Deborah Ross is the chief film critic of The Spectator
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
Within the first five minutes of Two Tickets to Greece you know what it is and where it’s going. It’s based on what I call ‘the hate-love formula’ with its in-built guarantee: any two people who can’t stand each other at the outset of a film will have bonded by the end. In this instance
La chimera, which, as in English, means something like ‘the unrealisable dream’, is the latest film from Italian writer/director Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro). Her films are arthouse, in the sense that if you’re in the mood for someone blowing stuff up and escaping by speedboat while enjoying flirtatious repartee with a sexy
The Fall Guy, starring Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling, is a gloriously fun, screwball action film that pokes fun at action films and this, I now know, is my favourite kind of action film. I would even venture that it’s the sort of film that’s crying out to be enjoyed with a big old bucket
Sometimes I Think About Dying is one of those titles you want to shout back at – what? Only sometimes? It is co-produced by, and stars, Daisy Ridley from the Star Wars franchise who, in going from a blockbuster to an interesting independent film, is taking the opposite of the usual career trajectory. Perhaps you
When the trailer for Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic of Amy Winehouse, Back to Black, first landed, her fans were gracious. ‘This,’ they said, ‘is going to be terrific.’ I’m winding you up. They were horrified. It’s too soon, they said. It’s exploitative and trashes her legacy, they concluded, from having watched two minutes of footage. I
Scoop is a dramatised account of the events leading up to the BBC’s 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. The one he imagined would allow him to put Jeffrey Epstein behind him, but instead put Pizza Express (Woking) on the map, made us want to claw our own faces off with the horror of it,
Mothers’ Instinct is a psychological thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain and it is one of those over-ripe, camp melodramas that, back in the day, would have almost certainly starred Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Or Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak, if we are going to be Hitchcockian about it. Either way, it’s a
Robot Dreams is an animated film from the Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger and while it doesn’t have the production values of something by Pixar or Disney or DreamWorks, it will capture your heart. Sweet, charming, deeply moving…. Readers, I welled up! At a cartoon! This is something we need never speak of again. It is
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster is a drama based on misunderstandings, which, when it comes to annoying narratives, is up at the very top, surely. I have been known to throw a shoe at the screen when the plot device stops anyone uttering the few words that will clear everything up in one minute flat, allowing us
Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low: John Galliano charts the highs and (spectacular) low of the British fashion designer who was fired as creative director of Dior after a number of anti-Semitic tirades came to light. I went into the cinema wanting to hear what Galliano had to say about it all. Why Jews, John?
Dune: Part Two is not a sequel but a continuation of Dune, so picks up exactly at the point you’d started to wonder if it would ever end. All I can remember from the first film is sand, sand, so much sand, and it must get everywhere, and into your sandwiches. But it is set
Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days is a film about a Tokyo public toilet cleaner and if the gentle, meditative narrative doesn’t grab you, the toilets almost certainly will. (Trust me. They’re incredible.) It stars Koji Yakusho and, as much as it is set in Tokyo, it is also set on Yakusho’s face, which is so expressive
The Taste of Things, which is this year’s French entry for best international film at the Oscars, is a gastro-film but it is not of the ‘Angry Male Chef’ genre. It’s not Boiling Point or The Menu or The Bear. It is not stressful or adrenaline-filled. No one swears or screams ‘Yes, chef!’ Instead, it
Occupied City is Steve McQueen’s meditative essay on Amsterdam during Nazi occupation, with a running time of four hours and 22 minutes. There is no archive footage. There are no witness testimonies. It’s not The Sorrow and the Pity. It is not half-a-Shoah. Instead, this visits 130 addresses and details what happened there between 1940
I don’t know if it’s a Jewish thing, but I’m certainly always bracing myself for the latest Holocaust film. There have been some horribly dim ones, such as The Reader or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, both of which invite you to sympathise with the perpetrators and you know what? I won’t if it’s
Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is an aching tale of grief, loss and loneliness starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, so I probably don’t need to tell you the acting is off the scale but I will anyway: the acting is off the scale. Scott, in particular, infuses his character with such vulnerability that
