Film

Gemma Arterton’s new film, Their Finest, is about second world war propaganda. Her character, who is bookish and sensitive, is allowed — because of war — to write film scripts. She discovers two girls — two ordinary, pale, unhappy girls — who steal their father’s boat and sail to Dunkirk for the rescue. She thinks this story will swell hearts: and so she, and her collaborator (Sam Claflin), make a British Casablanca about Dunkirk. They know there must be loss, or nothing has value. I marvelled over two things in Their Finest, even as I dislike the title. First, how the pale, unhappy girls are transformed, for the film inside

The Sense of an Ending is an adaptation of Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker prize-winning novel starring Jim Broadbent (we love Jim Broadbent), Harriet Walter (we love Harriet Walter) and Charlotte Rampling (we love, love, love Charlotte Rampling). With such a cast, you’d be minded to think it can’t fail, and it doesn’t in this respect. The performances are transfixing throughout. But it does not satisfy emotionally, as the ending of The Sense of an Ending makes no sense. It’s a (Non)Sense of an Ending. Same with the book, which, on completing, I think I threw across the room with a: what? Is that it? As directed by Ritesh Batra

Films can be poetry — or like poetry; or poetic, at least — but can poetry ever be film? That is our question for today, and I’ll attempt to answer it, although there is absolutely no saying that I’ll be able to do so. Always touch and go, that. A Quiet Passion is Terence Davies’s biopic of the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson, author of ‘Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul’ and ‘Because I Could Not Stop for Death’ (look it up; do) and, all in all, 1,800 (incredibly wonderful) poems, of which only 10 were published in her lifetime. Who was this woman? She’s

It’s kind of surreal being here.’ The general sentiment, no doubt, of most people on planet Earth right now, but the specific words of Matt Damon at the world première of his latest film earlier this year. The reason for his befuddlement? The film was The Great Wall, for which he had moved to China for half a year with his family. But the première was taking place beneath the extravagant pagoda of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. From actual China to Los Angeles’ idea of China — no wonder Damon found it weird. Yet, as so often happens in Hollywood, the weird could well become the way of

Creaking doors, rustling leaves and leaky taps make up the soundtrack of Olivier Assayas’ improbable horror film Personal Shopper. But the most unnerving (and grating) sound in this supernatural fashion show are the iMessage alerts that may or may not be coming from the beyond. If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because, like so much else in this baffling film, it is. Assayas has made some excellent films over the past two decades and more, and I think his nosedive with Personal Shopper can be explained by his latest muse, Kristen Stewart. Sure, she’s pretty – if that emaciated-junkie look turns you on. But why the former Twilight star has turned

Elle has been described as ‘a rape revenge comedy’, which seems unlikely, and also as ‘post-feminist’, which is likely as, in my experience, that simply means anything goes so long as you acknowledge that feminism has happened. The film stars Isabelle Huppert, who was Oscar-nominated for her performance, and who has repeatedly said that her character, Michèle, is not ‘a victim’ although, as you have to watch Michèle being raped or near-raped several times, I don’t know how we can be so sure about that. Perhaps I’m just not sufficiently in touch with my ‘post-feminist’ side to fully comprehend. Directed by Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, RoboCop, Total Recall, Showgirls) and

Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is one of those angst-ridden dramas focusing on what is commonly referred to as a ‘dysfunctional family’ as if there might be any other kind and it isn’t just a question of degree. This family certainly doesn’t hold back. This family has everyone shouting at everyone else for 95 minutes, blurting out brutal truths that might equally be brutal untruths (hard to tell). It has not been rapturously received. It was jeered at Cannes (even though it won the Grand Prix) and has been described by various critics as ‘insufferable’ and ‘intolerable’, which can only make you think that they haven’t