sun 10/08/2025

Film Reviews

Eight Postcards from Utopia review - ads from the era when 1990s Romania embraced capitalism

Helen Hawkins

If you saw it blind, with no information about its origins, Eight Postcards from Utopia might look like 70 minutes of outtakes from lost Fast Show recordings, the bits where they lampooned the TV they had watched on foreign holidays and the spoof ads they concocted.

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The Kingdom review - coming of age as the body count rises

Graham Fuller

The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is the bitter message of The Kingdom.

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Weapons review - suffer the children

Nick Hasted

Weapons’ enigmatic title, as with Zach Cregger’s previous film Barbarian, reveals little of what follows. The smalltown Pied Piper premise is sufficiently alluring: at 2.17 am, all bar one of a primary school class leave their beds and sprint through night streets, arms flung back like fighter jets, before vanishing utterly.

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Oslo Stories Trilogy: Dreams review - love lessons

Nick Hasted

Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy. Love and Sex complete the thematically interwoven sequence, which unpick assumptions about sexual identity with gentle irony.

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Late Shift review - life and death in an understaffed Swiss hospital

Markie Robson-Scott

Floria (the superb Leonie Benesch: The Crown; The Teachers’ Lounge; September 5) is a nurse, working the severely understaffed night shift in a Zurich hospital. She is constantly doing three things at once, sanitising her hands, snapping her gloves on and off, measuring medications into syringes, finding veins for IVs and saying, endlessly, “Ich komme gleich” (I’ll be there soon) or “Have you pain on a scale of one to ten?”

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The Naked Gun review - farce, slapstick and crass stupidity

Adam Sweeting

The original Naked Gun series (spun off from the Police Squad! TV show) brought reliable belly-laughs to the Eighties and Nineties and starred the incomparable Leslie Nielsen as the preposterous detective Frank Drebin, but for this regenerated version Liam Neeson has stepped up to the plate.

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps review - innocence regained

Nick Hasted

Marvel goes back to its origins, gulping the fresh air of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first hit comic The Fantastic Four in 1961. Ignoring recent flop film versions, it revels in a self-contained, space-age world as yet uncluttered with other costumed characters, and heroes who aren’t brooding vigilantes but human beacons of light.

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Dying review - they fuck you up, your mum and dad

Demetrios Matheou

Despite the title of Matthias Glasner’s award-winning drama, and the death that swirls around its characters, dying isn’t really its subject, but the mess of living. 

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The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire review - a mysterious silence

Nick Hasted

A glamorous black woman sits in a Forties bar under a Vichy cop’s gaze, cigarette tilted at an angle, till two male companions join her in clandestine conversation. The woman is Suzanne Césaire (Zita Hanrot), an influential Martinican journalist and essayist on Surrealism, feminism, Négritude (Francophone black consciousness) and an anti-colonial philosophy honed to a dangerous edge by the Fascist-aligned authorities.

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Harvest review - blood, barley and adaptation

James Saynor

Lovers of a particular novel, when it’s adapted as a movie, often want book and movie to fit together as a hand in a glove. You want it to be like sheet music transfigured into the sound of an orchestra. Too often, though, the resulting film can resemble the sound of the orchestra trying to play in boxing gloves.

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Friendship review - toxic buddy alert

Sebastian Scotney

The frenetic brand of humour that Tim Robinson brings to Friendship comes from a long lineage. There have been turbo-charged, mad-staring, cringe-inducing figures occupying the centre of comedies and propelling them at least as far back as Molière, and continuing through John Cleese, Jim Carrey, and others.

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S/HE IS STILL HER/E - The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary review - a shapeshifting open window onto a counter-cultural radical

Tim Cumming

“I like guns. At school we had to fight with guns in the army cadets. I’m actually a first-class sniper. I could shoot people from half a mile away.”

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Superman review - America's ultimate immigrant

Nick Hasted

A three-century-spanning countdown rapidly ticks to a version of now, and a beaten Superman (David Corenswet) ploughing into Arctic snow. His super-whistle fetches Superdog Krypto to excavate him like a favourite bone, and drag him to crystalline sanctuary the Fortress of Solitude. 

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The Other Way Around review - teasing Spanish study of a breakup with unexpected depth

Helen Hawkins

Can a romcom be intellectually challenging while hitting all the sweet spots of the genre? Jonás Trueba, the director of the award-winning Spanish film The Other Way Around (Volveréis, literally “you will return”), has confected something close to that.

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Hot Milk review - a mother of a problem

Graham Fuller

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s 2016 Man Booker shortlistee, has been described as a "psychological drama". Strictly speaking, it's a psychoanalytic one – a clue-sprinkled case study, involving talk therapy, of a woman whose repressed trauma has confined her to a wheelchair for 20 years. 

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The Shrouds review - he wouldn't let it lie

James Saynor

“Dying is an act of eroticism,” suggested one of the many disposable characters in David Cronenberg’s first full-length feature, Shivers (1975), and that slippery adage could sum up more than a few of the Canadian sensationalist’s movies in the past 50 years – not least his latest, The Shrouds, which was in competition at Cannes last year.

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