wed 02/07/2025

Film Reviews

The Critic review - beware the acid-tipped pen

Justine Elias

The setting is the lively 1930s London theatre world, but any sense that The Critic will be a lighthearted thriller should soon be dispelled by a soundtrack featuring “Midnight and the Stars and You,” the song that Stanley Kubrick used to ominous effect in The Shining.

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Lee review - shaky biopic of an iconic photographer

Saskia Baron

Anyone who has seen Lee Miller’s photographs – those taken of her in the 1920s when she was a dazzling American beauty, those she took as a World War Two photojournalist – and read about her extraordinary life will have thought: this will make a great biopic.

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Reawakening review - a prodigal daughter returns, or does she?

Markie Robson-Scott

“I’d know her. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Would I know her? Would I?” John (a brilliant Jared Harris, who’s also an executive producer) is always looking for his daughter, who ran away from home ten years ago at the age of 14 and hasn’t been seen since.

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Red Rooms review - the darkest of webs

Harry Thorfinn-

A woman sits at her computer. She copy-pastes an address into a search engine. She goes to street view. She zooms in. Click. Opens a new tab. Click. Searches a name. There are no lines of green code on a black screen or indecipherable programmes that we associate with sketchy online activity. Instead the woman is doing the kind of amateur sleuthing that anybody with a computer and internet connection can do. 

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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review - a lively resurrection

James Saynor

Sometimes love never dies and the dead never rot. A lot of water has flowed down the River Styx since Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice film in 1988, but the bones of the original have held up surprisingly well, the madcap morbid spoof outliving many of its peers from the “high concept” era.

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Starve Acre review - unearthing the unearthly in a fine folk horror film

Justine Elias

Blame the high cost of city housing, or killer smog. What else can explain a bright young couple’s move from 1970s Leeds to Starve Acre, an isolated, near-derelict farm in rural Yorkshire that has to be the spookiest back-to-the-land setting since The Wicker Man.

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Firebrand review - surviving Henry VIII

James Saynor

Life in Tudor times is a gift that keeps giving to film and TV people, even if the history has to be bent a little for things to make sense to contemporary audiences – Elizabeth (1998) and A Man for All Seasons (1966) being two of the more successful examples of such retrofitting of the past.

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Paradise Is Burning review - O mother, where art thou?

Saskia Baron

Paradise Is Burning is one of those films that appears to be designed to convince the outside world that Sweden isn’t all IKEA interiors and ABBA sing-alongs. There are blissful long summer days spent in pine forests and plenty of lithe-limbed girls, but the focus here is on a social underclass that Ingmar Bergman rarely filmed.

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Sing Sing review - prison movie with an abundance of heart

Demetrios Matheou

Every actor has their own take on what acting means to them, which will include the chance to occupy personalities more interesting than their own, or to shed their inhibitions, or simply the pleasure of ‘play’. 

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Black Dog review - a drifter in China

James Saynor

We root for the rootless Outsider in classical western cinema because the places the Outsider fetches up in are scary dumps of the first order – maybe a medieval grub-hole, a Wild West deadfall or some cantina full of aliens that Harrison Ford drops in on.

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Kneecap review - Irish Republican rappers for real

Saskia Baron

A few recent documentaries have challenged the definition of the genre through the cheerful and wholesale dramatic reconstruction of past events, key moments that weren’t captured by a camera at the time.

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Widow Clicquot review - Haley Bennett stars as the First Lady of champagne

Adam Sweeting

The book by Tilar Mazzeo on which Thomas Napper's film is based is subtitled “The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled it”, though one suspects that the life of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin was a little less Mills & Boon-ish than the version seen here.

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Cuckoo review - insane time in the Bavarian Alps

Justine Elias

Strange noises fill the crisp nighttime air in a small Alpine village: Avian shrieks and some wild beast a-rustling in the hedgerows – or are those the screams of a desperate woman?

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Only the River Flows review - damp noir

Demetrios Matheou

An old woman, inexplicably known as Granny Four, is murdered by a river on the outskirts of a Chinese rural town. A respected detective is put in charge of the investigation, with the weight of his department’s reputation on his shoulders. But this a murky, twisty case that opens and closes with such regularity that it begins to threaten the man’s sanity. 

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Alien: Romulus review - game over for the adults

Saskia Baron

In space no one can hear you scream, but they usually can in a cinema. Wednesday night’s gala launch of Alien: Romulus was awash with the gussied-up cast and writer-director Fede Álvarez, alongside assorted Olympians and influencers walking the red carpet.

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Hollywoodgate review - on tour with the Taliban

Adam Sweeting

Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Nash’at is either very brave or slightly unhinged. His debut full-length documentary is an account of a year he spent in Afghanistan with the Taliban, after they’d taken control of the country at the end of August 2021, following the catastrophically inept evacuation of US and NATO forces.

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