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 Tess (Laura Dern) and finds himself floating in unfamiliar new waters. Their divorce also has a perverse knock-on effect on the lives of their close friends, Christine (Andra Day) and Balls (Cooper), who both start suffering from copycat syndrome.The joy of the piece (written by Cooper, Arnett and Mark Chappell and loosely based on the life of Read more ...

Somehow both rugged and smooth, embodying American values yet often turning up his collar against them, Robert Redford – who died on 16 September, aged 89 – was one of the biggest movie stars of the post-war period, as well as a stalwart, transformative supporter of independent film.These two sides to his movie career seem strangely at odds, for many of the Young Turk directors his Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival heroically fostered were unlikely to want to cast him in many of their films. Square-jawed, blue-eyed and bronze-haired, with an impossible-to-resist grin and a limited Read more ...

“I have a baby in me,” says Lydie (Naomi Ackie; Mickey 17). “What? Right now?” says her friend Agnes (Eva Victor), who may not be entirely thrilled at the news. “Are you going to name it Agnes?”Eva Victor (Rian in Billions) stars in, writes and directs their debut feature, which was produced by Barry Jenkins’s production house, Pastel. It’s divided into five sections, beginning and ending with The Year with the Baby. Its silly humour can be irritating, as can the dialogue, and it’s not as incisive as Girls, Fleabag or I May Destroy You, with which it has some themes in common.But it addresses Read more ...

Director Ben Rivers is primarily an artist, and it shows. Every frame of Bogancloch is treated as a work of art and the viewer is given ample time to relish the beauty of the framing, lighting and composition. Many of the shots fall into traditional categories such as still life, landscape and portraiture and would work equally well as photographs.In fact, the whole film is structured as a series of episodes that are more like animated stills than narrative sequences. And it produces the sense of being in the continuous present – as in a painting or a photograph. It’s a perfect match for the Read more ...

There’s nothing more healthy than dissing your own dad, and filmmaker Amalia Ulman says that her old man was “a Gen X deadbeat edgelord skater” when she was growing up in the 1990s. The phrase brings the half-forgotten world of Generation X back to us from the mists of time, with its slackers and Douglas Coupland books and mumbling evasions.The New York-based Ulman says she wanted to explore this Gen X world in her second feature, Magic Farm – but rather confusingly she sets it in the present amid the X-ers’ successors, the Millennials. From her angle, there seems scarce difference between Read more ...

Radhika Apte has been acclaimed for her ebullient performance as a reluctant bride in Sister Midnight since director Karan Kandhari’s comic horror movie was launched at Cannes last May. Talking over Zoom from her home near Epping Forest, Apte, 38, quickly stresses that it wasn’t the film's topic of arranged marriage that made her sign up for Kandhari’s feature debut. What she loved about his script, she says, “is the wild and weirdly wonderful way it tackles the feeling of not fitting in, and the eventual journey of accepting oneself as one is with all the imperfections.”Apte’s Uma Read more ...

Rehab people will tell you there are three stages to drug abuse: fun; fun with problems; problems. There’s also a fourth phase, where there aren't any problems, because you’re dead.Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy maps out the territory between stages two and four. Bob (Matt Dillon) and his girlfriend Dianne (Kelly Lynch) lead Rick (James LeGros) and his girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham) in a gang of chronic narcotics addicts robbing pharmacies around Portland, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest in order to stay one step ahead of withdrawal. Timewise, the film is hard to pin Read more ...

“What happens if you’ve overstepped your mandate?” aristocrat-architect Cesar Catalin (Adam Driver) is asked. “I’ll apologise,” he smirks. Francis Ford Coppola’s forty years in the making, self-financed epic is studded with such self-implicating bravado, including a wish to “escape into the ranks of the insane” rather than accept conventional thinking, as if at 85 he is not only Cesar but Kurtz, plunging chaotically upriver again, inviting career termination.Coppola subtitles Megalopolis “a fable”, and its tale of an imperious architect fighting venal New Rome’s Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Read more ...

There comes a point in I Saw the TV Glow when the repressed high-schooler Owen (Justice Smith) smashes his television’s screen by trying to dive into the box itself, to cross the great divide between his numbed reality and the feminine supernatural fantasy-land of his favourite series.Bursting into the room, Owen’s brutish widowed father (Fred Durst) pulls him from the wreckage. The scene is a metaphor for gender dysphoric Owen’s inability to start transitioning into a girl, a block that will leave him emotionally crippled. That is the nub of Jane Schoenbrun’s dazzling second feature, not so Read more ...

Crossing is a remarkable step forward for Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin. There are elements that build on his acclaimed 2019 Tbilisi drama And Then We Danced, but his new film is rich with a new complexity, as well as a redolent melancholy, a loose road-movie that speaks with considerable profundity of the overlapping worlds in which it is set.The journey in question is from Batumi, the main seaport city of southwest Georgia, to Istanbul, where the greater part of the story unfolds, although narrative in itself is of less importance, Akin’s emphasis instead being on observational Read more ...

The Israel-Palestine conflict aptly infuses a haunted house in Muayad Alayan’s story of layered loss. The Shapiro family home in Jerusalem which grieving British-Jewish husband Michael (Johnny Harris) and daughter Rebecca (Rebecca Calder) retreat to as a sanctuary already bears the pain of past Palestinian owners, as ghost stories multiply.This is a girl’s adventure story from 10-year-old Rebecca’s perspective, as she longs for her mum, dead in a car crash in which Rebecca was a passenger, hurt repressed by her dad. “I keep trying to hide everything that might trigger her past,” he tells a Read more ...

Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s Hunger. It’s gripping from the first frame to the last; the tension rarely lets up as we watch the main character lying and cheating his way through life as he struggles with addiction and is fleeced by card and loan sharks. In a heart-wrenching scene, his brother Paul (expertly played by Cam Riley) begs him to seek help.The film opens with Stephen (Stephen Giddings) watching The Arrest of Thomas Goudie, a film shot in 1901 about a real life bank clerk who Read more ...