film reviews
Markie Robson-Scott

The fascinating story of the silent twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons, who were incarcerated in Broadmoor for 12 years for minor crimes, has been told before, several times. There’s a 1986 BBC film by Jon Amiel based on Marjorie Wallace’s book about them; a documentary by Olivia Lichtenstein in 1994; a French rock opera; a classical opera, and a play.

Saskia Baron

We hear the projector whirr as the mute 16mm film flows through the sprockets and on to the screen. For three minutes and a little longer we watch children and adults spilling out of buildings, intrigued by the novelty of a camera on their streets.

Nick Hasted

This is Noah Baumbach’s most capacious, overreaching work, corralling Don De Lillo’s novel of catastrophising, neurotic academia into a film jazzily dependent on rhythm, hooked on language and wildly diverse in tone.

Saskia Baron

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes are Belgium’s national conscience. The brothers, who have been sharing the roles of writer-director-producer since their first film in 1996, make humanist dramas about desperate people trying to survive in a harsh world.

Barney Harsent

“You’re filmin’ a movie or something – can you explain this?” the radio DJ turns to Neil Young, a laugh underpinning his question and setting the scene: light, jovial.

“We’re just makin’ a film about…” Young pauses for a second. “I dunno, just the things we wanna film… I’m making it like I make an album, sort of… It’s like… I’m cutting it, instead of… so it’s personal, like an album.”

“So some day someone’ll be able to go to a theatre and see it maybe?” the DJ asks.

“Yeah, I hope so, maybe pretty soon,” comes the reply. 

Matt Wolf

I bow to no one in my affection for Matilda the Musical onstage, which I've loved across multiple iterations, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the West End and Broadway, and numerous cast changes, too.

Nick Hasted

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel is an even more brightly entertaining puzzle picture, revelling in the old-fashioned glamour of enviably sunny climes and another rogues’ gallery of piquantly deployed film stars. Self-styled world’s greatest detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is again on hand to pick up the inevitably murderous pieces.

Matt Wolf

You expect gross-out movies to send your hands flying in front of your eyes. But Luca Guadagnino's ludicrous Bones and All is not just gory but grossly sentimental, too. Reuniting the Italian director with the star of his breakout hit Call Me By Your Name, the film finds a physical embodiment of its title in the wraithlike Timothée Chalamet, playing a cannibal-minded drifter who beneath his skin and bones is just a lost soul at heart. 

Saskia Baron

Nanny is being marketed as a horror movie, and arachnophobes should certainly beware, but it’s also a stylish exploration of race and class by African-American writer-director Nikyatu Jusu.

Its heroine is Aisha (Anna Diop) a Senegalese graduate teacher who is fluent in several languages. Without official papers, however, she can only work as a nanny in New York. Amy (Michelle Monaghan) is pursuing her own career and pays Aisha cash in hand to teach French to her five-year-old daughter Rose.  

Graham Fuller

Five years have elapsed since New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey revealed that dozens of women had accused the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual abuse and harassment over three decades. Based on Kantor and Twohey’s book about their investigation, which sparked the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, She Said is an urgent if belated film.