film reviews
Tom Baily

Deadpan humour is given new meaning in Jim Jarmusch’s 13th film, a zombie comedy animated by his typical oddball style. Jarmusch has assembled a grand cast comprising recent collaborators Adam Driver and Bill Murray, long-term musician pals Tom Waits, Iggy Pop and RZA, and a swathe of newbies that includes Selena Gomez.

Nick Hasted

Annabelle, the demonically-possessed doll now making its third appearance, makes its intentions clear pretty early here.

Markie Robson-Scott

“You do like to have your cake and eat it, Vity. So many cakes, so many,” laments Harold Nicholson (Rupert Penry-Jones) to his wife Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) as she embarks on an affair with Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki).

Joseph Walsh

Who would have thought that Ari Aster could top the satanic delights of Hereditary? Yet with Midsommar, a psychedelic twist on folk horror, he has. Aster abandons the supernatural to show that it’s not things that go bump in the night that scare us, it’s other people.

Mark Kidel

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who made his reputation as a leading German film-maker with The Lives of Others (2006), told the New Yorker that his latest film sprang out of a desire to explore the relationship between making art and healing.

Saskia Baron

There’s no rest for the webbed wonder in Spiderman: Far from Home. It’s just a few months since Marvel wiped out Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame and his protégé Peter Parker is being hounded to fill Tony Stark’s place.

Saskia Baron

A rambling portrait of 24 hours in the life of Double Whammies, an American sports bar where the waitresses entertain their TV-watching patrons by dressing in skimpy tops and tiny shorts. Apparently this is categorised as a ‘breastaurant’ (my spell-checker reels at this portmanteau, but there are several well-established chains in the US).

Graham Fuller

Red is the colour, mayhem is the name – along with pestilence and greed. In writer-director Peter Strickland’s exquisite fourth feature In Fabric, the first he’s made in his native England, middle-aged bank clerk Sheila Woolchapel (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, main picture) is terrorised by a haunted scarlet dress she buys in Dentley and Soper’s, a Debenhams-like department store in drearily generic “Thames Valley-on Thames”.

Adam Sweeting

The price of fame and the value of artistic truth are among the topics probed in Danny Boyle’s irresistible comedy, a beguiling magical mystery tour of an upside-down world where The Beatles suddenly never existed.

Tom Baily

How could this story be told again? Director Todd Douglas Miller has found a way: strip away narrative and give the audience the purity of original record. The result is a gripping non-fiction experience that sits in a unique space between documentary, art, drama and dream.