wed 22/01/2025

Film Reviews

William Tell review - stirring action adventure with silly dialogue

Justine Elias

Despite Rossini’s banger of an overture and a Looney Tunes cartoon starring Daffy Duck as William Tell, I’ll wager that few non-German-speakers can recite the precise details of the Swiss folk hero’s legend. Beyond, that is, describing him as a Robin Hood of the Alps whose crossbow arrow pierced the apple perched on his son’s head. However, in a stirring new action-adventure movie Tell turns out to be a surprising protagonist. 

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A Complete Unknown review - how does it feel?

Adam Sweeting

Being unknowable has been almost as much of a preoccupation for the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman as writing songs. Previously on film he has played the role of Alias in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, having first presented himself to the world under the alias of “Bob Dylan”.

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Vermiglio review - a simple tale, simply but beautifully told

Helen Hawkins

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.

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The Second Act review - absurdist meta comedy about stardom

Sebastian Scotney

Can any line from The Second Act be taken at face value? Not really. “I should never have made this film,” confides Florence (the starry Léa Seydoux) just before the half-way mark. It's just another line from a script.

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

Adam Sweeting

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.”

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Babygirl review - would-be steamy drama that only flirts with transgression

Helen Hawkins

Babygirl starts with the sound of sex, piped in over the credits. There's a lot of it on our screens at the moment, from Disclaimer on Apple TV to Anora and Queer at the cinema, much of it noisily explicit. The intimacy co-ordinators must be having a field day.

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

Markie Robson-Scott

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.

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A Real Pain review - Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin take a Holocaust tour of Poland

Adam Sweeting

Jesse Eisenberg's first film as writer/director was 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, which met with modest acclaim. But he’s taken a giant leap forward with the follow-up, A Real Pain, which has been hoovering up critical plaudits from festival showings and its American release.

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Nickel Boys review - a soulful experiment

Nick Hasted

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.

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Nosferatu review - Lily-Rose Depp stands out in uneven horror remake

Harry Thorfinn-

Robert Eggers' strength as a director is his ability to bring historical periods alive with gritty, tactile realism. He does this successfully because of his anthropological attention to props, costume and language, but also his willingness to treat the era’s belief system as concrete reality. There’s nothing glib or anachronistic about his films set among 17th century New England Puritans, 19th century fishermen or 11th century Icelandic vikings. 

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

graham Rickson

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.

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Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes review - a Hollywood legend, warts and all

John Carvill

It might be a push to call this documentary a feminist slant on Humphrey Bogart, but it wouldn’t quite be a shove. Northern Irish filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson’s work has often concerned itself with identity and gender politics, and her narrative here is framed around the women in Bogart’s life, starting with his aloof, undemonstrative mother, Maud. 

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Sujo review - cartels through another lens

James Saynor

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. 

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Queer review - Daniel Craig meets William Burroughs

Adam Sweeting

Judging by a Sunday Times interview last weekend, Daniel Craig now enjoys wearing brilliantly-coloured sweaters and extraordinary trousers, very much like a man running as fast as possible in the opposite direction to James Bond. He has goodbye-Bond-esque quotes to go with it.

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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review - a middling return to Middle-earth

James Saynor

Lauded by Auden, detested by Edmund Wilson, the Tolkien sagas have divided many from childhood onwards: for kids, they’re not quite pulpy enough to be the first choice for a Halloween costume, for grown-ups not quite literary enough to be literary.

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The Commander review - the good Italian

Nick Hasted

Patriotic Italian films set during the Fascist war effort are understandably rare UK releases. Submarine commander Salvatore Todaro (Pierfrancesco Favino) was, though, an honourable warrior-poet who director Edoardo De Angelis seeks to separate from wider currents.

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