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2/5
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Lee
(2023)
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Tom Shone
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It was quite a life, and Lee struggles, like many a biopic before it, to squish it all into anything resembling dramatic shape. The message of the movie seems to be: Kate Winslet wants to give the victims of the Second World War a nice big hug.
Posted Sep 17, 2024
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4/5
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The Critic
(2023)
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Tom Shone
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... Directed by Tucker with assurance and panache, The Critic is the kind of entertainment, busy with plot, bordering on farce, but shaded with dark motive, that used to be the speciality of Ealing Studios.
Posted Sep 17, 2024
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3/5
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
(2024)
|
Susannah Butter
|
The performances are engaging, at times moving, and that rare thing -- entertaining for all generations.
Posted Sep 11, 2024
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2/5
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The Whip
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
The gang that Sadie assembles, lured not by cash but by the idealistic urge to topple a government and remake society, seem too pie-in-the-sky for the slicker dynamics of the heist movie to really work.
Posted Sep 11, 2024
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3/5
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Starve Acre
(2023)
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Tom Shone
|
Don’t go expecting the jack-in-the-box scares of full-tilt horror, but the disquieting slow burn of excavating the darker corners of your own kith and kin, and you’ll find skeletons and hauntings enough.
Posted Sep 11, 2024
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3/5
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Apollo 13: Survival
(2024)
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Tom Shone
|
There are small fillets of new material and things that seemed like clichés in Howard’s film are proven to be true. The story really did seem to unite the world, however briefly, in wishing those three men home.
Posted Sep 01, 2024
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Sing Sing
(2023)
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Tom Shone
|
The film walks across a viper-pit of potential cliché every step of the way, but Kwedar keeps his direction loose and urgent.
Posted Sep 01, 2024
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2/5
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Widow Clicquot
(2023)
|
Jonathan Dean
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Like second-day champagne, it rather lacks in fizz.
Posted Aug 26, 2024
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3/5
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Between the Temples
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
Harold and Maude for the Wes Anderson set.
Posted Aug 26, 2024
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3/5
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Blink Twice
(2024)
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Tom Shone
|
Blink Twice has the feel of something purgative — an angry eruption that must have been satisfying for Kravitz to get off her chest — but it wipes off pretty cleanly afterwards. The blood doesn’t stick.
Posted Aug 26, 2024
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3/5
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Hollywoodgate
(2023)
|
Tom Shone
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Perhaps the most chilling thing of all is that the documentary was done with the full approval of the Taliban: this is how they want to appear.
Posted Aug 19, 2024
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4/5
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Alien: Romulus
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
Like the creature at its centre, Alien: Romulus is a remarkable piece of adaptive creative bioengineering.
Posted Aug 19, 2024
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3/5
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Tuesday
(2023)
|
Tom Shone
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Dreyfus delivers a stunning portrait of a mother challenged to come good for her daughter in the last chapter of her life... but Oniunas-Pusic seems far too enamoured of her magic-realist metaphor than she should be.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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3/5
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The Instigators
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
... An echelon of film-making that used to thrive in the heyday of the studios: don’t look now, but they may have reinvented the B-movie.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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1/5
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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
(2024)
|
Kevin Maher
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Verisimilitude, of course, is not a Ritchie thing. But slick direction is, or used to be, and there’s none of that on show here.
Posted Aug 05, 2024
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4/5
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Kensuke's Kingdom
(2023)
|
Jonathan Dean
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Kensuke's Kingdom may sound like a bold choice of family film for the summer holidays, but it is a mightily rewarding one that does justice to an author whose books have stood the test of time.
Posted Aug 05, 2024
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3/5
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I Saw the TV Glow
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
Its structure as drama at times wispily thin, I Saw the TV Glow is more mood board than movie, but its hypnotic visuals and ethereal alt-pop score perfectly conjure that febrile world of spooky intuition.
Posted Jul 29, 2024
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1/5
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Deadpool & Wolverine
(2024)
|
Jonathan Dean
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This interminable blockbuster is over two hours of being winked at by film-makers out of ideas. There is another nadir, if that is possible.
Posted Jul 29, 2024
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4/5
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Eno
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
It’s a bit like a documentary on permanent shuffle mode. It’s overly tricksy, but if you’re lucky you’ll get clips of Eno in light-blue eye shadow and pink lipstick performing Virginia Plain with Roxy Music on Top of the Pops in 1972...
Posted Jul 08, 2024
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4/5
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Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
[Murphy] can crank up his reaction times and yammer away at the drop of a hat. There’s enormous pleasure in seeing him do so, like hearing the engine of a classic motor kicking into life...
Posted Jul 08, 2024
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Jaws
(1975)
|
Dilys Powell
|
It is well played and exciting; it has the look of triumph. And it is by a young man, a director as yet scarcely tried.
Posted Jul 02, 2024
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2/5
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Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
What Costner has made is less a western than seven subplots in search of a movie.
Posted Jul 01, 2024
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1/5
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Kinds of Kindness
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
Kafka by way of the emergency room. I’d say give it a hard pass unless you happen to be a fan of Plemons, who won the acting prize at Cannes for his almost permanent air of swimming perplexity, like a man remembering he left the oven on.
Posted Jul 01, 2024
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4/5
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The Bikeriders
(2023)
|
Tom Shone
|
Nichols has made a Goodfellas-style film depicting the progression of a Chicago-area motorcycle club, from hairy drinking buddies to murderous crime syndicate.
Posted Jun 24, 2024
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3/5
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Sasquatch Sunset
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
What a very strange species we are that some of us will find this mixture of anthropological whimsy and lavatorial humour hilarious — it will appeal mainly to college students, I would imagine, as well as hipster-ironists...
Posted Jun 17, 2024
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2/5
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Freud's Last Session
(2023)
|
Tom Shone
|
There is no better screen show-off than Hopkins, who delivers another con brio in a mediocre film.
Posted Jun 17, 2024
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4/5
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Inside Out 2
(2024)
|
Jonathan Dean
|
Move over Bambi, there is a new weepy cartoon in town.
Posted Jun 17, 2024
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2/5
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Bad Boys: Ride or Die
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the better jokes — Smith and Lawrence stealing from the clothesline of some Kentucky-fried racists, Lawrence scarfing jelly beans in the middle of a hold-up — with Lawrence getting the majority of the laughs.
Posted Jun 10, 2024
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4/5
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Hit Man
(2023)
|
Tom Shone
|
Linklater directs farce like few other film directors — not at breakneck speed, but with the ambling, relaxed, even drowsy energy with which you might pop around the corner for groceries.
Posted Jun 10, 2024
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3/5
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The Beast
(2023)
|
Tom Shone
|
Bonello’s film is frequently bewildering, often frustrating and intermittently riveting, but Seydoux works her soft magnetism throughout.
Posted Jun 03, 2024
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3/5
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Young Woman and the Sea
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
Despite being made with all the production polish you’d expect of Disney — the sound design is an immersive, pebble-scouring experience even when viewed at home — Young Woman and the Sea leaves its star treading water.
Posted Jun 03, 2024
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4/5
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
The conflict between these two worlds, masculine and feminine, blood and milk, dust storm and fireball, seems the stuff of a modern-day myth. You can’t say that of many movies.
Posted May 29, 2024
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2/5
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The Garfield Movie
(2024)
|
Ed Potton
|
Pratt can still be engaging, even if you’re rather too accustomed to the sound of his voice. Beyond that it’s thin pickings. My nine-year-old loved it, for the record, but for parents this is an opportunity for a cheeky cinema snooze.
Posted May 23, 2024
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3/5
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Hoard
(2023)
|
Tom Shone
|
Hoard is one of those poetry-in-the-gutter films, like Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, which looks at how closely love can be entangled with pathology, a bit like the Romantic poets who claimed to find the perspective of lunatics liberating.
Posted May 20, 2024
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2/5
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IF
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
The film feels more animated by adult hopes and fears than those of children.
Posted May 20, 2024
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3/5
|
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
... A brutal fight scene is followed by a brief civics lesson, which is followed by another brutal fight and another civics lesson, and so on, which suggests that something about the civics lesson isn't, you know, getting through.
Posted May 13, 2024
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3/5
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Love Lies Bleeding
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
Kristen Stewart gives the performance she’s been wanting to give her whole career in Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, a hard-knuckled, hard-boiled B-movie on steroids that comes on like a cross between the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple and Thelma & Louise.
Posted May 06, 2024
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2/5
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The Idea of You
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
The film is too busy setting up Hayes as a dreamboat fantasy to find anything remotely funny about the world of boy bands.
Posted May 06, 2024
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4/5
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The Fall Guy
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
It’s been a long time, too, since I saw a film that switches back and forth between action and romance so deftly.
Posted May 06, 2024
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4/5
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Monkey Man
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
The film feels alive, with all the rush of Drive or Uncut Gems. This is not Bollywood — nobody sings — but rhythm is key.
Posted Apr 29, 2024
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3/5
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That They May Face the Rising Sun
(2023)
|
Tom Shone
|
There’s not much more to the film than that: the passing of the seasons, a death, a marriage, all sewn together with excerpts of Joe’s writing... But the film casts a drowsy spell, like a summer meadow you cannot quite bring yourself to leave.
Posted Apr 29, 2024
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4/5
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Challengers
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
Guadagnino does for tennis what Call Me by Your Name did for peaches.
Posted Apr 29, 2024
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White Heat
(1949)
|
Dilys Powell
|
[Cagney] gives his usual easy, beautifully shaded performance; the director has seen to it that the audience never has time to lose interest in the record of murder, and the screenwriters have seen to it that death and savagery dominate the tale.
Posted Apr 22, 2024
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3/5
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Sometimes I Think About Dying
(2023)
|
Tom Shone
|
It’s almost anorexically slight, but Ridley’s performance holds the screen with an unforced minimalism that may come as a surprise to those more used to seeing her wield a lightsaber.
Posted Apr 22, 2024
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The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings
(1976)
|
Alan Brien
|
The baseball sequences are easy to follow, for it is the people who hold our attention.
Posted Apr 11, 2024
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Dog Day Afternoon
(1975)
|
Dilys Powell
|
A triumph for Sidney Lumet.
Posted Apr 07, 2024
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3/5
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Evil Does Not Exist
(2023)
|
Kevin Maher
|
There’s also a closing reel twist that is so willfully obscure and inscrutable that it effectively bullies a suggestion of greatness into the baffled minds of its audience. To me felt like a last-minute betrayal...
Posted Apr 04, 2024
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The Big Heat
(1953)
|
Dilys Powell
|
Fritz Lang's gangster film The Big Heat is well worth looking at for those with the stomach for violence; exciting, made with cold, savage skill, played for all it is worth by Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame.
Posted Mar 28, 2024
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3/5
|
Immaculate
(2024)
|
Tom Shone
|
The movie is a hokey marriage of the gothic and the prenatal, heavily reliant on jump scares as predictable as a pop-up toaster... But Sweeney’s wide-eyed presence roots it in very real fears of lost bodily autonomy.
Posted Mar 25, 2024
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The Searchers
(1956)
|
Dilys Powell
|
The Searchers is full of landscapes so framed as to make one start with pleasure. But John Ford goes further. He establishes a relationship between man and landscape which is emotional as well as spatial.
Posted Mar 25, 2024
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