Reviews

The stories we tell ourselves and to others define the way we understand the world, and The Last Black Man in San Francisco uses this ever-changing mythos to expertly evoke an ever-changing city. Based on the...

"With that hair," comments a local pilgrim to a visiting stranger with long curls and a full beard, "you're either sick, a wacko, or a scientist." It sums up Alaa Eddine Aljem's gentle farce about faith...

It's taken 20 years for Michael Caton-Jones to bring his adaptation of Alan Warner's novel The Sopranos to the big screen - and it's worth the wait. It's already had a second life as a stage musical...

At its best, cinema can approach being indescribable. ‘FW Murnau directs an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ doesn’t make any kind of coherent sense on paper, nor is it something you can...

The shift from offbeat to bonkers can be glorious. For Maggie, an erratic structure mirrors the film’s examination of truth, perception and trust – but unfortunately in a way that comes across as more...

If one were to list off the common pitfalls of biopics, ‘formulaic’ would likely be near the top. Yet, Just Mercy proves that sticking rigidly to an expected formula need not necessarily be a bad thing as...

There's a common belief that older women enjoy the goriest fiction. Certainly there's an invisibility that comes with age; a sense of being the constantly underestimated little old lady. In Lucky Grandma,...

Both in its premise and its marketing, Harriet looks like a straightforward Oscar-season piece of prestige biopic, telling an inspiring true story and hunting for acting trophies. In practice, though, Kasi...

Armando Iannucci isn't known for his forgiving touch when it comes to social commentary. But for this almost aggressively charming Dickens adaptation he slips off the knuckledusters and takes a noticeably...

There’s a scene in The Goldfinch where Hobie, a dealer and restorer of antique furniture, teaches protagonist Theo how to distinguish between a true antique and a fake. Fake antiques, he says, are dead...

One of the most tiresome habits of modern film marketing and discourse is the obsession with timeliness. Every "serious" release has to be related to Trump or Brexit or MeToo, even if the connection is...

Who's up for some literal class war? Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's pitch-black horror comedy wears its politics on its sleeve, and is mostly the better for it. Ready or Not sets its dissection...

Opening with a blood-freezing look at a death row execution, Clemency starts heavily and only rarely lets you up to breathe from there. Chinonye Chukwu’s Sundance-conquering look at the barbaric inhumanity...

Just as Bertand Bonello’s last film, Nocturama, split its viewers down ideological lines, so too will Zombi Child divide audiences. Unfortunately, this time out, the difference will be between the people who...

Melding a teen drama with the hypnotic jungle trip of Apocalypse Now, Monos is a film both easy to pigeonhole and hard to fully get a handle on. It defies expectations, from the strange, shifting story to its...