mon 12/05/2025

Film Reviews

Bob Marley: One Love review - sanitised official version of the Jamaican icon's story

Adam Sweeting

It was only a matter of time before Bob Marley got his own posthumous biopic, and One Love isn’t the worst you’ll see. For instance, it’s miles ahead of the Elton John flick Rocketman, and at least it’s an hour shorter than Baz Luhrmann’s bloated Elvis misfire.

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The Promised Land review - gripping Danish Western

Graham Fuller

Impassive, immovable, relentless  – Mads Mikkelsen’s Ludvig Kahlen, a fatherless army captain turned sodbuster in Nikolai Arcel’s The Promised Land, recalls the Hollywood Western’s most obdurate “rugged individuals”.

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The Taste of Things review - a gentle love letter to haute cuisine

Helen Hawkins

Awarded the best director prize at Cannes last year, Anh Hung Tran has served up cinema’s latest hymn to gastronomy, The Taste of Things. Tasting (and smelling) what’s on the screen is obviously impossible, but even so Tran provides as total a sensory experience as a film can of the religion of haute cuisine and its acolytes. 

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Occupied City review - unquiet Nazi crimes

Nick Hasted

“I feel as if I am live reporting from a shipwreck,” Dutch-Jewish journalist Philip Mechanicus wrote en route to his concentration camp murder. Steve McQueen’s four-hour reverie on Amsterdam’s Nazi occupation teases out the scars of that arbitrary, vicious time beneath his adopted home’s placid streets. Filming during 2020’s pandemic, this becomes a time-jumping double-portrait of his adopted home city, though the inexact mirroring often cracks.

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The Iron Claw review - pancakes and beefcakes

James Saynor

The Iron Claw is the sort of solid, mid-market Hollywood “programmer” that is often said to no longer exist on the big screen, and this family saga set in the world of Texas wrestling certainly has the feel of a museum piece. Many have warmed to it, perhaps for that nostalgic reason. 

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The Settlers review - a western populated only by anti-heroes

Sarah Kent

From its opening shot – of a flock of sheep backlit by the sun’s rays – The Settlers is visually stunning. But the beauty ends there; as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that everything else about this episode in Chile’s history is cruel and ugly.

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The Zone of Interest review - garden gates of death

James Saynor

The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?

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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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