Ballad of a Small Player opens with Lord Doyle, played by Colin Farrell, hiding from security in his trashed casino suite in Macau. After they’re gone, he slips into the corridor and sees a trolley holding a bouquet of flowers and a knife. I kept my eyes on the knife, expecting the jittery, paranoid gambling
Is Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest as good as everyone is saying? That it has a run time of nearly three hours and I didn’t drop off, and didn’t have to fight dropping off, may say it all. But if you want more, I can also vouch that One Battle After Another is funny and fantastically
Dead of Winter is an action thriller starring Emma Thompson and you have to hand it to her. Has such a thoroughly ordinary, sixty-something-year-old woman (no superpowers) ever carried an action thriller before? Not that I can think of. That’s not to say it’s devoid of clichés. I think we all know that it’s best
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is, I have to tell you, anything but. I should have trusted the trailer. When I caught this, my first thought was ‘heck, that looks bad’. Stupidly, I was not put off. The film is written by Seth Reiss (co-writer of The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (if you haven’t
This Is Spinal Tap is now such a deserved comedy behemoth that it’s easy to forget how gradual its ascent to generally agreed greatness was. Only over the years did so many lines and scenes from a low-key 1984 mockumentary about a heavy-rock band (amps that ‘go to 11’, a tiny Stonehenge, a classically inspired
What set this apart, I would suggest, is its deep and unremitting unpleasantness The Cut stars Orlando Bloom as a boxer who comes out of retirement for one last shot at glory. You may be wondering: how does this film about a boxer coming out of retirement for one last shot at glory differ from
The Roses is a remake of The War of the Roses (1989), the diabolically funny black bitter comedy that was directed by Danny DeVito and starred Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas as a couple who start out in love, then hate each other like poison, and once their battle is under way it’s no holds
Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which is set in a retirement village and features pensioners solving murders, was a publishing sensation. (There are now four books in the series, with combined sales of more than ten million copies.) I’ve never read it. ‘Cosy crime’, as it’s called, is either your bag or it isn’t.
Celine Song’s first film, the wonderful Past Lives (2023), earned two Oscar nominations. So expectations were riding high for Materialists. Perhaps way too high. And, yes, it’s a letdown. It feels like an early Woody Allen but blunter, shallower, with no zingers, and a lead character that’s hard to care about. Dakota Johnson is our
The Kingdom is a mafia drama like no other. It’s directed by Julien Colonna whose father was a Corsican mob boss who died in 2006 (officially in a car crash although it’s generally believed he was ‘whacked’). And it’s told through the eyes of a young girl. Think of it as The Godfather from the
As the lights went down for The Naked Gun – the ‘legacy sequel’ to the spoof cop franchise – I found myself praying: ‘Please God, let it be deliciously and relentlessly stupid or I will be heartbroken.’ I was not hopeful. I never am when it comes to a ‘legacy sequel’. What they usually mean
The Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou started off as YouTubers known for their comically violent shorts – Ronald McDonald Chicken Store Massacre (2014) has accrued 67 million views. They then raised the money to make their first feature. This was the quietly disquieting Talk To Me (2022), which cost $4.5 million and made $92
In the brief lull between last week’s summer blockbuster (Superman) and next week’s (Fantastic Four) you may wish to catch Four Letters of Love. Based on the internationally bestselling novel (1997) by Niall Williams, it’s a quiet, lyrical, Irish love story featuring a superb cast (Helena Bonham Carter, Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne) and no dinosaurs
My father took us to the cinema (Odeon, Leicester Square) once a year at Christmas and in 1978 the film was Superman. I remember it vividly, and I remember it as thrilling, but hadn’t seen it since so I rewatched it and it is everything a superhero movie should be, the gold standard. It has
Midway through Jurassic World Rebirth the scientist character played by Jonathan Bailey, whom we can all immediately spot as a scientist (he wears glasses), tells us that intelligence is not especially useful for a species. Look at dinosaurs, he continues, ‘who are dumb but survived for 165 million years’. These Jurassic films have been going
First it was 28 Days Later (directed by Danny Boyle, 2002), then 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) and now Boyle is back at the helm with 28 Years Later, which is, as I understand it, the first in a new trilogy. This post-apocalyptic horror franchise could go on for ever. As the last
Tornado is a samurai spaghetti western starring Tim Roth, Jack Lowden and Takehiro Hira (among others). Samurai spaghetti westerns aren’t anything new. In fact, we wouldn’t have spaghetti westerns if it weren’t for the samurai genre – Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (1964) was, as Clint Eastwood conceded, an ‘obvious rip-off’* of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo
Falling Into Place is a love story written by Aylin Tezel, directed by Aylin Tezel, and starring Aylin Tezel. That’s a lot of Aylin Tezel so I was nervous going in. What if it’s too much Aylin Tezel? What if Aylin Tezel and I don’t get along? Who even is Aylin Tezel? But I knew
The Salt Path is an adaptation of the best-selling book by Raynor Winn. It tells the true story of how she and her husband, Moth, lost their home and lost all their money. At one point they go to a bank to withdraw all their funds: £1.38. And if that wasn’t bad enough he’s then
You have to time your arrival at cinemas carefully if you want to avoid the high-volume, rapid-fire edits of trailers for upcoming mind-rot. That’s conceptually impossible with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The first half an hour is a debrief in the form of an extended trailer of highlights from previous missions. At one
