wed 21/05/2025

Film Reviews

Top Cat: The Movie

Lisa-Marie Ferla

The last time racial stereotyping (or at least, its cross-species equivalent) could be passed off as shorthand for a certain kind of slapstick humour was probably back in 1962 - coincidentally, the year that the last of Hanna-Barbera’s 30 episodes of the original Top Cat cartoon ran. And yet you don’t have to be eight years old to laugh out loud at the spectacle of a red-eyed gorilla beating its chest and screaming for bananas.

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Yael Bartana: And Europe Will Be Stunned, Artangel at Hornsey Town Hall

Steven Gambardella

In the cool, dim, municipal modernist interior of Hornsey Town Hall you’re confronted with a neon sign: And Europe Will be Stunned. It's the title of the trilogy of films at the heart of this Artangel-commissioned show by Israel-born Yael Bartana. The films are split in location around the building in an exhibition which includes neon slogans and posters which can be taken away, bearing manifestos in different languages.

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Personal Best

Jasper Rees

Of the rash of Olympic-themed films lining up on the startline, there is a double entry from Chariots of Fire, digitally remastered on film and freshly rebooted for the stage, as well as a forthcoming feelgood drama about young women in a relay squad – a sort of Round the Bend with Beckham – called Fast Girls.

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Men in Black 3

Matt Wolf

J + K = zzzzzzz in this snooze-inducing latest instalment of the once-fun Men in Black franchise, which finds Tommy Lee Jones looking as pained as Will Smith does fretful, and who can blame them? Long in the making but limited in terms of rewards, Barry Sonnenfeld's film doesn't display much conviction for the story it wants to tell (and certainly has no reason to go the all-too-ubiquitous 3D route).

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Moonrise Kingdom

Emma Simmonds

With its precocious youngsters, enchanting title, wonderful wit and delight in hand-crafted detail, Moonrise Kingdom is every inch a Wes Anderson film. This year’s Cannes opener is steeped in The Royal Tenenbaums’ director’s faux-naïf, frivolous worldview, with nearly every one of its magical frames carrying his signature.

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Iron Sky

Adam Sweeting

This much-rumoured independent movie has been in the works since 2006, and is improbably billed as a Finnish-German-Australian co-production. It's also unusual for being a project that grew out of the online self-supporting film-making community, Wreck-a-Movie.

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She Monkeys

Kieron Tyler

She Monkeys comes with a “note of intent” from its Swedish director Lisa Aschan. “She Monkeys plays with rules that surround human behaviour. I want to explore society’s contradictions by allowing young women to perform brutal actions. To show these taboos in contrast to the innocent and what seems to be naïve. The story’s focus is a power play between two teenage girls and the world around them. They’re in constant competition.”

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The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Graham Fuller

It’s impossible to think of a contemporary British director or writer-director team making six consecutive masterpieces as did Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger when they followed The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) with A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948).

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Even the Rain

Jasper Rees

Perhaps it’s not a strange coincidence that this week brings two films about the precious commodity that is water. (The other is The Source.) More than oil, more than land, certainly more than ideology, one day the thing mankind will fight over is access to the element without which life is unsustainable.

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The Source

Tom Birchenough

Aridity and comedy are not words you expect to read, or write, in the same sentence. Yet they capture some of the many attractions of Radu Mihaileanu’s new film The Source. The director came to considerable public attention two years ago with his Russian-themed burlesque The Concert. This time he has journeyed to the Arab world, and the results are considerably deeper, and more emotionally engaging.

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The Dictator

Bruce Dessau

Is this a sophisticated satire or a dumb, laugh-out-loud, nothing-is-sacred comedy? That is the question which pings around your head Sacha Baron Cohen's latest.

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The Raid

Emma Simmonds

If action speaks louder than words, then The Raid is positively deafening. The third feature from Welshman Gareth Evans is ingeniously, almost absurdly exciting - for the most part it’s shorn of story and propelled not by plot but by peril. That it’s basically a series of imaginative smack-downs and shoot-outs will be off-putting to many but this Indonesian actioner is entirely engrossing and executed with gobsmacking gusto and precision.

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Dark Shadows

Emma Simmonds

Tim Burton is a man who has always been at home in the shadows. His is a world of demon barbers, headless horsemen, deformed sewer dwellers and corpse brides, of chalky complexions, dusky aesthetics and billowing fog. His films are designed to chill children, or bewitch big kids, they hark back to the Brothers Grimm and Hammer horror - not least in the recurring presence of avuncular abomination Christopher Lee.

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Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Jasper Rees

It’s maybe one for their shrink. The filmmaking Duplass brothers are irresistibly drawn to male losers still clinging to the apron strings. In Cyrus Jonah Hill played an overgrown mommy’s boy in the grip of an oedipal love-in who fights off his single mother’s new man like a fat hellcat. In Jeff, Who Lives at Home things have moved on, though not in an evolutionary sense.

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Two Years At Sea

ASH Smyth

He trudges about in the snow somewhere. He cooks. He sleeps. He chops wood and saws branches. He reads. He looks like Darwin. He makes hot drinks. He does not do spring cleaning.

This is a more-or-less complete synopsis of Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea, a “study” (I think is the correct technical term) of some bloke, somewhere, living in the wilderness, who clearly does not hold down a day-job.

He takes a shower.

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Le Quai des brumes

Graham Fuller

“Atmosphère…atmosphère,” the tart played by Arletty barks at her boyfriend-pimp on a canal bridge in Marcel Carné’s 1938 Hôtel du Nord.

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