Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man is ‘a darkly comic psychological thriller’ that plays like an inverted Beauty and the Beast. What happens when the handsome prince turns out to be not all that? The three central performances are magnificent, and there’s a wry absurdist humour at work but unless you’re a fan of body horror
Megalopolis, which draws parallels between the fall of the Roman empire and modern-day America, is a film by Francis Ford Coppola – and it couldn’t, in fact, be more by Francis Ford Coppola if it tried. He wrote, produced, directed and self-financed it ($120 million; ouch) and even found the time to be its greatest
Both horribly familiar and wonderfully shocking, this body-horror film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat does a very traditional thing – turning the scramble for youth and beauty into a monster of immeasurable disgust and immorality – in a huge way. There is nothing minimal or restrained or overly clever here; nothing of the nuance
The Critic is a period drama starring Ian McKellen as a newspaper theatre critic famed for his savagery and it did sound as if it had all the makings of an entertaining and nicely savage little film. But through a surfeit of plot, it rather loses the plot, and the result is a surprisingly bland
Firebrand is a period drama about Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr. It is sumptuously photographed – it’s as if Hans Holbein were behind the camera – and magnificently costumed. And Jude Law is tremendous as the monstrous, ailing Henry but be warned: it doesn’t play fast and loose with the facts so
The Terminator is James Cameron’s first film, made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger, is celebrating its 40th anniversary – there’s a 4K restoration out in cinemas – and I’ve never seen it. I’m not wholly ignorant of 1980s action films, it may surprise you to hear. I’ve seen Diehard. I know a single fella in
The most important thing to know about the filmmaker and writer Marguerite Duras is that she was a total drunk. ‘I became an alcoholic as soon as I started to drink,’ she wrote, proudly. ‘And left everyone else behind.’ It’s not something any of the academics who’d been drafted in to introduce each film in
August is known as ‘dump month’. It’s when the most forgettable films are released on the grounds that people don’t go to the cinema much in the summer. But maybe they don’t go because the films are so forgettable? Either way, the best film you probably won’t go and see this week is Widow Clicquot.
In the Alien films, a xenomorph is a monstrous, all-consuming life form that exists only to make more and more copies of itself. Once the first xenomorph appears, it’s only a matter of time until all those gleaming chrome walls will be covered in creepy black goo and the humans suspended lifeless from the ceiling
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is a new version of the 1979 Caligula that is still banned in some countries (Belarus). The most expensive independent production of its time, it was intended to prove an adult film could be a Hollywood hit – but not everyone received it in that spirit. ‘Sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash,’
Didi is a coming-of-age drama by the Taiwanese-American writer-director Sean Wang. It’s set in the summer of 2008 and based on his own adolescence – and here’s the bottom line: it’s an absolute joy. It’s funny, moving, authentic and takes you right back to being 13. (Agh!) The main character here is Chris (Izaac Wang),
About Dry Grasses is the latest film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan and it had better – I thought to myself as the lights dimmed – have a great deal to say about dry grasses that is fascinating and insightful, given it has a formidable running time of 200 minutes. (That’s nearly three and
Twisters is an action-disaster film that follows ‘storm-chasers’ and is so relentless in its own pursuit of tornadoes that plot, character and dialogue are also thrown to the wind. It has a classy cast (Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell) and a classy director (Lee Isaac Chung) but if you believe, as I do, that once you’ve
Fly Me to the Moon is a romantic comedy starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum set during the 1960s space race but, unlike Apollo 11, this isn’t going anywhere we haven’t been before. The extent to which the film does take flight is largely thanks to Johansson’s charisma, even though I couldn’t help shake the
The Nature of Love is a French-Canadian film about an academic who considers herself happily married but then encounters a builder and sparks fly. I’ve made it sound like one of those Confessions… films, or an airport novel, but it isn’t. It’s sly, sexy and smart and, even though it’s billed as a romantic comedy
Horizon: An American Saga is a Western directed by Kevin Costner. It also stars Kevin Costner and is co-written by Kevin Costner and has been bankrolled by Kevin Costner – so if it’s Kevin Costner you’re after, happy days. This is Chapter One, and there are three more chapters to come, so even though it’s
Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders is based on the book by photojournalist Danny Lyon, first published in 1968, about his years embedded with a lawless motorcycle gang in Chicago. Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud, Loving) has imposed a fictional narrative arc and while it’s bogus in some respects and the arc quite familiar to anyone acquainted with
Freud’s Last Session stars Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode and is a work of speculative fiction asking what would have happened if Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis had met to debate the existence of God. What if two of the greatest minds of the 20th century had the chance to thrash it out? Thrash it
Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is a minor Linklater but a minor Linklater is still an event. Also, after all those contemplative, existential films (Boyhood, the Before trilogy), who can blame him for letting his hair down with a sexy rom-com thriller that’s not concerned with deep questions. Though the film doesn’t add up to much,
This week, a horror film – and with it, a whole load of alien spider insanity. If you’ve been hankering after a whole load of alien spider insanity, then Sting will hit the spot. As a rule, I avoid this genre, as I still suffer from nightmares after bunking off school to see The Exorcist
