1 day ago
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Nickel Boys
Adaptation of Colson Whitehead novel is an intensely moving story of two friends trapped in a racist reform school, told with piercing beauty by RaMell Ross.
What we said: “There are wonderful moments of humanity and hope; I don’t usually respond to ‘hug’ moments in drama: and yet the (soon to be classic) scene here in which a woman has to hug her grandson’s friend in the absence of the grandson himself is overwhelming.” Read the full review.
A Real Pain
Writer/director/actor Jesse Eisenberg effortlessly walks a tonal tightrope in this film about Jewish American cousins on a Holocaust tour in Poland, with Kieran Culkin stealing the show.
What we said: “This is an effortlessly witty, fluent and astringent comedy with a very serious overcurrent. It is a road movie which is partly about the Holocaust and about America’s third-generation attempt at coming to terms with it, at confronting what their parents and grandparents found too painfully recent to revisit, or necessary to forget in order to survive. And partly it’s about family, male friendship and growing older.” Read the full review.
The Girl With the Needle
Fictionalised true crime nightmare based on Denmark’s 1921 baby-killer case, directed by Magnus von Horn, that leaves a shiver of pure fear.
What we said: “It is about a world in which women’s lives are disposable and in which the authorities are disapproving of and disgusted by their suffering – and set at a time in which the first world war had normalised the idea of mass murder.” Read the full review.
Maria
Angelina Jolie’s Callas commands the screen in Pablo Larraín’s strange and mordant drama that portrays the diva’s haughty struggle as her voice begins to fail but her stardom remains undimmed.
What we said: “Maria is the most persuasive and seductive of Larraín’s trilogy of great women at bay, after Jackie about Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer about Princess Diana. There is less sentimentality and self-importance to this one though, for all that it is about the biggest diva in history.” Read the full review.
Pepe
Huge and wayward docu-fictional meditation goes inside inside the beautiful mind of Pablo Escobar’s hippo, shipped out to furnish the Colombian druglord’s estate.
What we said: “The hippo, as a German tour guide tells us at the very beginning, may look fat and placid and rather cute, but it’s fast-moving, aggressive and dangerous to humans; perhaps the film itself, so mysteriously distended with huge digressions and non-narrative scenes, is as exotically fleshy and strange as a hippo. Yet it has bite.” Read the full review.
Vermiglio
Maura Delpero’s beautifully made drama explores the complex dynamics of a sprawling family in an idyllic Italian village near the wartime border with Germany.
What we said: “It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.” Read the full review.
A Complete Unknown
James Mangold’s biopic of Bob Dylan follows the rise of the era-defining star with Timothée Chalamet brilliantly embodying his shapeshifting allure.
What we said: “Chalamet is a hypnotic Dylan, performing the tracks himself and fabricating to a really impressive degree that stoner-hungover birdsong. He does a very passable version of Don’t Think Twice, with the distinctive, eccentric intonations, singing as if he’s not entirely sure of the tune and appearing to run out of breath at the end of every line.” Read the full review.
The Brutalist
Epic postwar architectural drama with Adrien Brody as a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who comes to the US and begins a distinguished career under the patronage of a wealthy man.
What we said: “This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a-half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.” Read the full review.
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story
One of Ireland’s most important novelists and a woman of fierce intelligence and bravery is celebrated in Sinéad O’Shea’s thoroughly enjoyable documentary.
What we said: “This portrait of the author Edna O’Brien is a reminder that most writers – most people, in fact – don’t have lives anywhere near as exciting or fulfilling as hers.” Read the full review.
Hard Truths
Marianne Jean-Baptiste is exceptional as a woman in the terrifying endgame of depression in this deeply sober and compassionate drama, a Mike Leigh classic of day-to-day disillusionment and courage.
What we said: “It reunites Leigh with that overwhelmingly powerful female lead, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whose name was made by her electrifying performance in Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets and Lies, and might well get made all over again with her formidable appearance here, demonstrating the terrible connection between depression and anger.” Read the full review.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Exiled director Mohammad Rasoulof’s arresting tale of Iran’s violence and paranoia, and officialdom’s misogyny and theocracy, whose importance is beyond doubt.
What we said: “The Seed of the Sacred Fig begins as a downbeat political and domestic drama in the familiar style of Iranian cinema, and then progressively escalates to something extravagantly crazy and traumatised – like a pueblo shootout by Sergio Leone.” Read the full review.
September 5
Taut media procedural revisits Munich Olympics in Tim Fehlbaum’s tense thriller focusing on the 1972 terrorist massacre through a TV crew lens.
What we said: “It’s a really smart, involving, unassumingly written picture with something of James L Brooks’ Broadcast News and I couldn’t help think that maybe this is the film that Steven Spielberg could have made rather than Munich, his rather ponderous, Forsythian thriller about the aftermath.” Read the full review.
To a Land Unknown
Mahdi Fleifel’s tale of displacement and desperation as Palestinian refugees seek a better life makes for suspenseful, melancholic viewing.
What we said: “Mahmood Bakri’s excellent performance shows Chatila to be smart, personable, manipulative and ruthless, always on the lookout for ways to get money for a fake passport.” Read the full review.
Memoir of a Snail
Sarah Snook and Kodi Smit-McPhee lend their voice talents to Adam Elliott’s ambitious animation, a charming, poignant tale of troubled twins that has a strong personal touch.
What we said: “There’s an ingenuousness and innocence to Memoir of a Snail, a family-entertainment approachability that belies a strange intensity. There are some candid hints, through the obviously personal narrative touches, that in this film some very real adult pain and anger is being hidden in plain sight.” Read the full review.
I Am Martin Parr
Enjoyable and valuable study of tragicomic Britain’s inspired photographer, whose highly coloured 70s and 80s images revealed the white working class as never before.
What we said: “The film shows that part of his skill is just looking like an ordinary bloke, going around in the crowd with his wheeled walking frame (after recent illness), smiling benignly, endlessly taking pictures.” Read the full review.
Superboys of Malegaon
Inspired by a true story, this feelgood Indian film is about some Bollywood superfans making their own movies with a cheeky but admirable DIY ethos.
What we said: “There is terrific fun, charm and storytelling energy in Superboys of Malegaon, and it settles on an interesting theme: very rarely indeed does a new film-maker find success with a completely original work.” Read the full review.
Ernest Cole: Lost & Found
Tragic story of a fiercely pioneering photographer, a black South African whose work illuminated the reality of life under apartheid, but who lived a life of exile and homesickness.
What we said: “Raoul Peck’s film, in which LaKeith Stanfield narrates a kind of heightened, fictionalised first-person account from Cole’s own writings and diaries, is devastatingly sad. It is the sadness of an artist who becomes estranged, not merely from his homeland, but from his art and his livelihood.” Read the full review.
On Falling
Laura Carreira’s impressive debut drama sees a quietly excellent Joana Santos endure dehumanising work conditions an online warehouse worker while looking for a way out.
What we said: “On Falling shows us a world of sadness and exhaustion, a kind of heavy cloud cover of depression that is both a symptom of the job and a way of getting through it: only by reducing yourself to zombie-like inattention to your own needs can you get through the day as a ‘picker’.” Read the full review.
Sister Midnight
Mumbai-set comic horror with Radhika Apte terrific as a woman preparing to settle down with a shiftless husband she barely knows when her world goes awry.
What we said: “With its deadpan drollery and rectilinear tableau scenes, Sister Midnight takes something from Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch and also – at its most alarming – something more from Polanski’s Repulsion.” Read the full review.
The Rule of Jenny Pen
Geoffrey Rush’s retired judge is terrorised by John Lithgow’s therapy puppet-wielding fellow resident in this claustrophobic care-home thriller of elder-on-elder abuse.
What we said: “Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end.” Read the full review.
Santosh
Terrifically tense cop movie digs into sexism and caste prejudice in India, Sunita Rajwar and Shahana Goswami as a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie who has inherited her late husband’s job.
What we said: “Writer-director Sandhya Suri has made a tense, violent and politically savvy crime procedural set in India: a film about sexism, caste bigotry and Islamophobia that doubles as a study in the complex relationship between two female cops.” Read the full review.
The End
Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon go to ground in a survival bunker with their son, in Joshua Oppenheimer’s end-of-the-world singalong drama.
What we said: “What Oppenheimer is doing here commands attention. He is facing something from which everyone, in art as in life, averts their gaze and the resulting film is far better than others notionally on the same subject.” Read the full review.
The Stimming Pool
Docufiction by a group of young film-makers on the spectrum examining how their creativity and sense of self is shaped by autism is funny and pregnant with ideas.
What we said: “The collective’s members finally come together in an empty swimming pool, which becomes their own “stimming pool”, symbolising their collective innovation. It’s an intriguing and atmospheric piece of work.” Read the full review.
One to One: John & Yoko
A collection of staggering TV clips and amazing audio of Lennon and Ono’s life in 1970s NYC, Kevin Macdonald’s immersive collage is a pop culture fever dream.
What we said: “It’s a film that mixes small screen zeitgeist fragments and madeleine moments, a memory quilt of a certain time and place, juxtaposing Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg with Richard Nixon and George Wallace, John and Yoko in concert with ads for Tupperware.” Read the full review.
The Return
Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes star in Uberto Pasolini’s raw and urgent Odyssey adaptation, as a traumatised Odysseus faces the shameful aftermath of war.
What we said: “An elementally violent movie about PTSD, survivor guilt, abandonment, Freudian dysfunction and ruined masculinity.” Read the full review.
Pink Floyd at Pompeii MCMLXXII
Mesmerically peculiar portrait of the band performing in the burning Italian sun in this outrageously indulgent yet vivid and beguiling music documentary.
What we said: “The music and the atmosphere are an irresistible fan-madeleine for those who can remember referring to them solemnly as ‘the Floyd’ (ahem).” Read the full review.
April
Shocking violence is tempered by strange, silent sequences in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s haunting abortion drama, which has echoes of The Piano Teacher.
What we said: “This is not the usual ‘abortion’ issue movie in which the reactionary anti-abortion authorities are straightforwardly criticised and the pregnant woman is awarded compassionate centre stage status.” Read the full review.
Julie Keeps Quiet
A star player at an elite tennis school decides to stay silent when the head coach is suspended in Leonardo Van Dijl’s absorbing movie.
What we said: “A tense, absorbing movie of silences and absences, of difficult terrain skirted around, of subjects avoided. It’s a reminder that in key situations, to keep quiet is a stressful, strenuous and, crucially, public activity – and a survival instinct that many young people have to learn.” Read the full review.
Where Dragons Live
Warm documentary from Dutch film-maker Suzanne Raes following three siblings as they clear out their enormously grand childhood home in Oxfordshire, where among the happy memories are those of cruelty.
What we said: “Maybe it takes a non-British film-maker to appreciate such intense and unfashionable Englishness; not eccentric exactly, but wayward and romantic.” Read the full review.
Ocean With David Attenborough
Released on his 99th birthday and presented in the context of his remarkable career, Attenborough’s passionate case against the ruination of the seas is matched only by nature’s grandeur in this visually stunning film.
What we said: “He shows us an amazing vista of diversity and life, an extraordinary undulating landscape, a giant second planet of whose existence humanity has long been unaware but now seems in danger of damaging or even destroying.” Read the full review.
Riefenstahl
Nauseating yet gripping story of Nazi poster woman who entranced Hitler, directed Triumph of the Will – and spent the rest of her life alternately fearful and defiant.
What we said: “This documentary shows she revised her memoirs endlessly, unsure if or how to minimise her personal contact with the Nazis, especially the sinister, besotted Joseph Goebbels; her fear of war guilt was at loggerheads with her unrepentant impulse to proclaim her own prestige.” Read the full review.
A New Kind of Wilderness
Beautiful film of an off-grid family shattered by bereavement who had to come to terms with not just the loss of a parent but a whole lifestyle.
What we said: “Norwegian film-maker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen tells a painful, complicated story, more complicated than even the film itself explicitly reveals.” Read the full review.
Good One
Lily Collias is outstanding as 17-year-old Sam, who goes hiking with her dad and his best buddy in India Donaldson’s intelligent and humane feature debut.
What we said: “Donaldson sets a low-key tone of banter and backtalk, in which Sam has to ride in the back of her Subaru, making herself carsick by checking her phone and annoying her dad by asking if she can drive; he finds it annoying because she is actually a better driver than he is.” Read the full review.
Hallow Road
Shot almost entirely inside a car, Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys play a splintering couple trying to save their terrified teenage daughter in a cracking thriller.
What we said: “A gripping, real-time suspense thriller with a twist of the macabre, a film about family guilt and the return of the repressed.” Read the full review.
Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Tom Cruise signs off with wildly entertaining adventure in this eighth and last Mission: Impossible, as agent Ethan Hunt takes on the ultimate in AI evil.
What we said: “Final Reckoning is a new and ultimate challenge (actually the second half of the challenge from the previous film) which takes Cruise’s buff and resourceful IMF leader Ethan Hunt on one last maverick, deniable mission to exasperate and yet overawe his stuffed-shirt superiors at Washington and Langley. And what might that be? To save the world of course, like all the other missions.” Read the full review.
Mountainhead
Weapons-grade zingers come thick and fast in Jesse Armstrong’s post-Succession uber-wealth satire about four plutocrats on a weekend away in a lodge that goes awry when the planet descends into chaos.
What we said: “More than any comedy or even film I’ve seen recently, this is movie driven by the line-by-line need for fierce, nasty, funny punched-up stuff in the dialogue, and narrative arcs and character development aren’t the point. But as with Succession, this does a really good job of persuading you that, yes, this is what our overlords are really like.” Read the full review.
