Vermiglio review - a simple tale, simply but beautifully told

Another new release opens with the sounds of people in bed playing over the credits, but these are not Babygirl’s sighs of a woman faking sex but the angelic breathing of three young sisters sharing a bed in the snowy Alto Adige.

Maria review - Pablo Larraín's haunting portrait of an opera legend

As Bono once commented about Luciano Pavarotti, “the opera follows him off stage”. Legendary soprano Maria Callas would have known exactly what he meant, and she herself said “an opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down.”

It's Raining Men review - frothy French comedy avoids dating-app reality

Iris (Laure Calamy) and her husband Stéphane (Vincent Elbaz) haven’t had sex for four years. Waiting at school for the parent-teacher conference (they have well-behaved daughters aged ten and 15), she bemoans this fact to a friend, though, she maintains, she has no intention of leaving him.

Nickel Boys review - a soulful experiment

RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys (2019), whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl review - an old foe returns

It’s difficult to believe that the last stop-motion Wallace and Gromit short graced our screens way back in 2008. Describing the pair’s new outing as a return to form is unnecessary: this duo never lost it in the first place.

Sujo review - cartels through another lens

It’s not often we hear barely a single gunshot in a movie set amid Mexican drug cartels, but that may be the way it is for people who actually live amid Mexican drug cartels.

In Sujo, Mexico’s bid for the next foreign feature Oscar, we experience violence the way many who inhabit violent places actually experience it – mostly embedded in the fabric of life, only occasionally directly.