New Statesman

Like the characters, Mektoub, My Love is itself apparently aimless, often irritating, prone to treading water -- indeed, it could be accused of being one long longueur. But I found plenty to admire in it.

Posted Feb 19, 2019

On the Basis of Sex (2019)

Imogen West-Knights

You could play a round of biopic-cliché bingo to On the Basis of Sex, but there is plenty to admire here alongside. It's well acted... [And] the ins and outs are dispatched clearly without dumbing down the technical language.

Posted Feb 15, 2019

A Private War (2018)

The director Matthew Heineman has a background in documentary, and Pike serves as a one-woman answer to the question of why he didn't make a factual piece: her tenacity, swagger and depth are astonishing.

Posted Feb 13, 2019

If Beale Street Could Talk (2019)

Jenkins's greatest achievement is to recreate Baldwin's depiction of the psychological horror of racism, the dread and claustrophobia it generates, along with the surging passion the couple use to try to defeat it.

Posted Feb 6, 2019

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

For what could have been a sordid and interior little yarn, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" positively glows.

Posted Jan 30, 2019

Dogman (2019)

A character study rather than the conventional thriller hinted at by its gangster trappings... In little more than 90 minutes, [Marcello Fonte] completes the unlikely metamorphosis from a Mr Bean to an El Greco.

Posted Jan 29, 2019

Tehran Taboo (2018)

The lyrical animation, and especially an expressive use of shadows which illuminates emotion in the actors' faces, makes it all appear to be unfolding in a woozy dream.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

First Man (2018)

In those sequences when Armstrong is heading for the stars, the approach is so immersive on a sensory level -- cacophonous sound design, juddering cinematography verging on the abstract -- that it almost compensates for the void at the film's core.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Possum (2018)

In taking his inspiration from Jimmy Savile, Holness has placed at the centre of his film the sort of bogeyman who could give even Michael Myers nightmares.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Halloween (2018)

[Forgets] that a decent Halloween movie should take its cue from Michael Myers: low on chat, high on surprise. Even so, this one can still boast a higher-than-average proportion of treats among its tricks.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Peterloo (2019)

It seems perverse that a film of such length should find no home for so many of its director's assets. Detailed character-work, complex domestic relationships, humour: these are elements that would have made the picture engaging.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Widows (2018)

It would be wrong to place all the credit on the script when every element of Widows expresses character and theme with intelligence and concision.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs feels like the Coen brothers' B-sides compilation... . That smugness to which the Coens are susceptible is in plentiful supply here.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Suspiria (2018)

Guadagnino claims that his Suspiria is not a remake at all but a cover version. If that's the case, it can only be the equivalent of turning a three-minute glam stomp into a bloated rock opera.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Disobedience (2018)

Chilean director Sebastián Lelio lends this adaptation of Naomi Alderman's 2006 novel of the same name an outsider's curiosity... only a foreigner could bring this much lyricism to locations within spitting distance of the North Circular.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Three Identical Strangers (2018)

Dramatises the nature vs nurture argument in a murky and intriguing way. If only its stylistic mannerisms didn't threaten to obscure the storytelling.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Roma (2018)

Cuarón fills every corner of the frame, just as Fellini did, so that the eye has to roam the screen as though scouring a fresco. But for all the bustle and brio, it's a visually lucid movie.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

The Favourite (2018)

Pushes the idea of the capricious monarch through the far reaches of comedy and almost into tragedy. Colman embodies sublimely the punch-drunk confusion of a woman unsure whether she's child or adult, plaything or puppet-master.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Stan & Ollie (2019)

There isn't a surprising shot or musical cue in the whole movie, but with performances this good you'd scarcely notice. Coogan and Reilly's physical and vocal resemblance to their subjects is stunning without being slavish or clinical.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Colette (2018)

[Keira Knightley] gets far more to do and is infinitely better at it than usual in the brisk new period piece Colette

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)

Hale County This Morning, This Evening has an impressive pedigree but that wouldn't count for much if it didn't achieve its aim to find a new language for the overlooked parts of neglected lives. But it does -- lovingly.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Beautiful Boy has a remorseless emotional integrity... It is frustrating, repetitive and inconclusive, and all the more admirable for it.

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Vice (2018)

These days, everyone is yelling, and that includes the makers of Vice. The title has a double-meaning but I'd suggest a third: watching the film feels like having your head stuck in a...

Posted Jan 25, 2019

Revolution in Ruins: The Hugo Chávez Story (2019)

Ruth Mayer's dash through Venezuela's recent history wasn't a radical piece of film-making, but it worked brilliantly. How quickly a state can fail.

Posted Jan 17, 2019

Mary Queen of Scots (2018)

Gwen Smith

Above all, Mary Queen of Scots excels at showing how women's bodies are so often weaponised against them... Its depiction of female bodies may not be shocking -- but its normalising stance might just jolt us into altering our reaction towards them.

Posted Jan 17, 2019

Fyre (2019)

More thriller than schadenfreude-laced comedy, I watched Fyre with squirming dread. Knowing what's coming only raises the suspense.

Posted Jan 16, 2019

Brexit (2019)

Utterly and completely Benedict Cumberbatch's show... What an irresistible performance he turns in: weird, committed, minutely observed

Posted Jan 2, 2019

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Simon Childs

While Sorry to Bother You is off-the-wall and hilariously bizarre, its message is firmly grounded in the recognisable injustice of a system whose decadence is seeing it teetering on the edge of collapse.

Posted Dec 20, 2018

The Interrogation of Tony Martin (2018)

Victoria Smith (Gloswitch)

Where there should have been dramatic tension, we got only muddle and hesitation; where we might have hoped for psychological insight, we had only the self-justification of one lonely, paranoid man.

Posted Nov 26, 2018

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)

At times it has the feel of a computer game: cross the bridge, open the gates, jump off the wall, beat the boss. Only characters in computer games tend to be more unpredictable, with more than one twist.

Posted Nov 12, 2018

Anna and the Apocalypse (2018)

Tom Beasley

Things are already grim and knowingly tacky before zombies arrive, and director John McPhail's movie uses his film's genre-bending position as a musical to play with tropes.

Posted Nov 12, 2018

Wildlife (2018)

At times thematically heavy-handed, but nevertheless atmospheric, the film's scaffolding is its three expansive central performances, and sensitive Stephen Shore-inspired cinematography.

Posted Nov 7, 2018

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

Kate Mossman

The cartoon unreality of Bohemian Rhapsody will feel, to many fans, like being trapped in a Queen nightmare.

Posted Oct 25, 2018

The Wife (2018)

At least The Wife has Close in its favour, not to mention timeliness.

Posted Oct 4, 2018

A Star Is Born (2018)

Were the actor Bradley Cooper not so tender and hard-working in his performance as the jaded rocker Jackson Maine, it would be possible to regard the whole thing as a vanity project, since he co-wrote and directed it also.

Posted Oct 4, 2018

Farther and Sun: A Dyslexic Road Trip (2018)

All the different ways in which human beings are wired grow ever more fascinating to me the older I get, and this film captured, with great gentleness, some aspects of these contrasts and incongruities.

Posted Oct 3, 2018

Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes (2018)

Manson: The Lost Tapes really is disquieting: a trip and a half of purest horror dressed up as social history.

Posted Sep 27, 2018

The Little Stranger (2018)

[Domhnall Gleeson] keeps Faraday's wounds painfully close to the surface... Faraday's bitterness works like a depressant, consuming him but also the movie, and robbing it of some of the electrical charge vital for fully effective horror.

Posted Sep 25, 2018

The Rider (2018)

The Rider could easily have been pitying or patronising but it is suffused instead with warmth, understanding and insightful detail

Posted Sep 12, 2018

King of Thieves (2019)

We can have the joshing banter, the gags about this over-the-hill Lavender Hill Mob, but they come mixed up with the sniping and snarling, the carnivorous nastiness... Bless.

Posted Sep 12, 2018

Against the Law (2017)

Here was all of the wit and compassion you find in Wildeblood's prose, combined with emotions I'd hitherto only been able rather half-heartedly to imagine: bewilderment, fear, agonising pain.

Posted Sep 12, 2018

American Animals (2018)

American Animals manages to be simultaneously fast-paced and contemplative.

Posted Sep 5, 2018

The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)

Fans of action blockbusters might pass up what seems a light-hearted comedy - but they'd miss out. This film's action sequences are every inch as bloody and bonkers as those of their male-fronted counterparts.

Posted Aug 29, 2018

Cold War (Zimna wojna) (2018)

The whole nature of Cold War is one of abbreviation: snappy editing, temporal jumps, deliberately unresolved emotions... This is a film of glancing, heart-crushing pleasures.

Posted Aug 29, 2018

To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018)

It's wonderful cliché that works... The script understands exactly where the effervescence of a great romcom lies.

Posted Aug 23, 2018

The Children Act (2018)

This isn't cinema so much as Sunday evening television, with a moral dilemma laid out in straight-arrow scenes stripped of much cinematic sensibility.

Posted Aug 23, 2018

Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar (2018)

Praised reverentially for an hour by a series of largely grim-faced American scholars, afterwards I could think of [Sylvia Plath] only in black and white: the colours of a PhD thesis, or a dry academic paper.

Posted Aug 17, 2018

Mark Gatiss on John Minton: The Lost Man of British Art (2018)

Threaded with tenderness and fellow-feeling, and resolutely determined not to fixate on the painter's suicide in 1957 at the age of 39.

Posted Aug 17, 2018

The Festival (2018)