fri 31/10/2025

America

Blu-ray: Wendy and Lucy

Wendy and Lucy is a road movie with a protagonist who’s unable to move on, and a study of friendship where one half of the partnership is mostly absent from the screen. Originally released during the 2008 financial crisis, Kelly Reichardt’s third...

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Bugonia review - Yorgos Lanthimos on aliens, bees and conspiracy theories

“How can you tell she’s an alien?” asks Don (Aidan Delbis, an impressive neuro-divergent actor) of his cousin Teddy (the excellent Jesse Plemons).Yurgos Lanthimos’s gripping black comedy Bugonia (nothing to do with begonias, by the way, but a Greek...

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theartsdesk Q&A: director Kelly Reichardt on 'The Mastermind' and reliving the 1970s

Kelly Reichardt has a thing about losers. You often see them in her films. It's the failure of American individualism that concerns her.Even when she tells stories of her country's history, like in the anti-western Meek's Cutoff (2010) or the 2019...

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The Mastermind review - another slim but nourishing slice of Americana from Kelly Reichardt

The clatter of cool jazz on the soundtrack announces writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s latest project, the kind of score that back in the day would have announced a film by a maverick new talent. The film, her ninth, has been given a faded and...

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Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere review - the story of the Boss who isn't boss of his own head

There’s something about hauntingly performed songs written in the first person that can draw us in like nothing else. As songs from Robert Johnson to Leonard Cohen remind us, they can take us into the mental recesses of their subjects – for...

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Mary Page Marlowe, Old Vic review - a starry portrait of a splintered life

I came late to the Old Vic's shimmering production of Mary Page Marlowe, Tracy Letts's Off Broadway play from 2018 which has arrived in London with Andrea Riseborough and Susan Sarandon leading a sizable and uniformly excellent cast. And I hope...

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The Diplomat, Season 3, Netflix review - Ambassador Kate Wyler becomes America's Second Lady

The return of this entertaining political drama is always welcome, though its soap-tinged mix of transatlantic politics and volatile personal relationships is beginning to look a little too genteel for our current age of ever-worsening crises.In the...

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London Film Festival 2025 - Bradley Cooper channels John Bishop, the Boss goes to Nebraska, and a French pandemic

Is This Thing On? Bradley Cooper has previously directed A Star Is Born and Maestro, but they weren’t nearly as much fun as this. It’s a story of New Yorkers in the throes of mid-life crises, as Alex Novak (Will Arnett) separates from his wife...

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London Film Festival 2025 - from paranoia in Brazil and Iran, to light relief in New York and Tuscany

Film festivals are a bran tub: what you find in them may be unexpected, and not always in a good way. Here are six I pulled out in my first week (minus one of my favourites, The Mastermind, which I will review when it goes on general release next...

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Emily A. Sprague realises a Japanese dream on 'Cloud Time'

The history of experimental musicians from Europe and North America adopting Japanese aesthetics is … patchy. It got especially dodgy in the 1990s when every other electronica dork started flinging random kanji characters on their sleeves, writing...

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A House of Dynamite review - the final countdown

Armageddon is here again, as Kathryn Bigelow’s first film in eight years examines the minutes before a nuclear missile hits Chicago from multiple perspectives, finding no hope anywhere.Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is our first witness,...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Idris Elba on playing a US President faced with a missile crisis in 'A House of Dynamite'

Idris Elba has only just appeared as the British Prime Minister in the action comedy Heads of State (2025) – now he's portraying the American President in Kathryn Bigelow's tense political thriller A House of Dynamite.The White House Situation Room...

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