved repertory cinema in then sleazy King’s Cross, born 1981, dead 1993, and now a dowdier music venue.

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Night Swim review - hardly immersive horror flick

Justine Elias

The water is wild in Night Swim, the weirdly wet horror debut from director Bryce McGuire, in which a backyard bathing pool becomes the locus of all things supernatural.

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Priscilla review - Bluebeard suede shoes

Hugh Barnes

Sofia Coppola knows a thing or two about teenage girldom. Like many of her other characters – in The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Somewhere and Marie Antoinette – the subject of her latest film, Priscilla Presley, is an ingenue living in a gilded cage and surrounded by lavish boredom. It hardly matters whether the setting is actually the Park Hyatt Tokyo, Chateau Marmont, the Palace of Versailles – or Graceland, in this case.

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Tchaikovsky's Wife review - husband material

Hugh Barnes

The movies haven’t been kind to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Nutcracker Suite was a highlight of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) perhaps, but the 1969 Soviet biopic directed by Igor Talankin was tedious and Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers, released two years later, worse than that.

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Ferrari review - a steady, slow-lane biopic

Nick Hasted

Just as Napoleon may be Ridley Scott’s most autobiographical subject, so motor-racing potentate Enzo Ferrari’s mastery of streamlined speed seems made for Michael Mann. But where his best films’ cool control accelerates into calibrated mayhem, Ferrari mostly stays underpowered.

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Next Goal Wins review - football's lamentables

James Saynor

For those who ever wonder if soccer scoreboards, or score-line captions on TV, can ever be made to reach three figures, consider the match between AS Adema and SO l’Emyrne, two teams in Madagascar, in 2002. It ended 149-0, but that was only because of an on-field protest. (They were all own goals.)

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