Reviews

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...

Comparisons to Scorsese are apt, but Hustlers’ sense of outrage and extraordinary female gaze feels like a fresh explosion of talent and perspective in a genre exhausted by Adam McKay. He is merely a...

Famously beloved by the French critics, and buried by Weinstein, the cinema of James Gray has a low-key grandeur. Unlike some of his contemporaries in the “major US auteur” game, he doesn’t showboat so...

Spy thrillers are one genre where it’s very easy to have too much of a good thing. They’re powered by secrets and twists, but Saturday Fiction is burdened with too much of the former at the start, and too...

Defeat the French at Agincourt? In that body? From his opening scenes as a spoilt emo princeling, whoring his way around Eastcheap, it’s hard to buy the French-American Timothée Chalamet as the legendary...

How do you make a film that’s half an adaptation of one of the greatest horror novels ever written, and a sequel to the highest-grossing horror movie of all time? Andy Muschetti’s answer seems to be: by...

It’s always promising when a film begins and you can’t immediately tell if it’s meant to be documentary or fiction. The ambiguity suggests a filmmaker ready to push their narrative in unusual directions...

A little over a year after it became legal for women to drive in Saudi Arabia, to open a Saudi Arabian film with the image of a woman behind the wheel feels like a triumph. This is just how director Haifaa...

Send a domino tumbling to the table and you know what will happen next. It’s chaotic, inevitable, and the perfect metaphor for how the financial crash played out across continents. Effetto Domino (Domino...

As the old idiom goes: "What begins as a terrible, incoherent, confusing mess will always end as one." This is slightly (and very purposefully) facetious, but it's far from an exaggeration to suggest that...