Film
You’ll want to claw your face off: Scoop reviewed
Scoop is a dramatised account of the events leading up to the BBC’s 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. The…
Modest fun: Red, White & Royal Blue reviewed
Red, White & Royal Blue is a rom-com based on the LGBT bestselling novel by Casey McQuiston. Nope, me neither,…
Hook up
Peter Pan & Wendy is Disney’s latest live-action remake (the animated version was in 1953) and it’s quite the sombre…
Don’t bank on it
Bank of Dave is the ‘true(ish)’ story, as this puts it, of Dave Fishwick, the Burnley businessman who wanted to…
Brought to book
You may already have read early reviews of Netflix’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion saying it’s ‘the worst adaptation ever’…
Safe and sound
This year the Oscar for best film went to the drama Coda– ‘Child of Deaf Adults’ – but the ceremony…
Small wonder
As there are no stand-out films this week aside from Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Death on the Nile — is…
A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do
Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog could also be called The Power of Benedict Cumberbatch, as he’s so spectacular.…
Take two women
Passing is Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of the Nella Larsen novella (1929) about two biracial women, one of whom chooses to…
Dutch courage
The Forgotten Battle is a Dutch feature film commemorating the desperate and relatively little-known Allied assault on the Scheldt estuary…
Di another day
This week, an excellent film (Moving On) and a film that isn’t at all, but is entirely worth it as…
Utopia or Pleasantville?
Some Kind of Heaven is a documentary set in The Villages, Florida, which is often described as a ‘Disneyland for…
A grief observed
Nomadland won multiple Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, and if there’d been an award for Best…
Down the rabbit hole
Black Bear is one of those indie dramas that is meta on so many levels you can either sit with…
A dish served very hot
Promising Young Woman is a rape-revenge-thriller that has already proved divisive but is a wonderfully clever, darkly funny, stomach-knotting —…
Mad about the boy
In the summer of 2018, when film-maker Lee Isaac Chung was on the brink of giving up filmmaking and had…
Frolics and fossils
Ammonite is writer-director Francis Lee’s second film after God’s Own Country, one of the best films of 2017, and possibly…
He loves me, he loves me not
The premise for the unsnappily titled Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is this: a Hungarian…
Thriller instinct
Judas and the Black Messiah is a biopic about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but it’s not your regular biopic…
The kids are not alright
Raya and the Last Dragon has everything you might want nowadays from a major Disney film — feisty kick-ass heroine,…
Nothing personal
Pelé is a two-hour documentary about the great Brazilian footballer — the greatest footballer ever, some would say — who…
Deliciously dark
I Care a Lot is a deliciously dark comic thriller that You’ll Enjoy a Lot. It’s heartless. It’s vicious. It’s…
Trigger happy
In this line of business you receive many emails from PRs ‘reaching out’ about their particular film, which I really…
Cinema as car ad
It’s a premise with plenty of previous. Children whose parents were murdered by Indians on the frontier of the American…
Lowering the baa
Rams is an average film with a better film trying to get out, and you may already have seen that…
