Barbie can’t handle the truth
Barbie and Oppenheimer show us how in the heart of the darkest realities we stumble upon fantasies.
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.
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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A Thousand and One understands the effects of gentrification
In this sensitive debut about a mother who steals her son from care, AV Rockwell maps the contours of a…
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Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Myself: the worst people in the world?
The wretchedly self-absorbed lead and her artist boyfriend are truly, absurdly awful. To what end?
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Hail the assassins
The American youth has lost its radical temper – Daniel Goldhaber’s film How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an…
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The Night of the 12th: a grim look at an unsolved murder
The director Dominik Moll is known for his tightly-plotted French thrillers. Now, he takes on an unsolved true crime.
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God’s Creatures is a powerful portrait of a toxic mother-son relationship
Paul Mescal and Emily Watson bring inner darkness to this story of trauma in a tiny Irish town.
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The rise of Mia Goth mania
In the horror films Pearl and Infinity Pool, the 29-year-old actor delivers two pleasingly unhinged performances.
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Rye Lane is a bright, euphoric south London romcom
Raine Allen-Miller’s visually dynamic debut turns a boy-meets-girl story into a joyous fantasy.
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