★★☆☆☆ Michael Winterbottom reunites with his perennial stars Steve Coogan and Shirley Henderson for a satire of the superrich set in the days running up to a lavish 60th birthday party in Mykonos. Coogan plays Sir Richard McCreadie, a clear...
★★☆☆☆ Written and directed by Jonah Hill, Mid90s paints a deeply personal, sun-drenched vision of skate culture in Los Angeles, as seen through the eyes of its teenage protagonist. It’s the latest production from A24, the company who brought us Moonlight, Lady Bird and Eighth Grade,...
★★☆☆☆ Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots is the latest attempt to tell the well-worn story of Mary Stuart, who challenged the protestant hold on the English throne under Elizabeth I. Starring Saoirse Ronan in the titular role and Margot...
★★★☆☆ Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the latest instalment in a projected pentalogy from J.K. Rowling, which finds Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander doing battle with Johnny Depp’s eponymous Grindelwald, whilst a selection of the, also eponymous, fantastic beasts...
★★★☆☆ As cultural curiosities go, they don’t get much more curious than Fred Rogers. A Pennsylvania pastor with a penchant for puppetry, he became the soft-spoken voice of public broadcasting for children over the course of fifty years. Won’t You...
★★★☆☆ In the 1990s, biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), frustrated with lack of interest in a mooted project about vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, and struggling with money and alcohol issues, began a spree of literary forgery that amounted to over...
★★★☆☆ Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy was, briefly, the hottest property in Hollywood. The star-studded cast of his 2001 Rat Pack remake delivered a film that was flawlessly confident, engaging and, above all, fun. It was as pure a two hours of joy...
★★★★☆ Four older women, bonded by the passage of time and extremely expensive interior design, meet for a monthly book club. Their world is turned upside down when Fifty Shades of Grey is chosen for the group. This sounds like...
★★☆☆☆ Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle) and Florence Ponting (Saoirse Ronan) are young, beautiful and in love. They’ve just married and taken a honeymoon on Chesil Beach in Dorset, where their marriage, and lives, slowly begin to unfold. As prestige literary...
★★★☆☆ Jason Reitman’s career has been on an odd trajectory since he smashed into the mainstream with his 2008 teen classic Juno. Since then he’s produced Academy Award bait (Up in the Air), Nicholas Sparks-style schmaltz (Labor Day), and outright...
★★☆☆☆ The plot of Blumhouse’s latest horror Truth or Dare, in so far as it can be discerned by human eyes, sees a group of sexy college students getting lured into a deadly drinking game whilst on Spring Break in...
★★★☆☆ In January 2013, Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz committed suicide following a series of protracted legal battle over copyright infringement after downloading JSTOR articles. It was the tragic conclusion to years of persecution, frustration and innovation. The Internet’s Own Boy...
★★☆☆☆ The premise of Jason Lapeyre and Robert Wilson’s I Declare War (2012) is great: it’s a children’s game of capture the flag, but played out with real weapons. There will, presumably, be a lot of nostalgic goodwill towards this...
★★☆☆☆ Here’s a film that Hollywood should be planning to remake; essentially a feature-length version of the zero gravity scenes from Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), which shares even closer DNA with the Kirsten Dunst US box office bomb Upside Down...
★★★☆☆ Teenage rebellion is a well-documented phenomenon and one that plays particularly well on film, where bright, sexy images can be used to punctuate the sound of tutting adults. Kaspar Munk’s Danish offering You & Me Forever (2012) fits neatly...