Film reviews and more
★★★★★ The latest offering from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, Alex Wheatle (co-written with Alastair Siddons) features an impressive debut from Sheyi Cole in the titular role. The film follows the early life of the award-winning writer from his time in care, his love of […]
★★★★★ Steve McQueen’s extraordinary five-part series, Small Axe, set in the heart of London’s West Indian community from the 1960s to the 1980s, continues on BBC One with Red, White and Blue, co-scripted with Courttia Newland and starring John Boyega (Star Wars: The Force Awakens). […]
★★★★☆ Mikhaël Hers’ sensitive, heartfelt third feature Amanda is about loss and bereavement in the aftermath of a brutal terrorist attack in a Paris park. David (Vincent Lacoste), twenty-four, loses his sister Sandrine (Ophélia Kolb) and has to decide whether he can take on the care […]
★★★★★ Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical feature The Souvenir introduces Honor Swinton Byrne in a tour de force performance. It’s a stunning evocation of a young woman’s rite of passage in 1980s London, and a poignant exploration of an artist’s early foray into film. When Julie (Swinton Byrne), […]
★★★☆☆ A stylishly shot period drama, charting the race to provide the world with electricity, should have been compulsive viewing. Instead, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s The Current War, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Nicholas Hoult and Michael Shannon, fails to ignite. Inventor Thomas Edison (Cumberbatch) has already stunned America […]
★★★★☆ Paul Weitz and Anthony Weintraub’s screen adaptation of Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto deftly weaves romance into a taut hostage drama. Roxane Coss (Julianne Moore), an international opera star (vocals courtesy of Renée Fleming) has been asked to sing at a diplomats’ dinner in […]
★★★☆☆ Based on a true story, Trevor Nunn’s Red Joan is an absorbing wartime drama about a spy ring. It opens in 2000 with Joan (Judi Dench), a pensioner happily tending her roses. Shocked by her unexpected arrest for alleged treason, she is forced to […]
★★★★☆ Ralph Fiennes’ third directorial feature, The White Crow is an evocative portrait of Russian ballet star Rudolf Nureyev’s early career and defection to the West in 1961. Inspired by Julie Kavanagh’s biography, David Hare’s perceptive screenplay takes us from Nureyev’s birth aboard a Trans-Siberian […]
★★★★☆ Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz’s heart-rending family drama Foxtrot, starring Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler and Yontan Shiray, explores the futility of war, love and loss. An ambitious melding of three distinctive parts, it opens with a middle-aged couple receiving devastating news. Two army officers turn up […]
★★★★★ The subject of Alexandria Bombach’s On Her Shoulders is an extraordinary woman, Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, and her tireless campaign for justice for the Yazidi people. Bombach demonstrates how Murad’s selfless devotion to the cause win hearts and minds and leads her to […]
★★★★☆ Michael Mayer takes something of a gamble bringing Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull to the screen and it doesn’t entirely pay off. This is very much an American, celebrity driven rendition of a Russian classic and the stellar cast, including Annette Bening, Billy Howle, Elisabeth Moss […]
★★★★☆ Ian McEwan’s poignant screen adaptation of his 2014 novel, The Children Act, directed by Richard Eyre, stars Emma Thompson in a career-best performance as a level-headed high court judge facing a crisis in her personal and professional life. Fiona Maye decides the legal fate […]
