tue 06/05/2025

Film Reviews

The Crime Is Mine review - entertaining froth from a crack cast

Helen Hawkins

For his latest pick’n’mix sortie into the world of the women’s picture, François Ozon has gone back to the 1930s and a popular play of the time, Mon Crime (1934). In his hands it emerges as an île flottante of a film that slips down easily but isn’t that nourishing, even though he adds some crunchier elements along the way.

Read more...

Woman of the Hour, Netflix review - gripping drama follows a true-life Seventies serial killer

Markie Robson-Scott

“I knew he was risky, but like fuck it, everyone’s risky.” A young woman (Kelley Jakle) poses for pictures on a deserted mountain road in Wyoming in 1977, telling Rodney, a charming, award-winning photographer (Daniel Zovatto), about the boyfriend who walked out on her when she got pregnant. She cries, grateful for his attention, and he listens sympathetically. Suddenly, his expression changes and he attacks her, strangling her, then revives her, then attacks again.

Read more...

Endurance review - the greatest escape, AI-assisted

Hugh Barnes

Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1914 only to be marooned until August 1916, was a failure but a “glorious failure”, in the words of one crew member, the meteorologist Leonard Hussey. It is also perhaps the greatest survival story ever told.

Read more...

Salem’s Lot review - listless King remake

Nick Hasted

A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of their skins.

Read more...

London Film Festival 2024 - the Vatican, the Blitz, a trip to Poland and a surfin' nightmare

Adam Sweeting

Conclave

Read more...

The Last of the Sea Women review - a moving tale of feisty traditional divers

Sarah Kent

“The ocean is our home… Even in my next life I will dive again,” says Geum Ok, one of a band of female divers from Jeju, a volcanic island 60 miles south of the Korean peninsular.

Read more...

Timestalker review – she's lost control again

Hugh Barnes

Unlike the controversial Netflix show Baby Reindeer, which challenges many of the same attitudes towards sexual harassment, self-delusion, and stalking’s gender bias, Alice Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star does not bill itself as a true story.

Read more...

Portraits of Dangerous Women review - quirky indie comedy

Markie Robson-Scott

“I like laws and rules,” Steph (Jeany Spark), a jaded primary school teacher, tells a pet-shop employee – she’s adopting a cat, though that venture is doomed to failure - defensively. “They’re what separate us from the monkeys and chaos.”

Read more...

Things Will Be Different review - lost in the past

Nick Hasted

Time-travel is a trap in debutante Michael Felker’s tender sf two-hander, whose title’s grim irony becomes gradually apparent.

Read more...

Joker: Folie à Deux review - supervillainy laid low

James Saynor

“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps why not everyone in Hollywood has agreed with the hotcake thing. 

Read more...

The Battle for Lakipia review - why post-colonial Kenya is a land of unease

Saskia Baron

The Battle for Lakipia is a beautifully filmed and thoughtfully directed documentary that was made over a two-year period. Its focus is the conflicting claim to Kenyan land made by white ranch owners of English descent and the indigenous pastoralist people.

Read more...

The Old Man and the Land review - dark secrets of a farming family

Graham Fuller

The Old Man and the Land depicts a worn-out sheep farmer going about his dreary business as the seasons pass, darkly and dankly. He does it because he’s always done it, and because he doesn’t trust his 42-year-old daughter, Laura, despite her farming skills, or his 40-year-old son, David, the farm’s heir but an alcoholic and drug user who is unsuited to the work, to take it over.

Read more...

Megalopolis review - magic from cinema's dawn

Nick Hasted

“What happens if you’ve overstepped your mandate?” aristocrat-architect Cesar Catalin (Adam Driver) is asked. “I’ll apologise,” he smirks. Francis Ford Coppola’s forty years in the making, self-financed epic is studded with such self-implicating bravado, including a wish to “escape into the ranks of the insane” rather than accept conventional thinking, as if at 85 he is not only Cesar but Kurtz, plunging chaotically upriver again, inviting career termination.

Read more...

The Teacher review - tense West Bank drama

Hugh Barnes

It’s hard not to review the Israeli occupation of Palestine when writing about The Teacher. The political context of this first feature by British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi, who also wrote the screenplay, is so thoroughly appalling that it sometimes overshadows the TV-style melodrama onscreen.

Read more...

The Outrun review - Saoirse Ronan is astonishing as an alcoholic fighting for recovery

Helen Hawkins

In 2016, Amy Liptrot made a fine publishing debut with a memoir about her alcoholism, The Outrun. Now she has co-written a film based on her book that is a significant achievement in its own right. It’s also the promising debut of Saoirse Ronan and her husband actor Jack Lowden as producers. 

Read more...

Notes from Sheepland review - her farm is her canvas

Justine Elias

Orla Barry laughed when she was advised to take up sheep farming, and not just because she had no experience. “Orla with the sheep eyes,” she calls herself and, indeed, in a stylized self-portrait, she does seem to have the placid, watchful gaze of a ewe.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Malpractice, ITV1, Series 2 review - fear and loathing in th...

Following on from the first series of Malpractice in 2023, this second season again probes into issues of medical malfeasance and...

Blu-ray: Laurel & Hardy - The Silent Years (1928)

Eureka’s second volume of Laurel and Hardy shorts catches the pair in 1928 on the cusp of their successful...

First Person: young cellist Zlatomir Fung on operatic fantas...

My new album, Fantasies, recorded with pianist Richard Fu, is the culmination of my years-long fascination with the wonderful genre of...

Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's Globe - swagger and viv...

Holsters, Stetsons and bluegrass music bring a distinctive flavour to this...

Two to One review - bank heist with a big catch

The Ealing-like comedy heist caper Two to One is...

Album: Arcade Fire - Pink Elephant

20 years on from their first appearance on record, the seventh long-player from...

Fake, ITV1 review - be careful what you wish for

The art of the conman is persuading their victim to fool themselves, which is the premise that lies at the core of this Australian drama series....

theartsdesk Q&A: film director Déa Kulumbegashvili on he...

One of the most exciting new voices in Eastern European film, Déa Kulumbegashvili is not concerned with conventional shot lengths. She has been...

Music Reissues Weekly: John McKay - Sixes and Sevens

Sixes and Sevens is a surprise. A big one. Since leaving Siouxsie and the Banshees in September 1979, John McKay has...