mon 07/07/2025

Film Reviews

Rumours review - pallid satire on geopolitics

Saskia Baron

It must have seemed such a delicious premise – a Buñuel-esque comedy about world leaders trapped at a luxury retreat as the apocalypse looms. With cult director and installation artist Guy Maddin directing alongside his regular collaborators Galen and Evan Johnson, one can understand why Cate Blanchett, Charles Dance, and the rest of the starry cast signed up for Rumours.

Read more...

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl review - mordant seriocomedy about buried abuse

Helen Hawkins

The writer-director of 2017’s I Am Not a Witch, Rungano Nyoni, has come up with another scorcher, this time taking aim at Zambia’s social structures, in which women’s power can become petty tyranny. Nyoni’s Zambian scenarios are populated with “aunties” and “uncles” and the occasional “grandma”. These titles designate the elders of the kinship group, the leaders who speak for the rest.

Read more...

Conclave review - secrets and lies in the Vatican's inner sanctum

Adam Sweeting

“You either got faith or you got unbelief, and there ain’t no neutral ground,” as Bob Dylan sang, but Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) isn’t finding it quite that simple.

Read more...

All We Imagine as Light review - tender portrait of three women struggling to survive in modern Mumbai

Helen Hawkins

The Indian writer-director Payal Kapadia scored this year’s Cannes Grand Prix with her first fiction film, All We Imagine as Light, which follows three women trying to make a living in modern Mumbai. It’s a deserving winner, both exquisitely delicate and formally bold.

Read more...

Witches review - beyond the broomstick, the cat, and the pointy hat

Justine Elias

From James I’s campaign to wipe out witchery to the feuding sister sorceresses of The Wizard of Oz and the new film musical Wicked, spellcasting by supposedly wayward women has never been able to avoid persecution and misunderstanding.

Read more...

Wicked review - overly busy if beautifully sung cliffhanger

Matt Wolf

"No one mourns the wicked," we're told during the immediately arresting beginning to Wicked, which concludes two hours 40 minutes later with the words, "to be continued" flashed up on the screen. Will filmgoers mourn that they have to wait an entire year to see the second part of this supercharged screen adaptation of the stage musical blockbuster that London and New York audiences can currently absorb in a single sitting?

Read more...

Snow Leopard review - clunky visual effects mar a director's swansong

Sarah Kent

Pema Tseden's final film Snow Leopard is a Chinese Tibetan-language drama that addresses wild animal preservation. It serves as a kind of allegory for the circumstances that preceded the 53-year-old director's death from a heart attack last year. In 2016, Tseden was hospitalised after being roughed up by police when trying to retrieve his luggage at Xining Caojiapu International Airport. A diabetic, he was unable to take his pills while being held by the police.

Read more...

Mediha review - a brutalised Yazidi teen comes of age with a camera

Saskia Baron

The plight of persecuted minority groups around the world seems to be growing worse. As one form of response, a non-fiction film like Mediha works to make vivid the individual stories of people who might otherwise be reduced to statistics from places that are scarcely on the west's radar.

Read more...

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat review - jazz-themed documentary on the 1960s Congo Crisis

Sebastian Scotney

The British writer and Africa specialist Michela Wrong recently wrote a whistle-stop summary of the upheavals that afflicted Congo in the early 1960s:

Read more...

Gladiator II review - can lightning strike twice?

Adam Sweeting

It has been nearly 25 years since Russell Crowe enjoyed his Oscar-winning finest hour as Maximus in Ridley Scott’s thunderous epic, Gladiator, and now Sir Ridley has brought us the next generation. Stepping up to the plate is Paul Mescal as Lucius (now known as Hanno), who finds himself an enslaved gladiator in Rome after an Imperial fleet has conquered his homeland of Numidia (Algeria, more or less).

Read more...

ARK: United States V by Laurie Anderson, Aviva Studios, Manchester review - a vessel for the thoughts and imaginings of a lifetime

Sarah Kent

Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.

Read more...

Joy review - the birth pangs of in vitro fertilisation

Justine Elias

Marie Curie excepted, movies about female scientists remain scarce, not just because STEM careers and Nobel Prizes still favour men. Now comes the British-made Joy, which explores women’s contributions to a decades-long quest to cure infertility.

Read more...

Bird review - travails of an unseen English tween

Graham Fuller

There’s a jolt or a surprise in almost every shot in Andrea Arnold’s Bird – her most impacted and energised depiction of underclass life yet. Photographed by Robbie Ryan, it’s a visual tour de force, one of the most exhilarating British films of 2024, but the affecting story it tells is undermined by its fleeting embrace of magical realism and the climactic swoop of a deus ex machina.

Read more...

The Problem With People review - local zero

Hugh Barnes

A quarter of an hour into The Problem With People, there’s a 15-second clip of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero – and it’s the best thing about this spectacularly unfunny comedy co-written by its American star, Paul Reiser (Mad About You, The Kominsky Method, Stranger Things).

Read more...

Anora review - life lesson for a kick-ass sex worker

Saskia Baron

Anora has had so much hype since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May that it doesn’t really need another reviewer weighing in. Sean Baker has crafted a high-velocity drama in three acts with a star-making turn by its lead Mikey Madison in the title role. She prefers to be called Ani and makes her living in a lap-dancing club in Manhattan by night before sleeping away her days in a run-down house in Brooklyn, right next to the rattle of the elevated train. 

Read more...

Blitz review - racism persists as bombs batter London

Graham Fuller

Blitz, set on a vast CGI canvas in September 1941, is an improbable boy’s adventure tale that depicts the misery and terror that was inflicted on East Londoners by Germany’s eight-month bombardment. The enemy in the movie is not airborne, however. Writer-director Steve McQueen made it to educate audiences about contemporaneous white racism in Britain – proof that not all the British pulled together during the time of total war.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Music Reissues Weekly: Motörhead - The Manticore Tapes

Manticore was owned by Emerson, Lake and Palmer and their manager. The organisation provided the name for the band’s label. Apart from ELP and its...

Kiefer / Van Gogh, Royal Academy review - a pairing of oppos...

When he was a callow youth of 18, German artist Anselm Keifer got a travel grant to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Vincent van Gogh. Some...

Siglo de Oro, Wigmore Hall review - electronic Lamentations...

Siglo de Oro are a vocal ensemble who specialise in older music – and especially neglected older music – but they have also...

Album: Barry Can't Swim - Loner

Despite being Mercury nominated, Bazza’s hardly a household name. Nevertheless, his debut album ...

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, National Portrait Ga...

When in the 1990s, Jenny Saville’s peers shunned painting in...

Hot Milk review - a mother of a problem

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s 2016 Man Booker shortlistee, has been described as a "psychological drama"....

Glastonbury Festival 2025: Five Somerset summer days of musi...

MONDAY 30th JUNE 2025

“I think you’d better drive,” says Finetime, his face sallow, skull-sockets underscored by...

Tom Raworth: Cancer review - truthfulness

I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter use the troubling phrase: "Not everyone agreed on the reality of that." Once the domain of Andre Breton’s...