In The Last Waltz it’s Joni Mitchell who mesmerises
Martin Scorsese’s film may be about the Band, but when Joni plays you feel the confidence burning off her like…
ByFilm reviews
Explore the world of cinema with our selection of film reviews, providing in-depth analysis, thoughtful critiques, and captivating insights into the latest releases and timeless classics.
Passages is Ira Sachs’s “horny film”
The director’s art-house film concerns a catastrophic ménage-a-trois.
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Scrapper is a sickly sweet father-daughter comedy
In Charlotte Regan’s playful but twee debut, a fiercely independent 12-year-old is reunited with her absent young dad.
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Lie With Me is a wildly romantic story of lost love
Olivier Peyon’s new film, adapted from a bestselling gay romance, knows how an early relationship can determine a life.
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A strategic analysis of Barbie
The ideological hegemony and failed revolution of Barbieland.
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The Virgin Suicides is a defining text of adolescent pain
Both Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel and Sofia Coppola’s film have endured through the decades, resonating with new generations of teenagers.
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Why Richard Ayoade’s Submarine still feels fresh
Now on Netflix, the coming-of-age film encapsulates the pain of adolescence in a small town.
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Barbie can’t handle the truth
Barbie and Oppenheimer show us how in the heart of the darkest realities we stumble upon fantasies.
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Oppenheimer’s tormented soul
In this perspective-shifting biopic, Christopher Nolan frames the father of the atom bomb as a tortured Prometheus.
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Greta Gerwig’s Barbie: the art of selling out
The director has achieved her ambition of becoming a blockbuster director – but at what cost?
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Mission Intolerable: a stupid franchise gets stupider
Reviewing the Tom Cruise film Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is an exercise as absurd as critiquing porn…
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Return to Seoul: a film made with more genius than cash
In this fantastic, low-budget film, a French-Korean woman adopted at a young age returns to the place of her birth.
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In Asteroid City, Wes Anderson is beyond parody
As a trend for homages to his work explodes, the director doubles down on his mannerisms in his most affected…
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How Pretty Red Dress explores black masculinity
This confident debut by Dionne Edwards, starring Alexandra Burke, uses clothing to ask questions about liberation and self-expression.
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Stephen William’s Chevalier is a wasted opportunity
This biopic of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier, the first black European composer, is less interested in the past than in converting…
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Reality is a chilling, forensic dramatisation of a whistleblower interrogation
Tina Satter’s verbatim treatment of the FBI’s questioning of a young NSA translator is deeply unsettling.
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The Little Mermaid deserves a progressive remake. This isn’t it
Its black Ariel caused a racist backlash, but Bridgerton-style casting isn’t enough to give Disney's new version any cultural depth.
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Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener is inexcusably nasty – and yet I loved it
This story of an ex-white supremacist and a mixed-race woman tending to the grounds of a former plantation will make…
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Beau Is Afraid is a cartoonishly Freudian horror
Ari Aster’s black comedy about malign maternal influence is full of cod-psychology that makes Psycho look like a Mother’s Day…
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The Eight Mountains is a rare portrait of male friendship
This moving film takes on a truly unusual subject: a durable, unstated, non-sexual relationship between two men.
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