film reviews
Saskia Baron

It’s somewhat dispiriting to watch a coming-of-age rom-com that rarely rises above clichés and limps along as slowly as Yes, God, Yes. It's set in the early 2000s, and 16-year old Alice (Natalie Dyer) is struggling with sexual desire, idling on saucy chat rooms on her parents’ basement computer and guiltily enjoying how good her phone feels when set to vibrate in her lap. 

Florence Hallett

In the gloomy splendour of Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, the 10th Duke of Buccleuch gazes up at Rembrandt’s Old Woman Reading, 1655. The painting has belonged to the Scott family for more than 250 years, and like generations before him, the duke has known it all his life. “She is the most powerful presence in this house.” He pauses: “Do you see what I mean?”

Markie Robson-Scott

Babyteeth gets off to a terrific start. A semi-naked, manic Moses (Toby Wallace, full of scabby charisma) almost pushes 15-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen; Sharp Objects, Little Women) on to the Sydney train tracks as she waits on the platform in her school uniform, carrying her violin. It’s a thunderclap: she’s smitten.

Joseph Walsh

What if there was a pill you could pop that gave you superpowers? The only catch is that, while it might make you invisible or bullet-proof, it might also boil your brain or make you explode with just one hit.

Adam Sweeting

Allergic to that word “influencer”? Afraid that social media is the death of civilisation as we’ve known it? Then this movie may be for you.

Nick Hasted

This seems a perfect project for Matteo Garrone, a director who has found new ways to conjure old Italian dreams, and invests even his most grimly realistic films with fairy tale logic and wonder. Carlo Collodi’s 1883 story is here returned to its local time and place, as Pinocchio’s picaresque journey of experience unfolds in a deliberately traditional, lovingly crafted children’s film.

Matt Wolf

We first see Leigh (Frankie Box), the cheeky heroine of Scottish writer-director Eva Riley’s debut feature Perfect 10, hanging upside down during a gymnastics workout.

Joseph Walsh

Seth Rogen offers up double the laughs by taking on both lead roles in a time-hopping, Rip-Van-Winkle screwball comedy, but with an oddly mixed conservative message about the merits of family and religion.

Owen Richards

Belgian filmmaking duo the Dardenne Brothers have long been darlings of Cannes Film Festival, winning awards for hardhitting dramas like La Promesse, Le Silence de Lorna and The Kid with the Bike. Their latest offering Young Ahmed is no different, a domestic terrorist tale which won them Best Director at 2019’s festival.

Nick Hasted

This sober French space movie is concerned with what a female astronaut leaves behind on Earth, not what she finds in the cosmic dark. Sarah (Eva Green) has been selected for a European Space Agency mission towards Mars, realising a childhood dream. Punishing training prepares her for separation from Earth, and from eight-year-old daughter Stella (Zelié Boulant-Lemesle).