Reviews

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...

It’s a worrying sign when the quirky adventures of David Thewlis, Health Inspector, are more entertaining than your central thriller plot of sex, blackmail and murder. Guest of Honour throws together two...

It’s hard to avoid the twin evils of mawkishness and misery when making a film about cancer, but Shannon Murphy navigates those potential pitfalls brilliantly with Babyteeth, her debut feature. At first,...

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...

Roy Andersson must be a master of the throwaway dinner party anecdote. His work is filled with sharp vignettes of everyday life, where often very little happens, but somehow it holds a deep meaning. About...

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...

What is it, exactly, with all of this late-‘60s revivalism? Have the eighties played out already? Perhaps it’s a nostalgic symptom of turning into the next terrifyingly unsure decade – has America been...

Benjamín Naishtat’s Argentinian mystery Rojo follows Claudio (Darío Grandinetti), a prominent lawyer whose life begins to unravel after an odd encounter with a stranger. Set in 1975, Rojo’s Argentina is...

If your partner (or, perhaps, ex) is notching Emmy nominations while your play has just been shelved from Broadway, is it justifiable to be jealous? What if your marriage is actively obstructing your ambition?...

This Sam Raimi-produced natural disaster thriller wastes no time getting going and maintains a breakneck pace throughout its 87-minute run time. Artistry is not the aim of Crawl – the main plot points and...

It’s easy to throw a film like Pain and Glory into all sorts of boxes – boxes marked ‘self-portrait’, ‘self-indulgent’ and ‘love letter to cinema’ – but that would be to cheapen a beguiling...