Film
India Lewis
Madfabulous, director Celyn Jones’ retelling of the true story of an heir who bankrupted a peerage, is a truly beautiful film – worth a watch if only for the excellent outfits worn by its iconic queer antagonist (played by Callum Scott Howells). Sailing into his new life, wearing his mother’s burgundy dress, Henry Paget, fifth Marquess of Anglesey (Ynys Môn), "Toppy" (as he is nicknamed), has come to live by his mother’s rule: “always be true to yourself, Henry, it’s the greatest gift you have.” However, tragedy is already near at hand – Toppy coughs into a handkerchief in the first Read more ...
Graham Rickson
You’d watch Hamnet for the visuals alone, director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal flooding the screen with lush greens and browns, 16th century rural England brought to physical life with an eye-popping attention to detail. We first meet Jessie Buckley’s Agnes in dense woodland gathering plants, a gift for falconry signalling her otherness. Though the locals whisper that she’s the daughter of a witch, she proves irresistible to glove maker and Latin tutor William (Paul Mescal). He charms her with his storytelling abilities and she reciprocates by reading his palm, hinting at a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Spielberg’s new close encounter of the third kind asks for faith in humanity and extraterrestrial life which it struggles to earn, his old sense of wonder only fitfully sparking as he argues that, whether contemplating our neighbours or the cosmos, we are not alone.Jaws, Close Encounters and Spielberg’s later Munich all borrowed from the Seventies conspiracy thriller, and Disclosure Day too begins as Daniel (Josh O’Connor) pilfers copious buried alien evidence from the US government’s secret Wardex Corporation, taking startled girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) along on his flight from company boss Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Charli xcx’s cinema blitz includes seven acting roles and Wuthering Heights’ soundtrack, reinforcing her cultural ubiquity since 2024’s Brat summer. Film remains an adjunct to her sensational avant-electropop, not yet following Lady Gaga’s transition to Oscar-winner and pop part-timer. Pete Ohs’ micro-budget Erupcja anyway trades minimally on her persona, trusting her charisma to underwrite a character who credibly triggers volcanos.Bethany (Charli xcx) is in Warsaw from London for a weekend during which boyfriend Rob (Will Madden, pictured below left with Charli xcx) means to propose, a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert is one of those albums that transcends its genre; it’s not only the best-selling jazz solo album of all time, but the best-selling piano album of any kind. And aside from its almost transcendental quality, this success reflects the mythical reputation of the one-off concert that it records.Ido Fluk’s film is a fictionalised account of that concert, which took place in Köln’s opera house in 1975, late at night, for a packed crowd of jazz afficionados. The legend of the performance lies in the fact that it should not have taken place: on the night, Jarrett Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Freshly-exhumed from the vaults, this latest Children's Film Foundation selection follows an established template. We get nine pacy short features taken from different eras in the CFF’s existence (in this case, between 1954 and 1980), along with a selection of choice extras. BFI producer and film historian Vic Pratt’s booklet notes are worth this set’s purchase price alone: that “CFF films were good, clean, fast-moving fun: short, sweet, high on kid-based comedy hi-jinks and straightforward adventure; low on boring grown-ups’ stuff like romance or overly complicated plots” pretty much sums up Read more ...
James Saynor
Steve Martin famously said that writing about music was like trying to dance architecture, so maybe making a movie about painting is like – I don’t know – trying to chant ceramics. But this Britain-New Zealand co-production has a go at following in the footsteps of films such as The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991), both of which got us more than half-interested in the deeply mundane and scarily intense business of daubing paint.It tells of the very extended process by which supermodel Kate Moss was limned by postwar portraiture colossus Lucian Freud in 2001. So Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik is a lurid triumph of style over substance, a film as insubstantial as its eponymous source material. The most famous of Italy’s fumetti neri (comic books aimed at adult readers), Diabolik, created by sisters Luciana and Angela Giussani first appeared in print in 1962. The books, a new one issued each month, featured a charismatic, amoral villain clearly inspired by French super thief Fantômas, their popularity inspiring scores of imitators. After the huge success of André Hunebelle’s mid-1960s Fantômas films, that it took so long to make a Diabolik feature is Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan) has, he says, painted nothing but shit in 30 years and nothing at all for 20. In the Sixties he was a major star of the British art scene. Now he’s reduced to making personalised video messages for fans (apparently he still has plenty), wearing a blue beret for an authentically artistic look. £149 a pop, £249 “if I sign”.This is prolific director Steven Soderbergh’s fourth collaboration with screenwriter Ed Solomon (Mosaic, No Sudden Move, Full Circle) and they created it with McKellan and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You), who plays an art forger, specifically in Read more ...
James Saynor
If you seek a filmmaker to create the fine grain of 20th-century Europe at its most traumatised, you can’t do better than Hungary’s László Nemes. The textures of his grinding Holocaust movie, Son of Saul (2015), are hard to dispel from the mind. His new film is set in a broken Budapest a year after the failed uprising against communism in 1956, and anyone with even a folk memory of the 1950s will recognise the scruffy streets, weathered rooms and dilapidated lifestyle items of that time.Each corner of the screen is filled with décor, props and clothes that archive austerity –everything Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Anyone who learned to love Bob Odenkirk from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul (let alone his stints with Ben Stiller and Larry Sanders) was surely wrong-footed (but in a good way) when he appeared as a reclusive but lethal all-action dynamo in Nobody and Nobody 2. It was as if somebody had cast Harry Enfield as Ethan Hunt.In Normal, under the firm directorial hand of Billericay’s own Ben Wheatley, Odenkirk deftly extends his range a little further as Sheriff Ulysses Richardson. In a story Odenkirk penned with co-writer Derek Kolstad (who created the John Wick franchise and wrote both Nobody Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In a notable case of nominative determinism, the 2025 film about a kabuki star, Kokuho – meaning “national treasure” – became just that in Japan, a box-office smash. The keening voices and ultra-stylised mannerisms of the genre are not staples of Western entertainment, so a three-hour feature film about a kabuki actor sounds like a tough proposition here. But the time is well spent and flies past.Kokuho’s storyline is the familiar one of the isolating life that supremely gifted artists face and the people they sacrifice along the way in their pursuit of perfection. Think virtually any biopic Read more ...