Zoe Margolis

★★★☆☆ Ambitious. Witty. Original. Surreal. Ridiculous. These all describe writer Boots Riley’s directorial debut Sorry To Bother You, and yet none of them quite encapsulate how innovative and genre-defying it is. It’s a screwball comedy, it’s absurdist sci-fi, it’s a satire on capitalism, and yet it also manages to be a political call-to-arms; a film…

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★★★★★ Tinge Krishnan’s Been So Long is a musical delight of heart-warming songs, sardonic British humour, and fantastic performances. Set in London’s Camden Town, its usual grittiness glossed over with a romantic, Technicolor lens, the story avoids posturing with the usual tropes of inner-city life, and instead offers its characters hope. This London may be punctuated…

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★★★★★ Joan Castleman (Glenn Close) has intellect, charm, and elegant diplomacy. Her husband Joe (Jonathan Pryce), meanwhile, is the personification of a ditzy writer: flyaway hair, scraggly beard, incapable of having any structure to his life – whether that’s remembering to take daily medication, or marital fidelity – and entirely dependent on his wife to support…

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★★★★★ Lucky follows the journey of a 90-year-old atheist who finds himself at the precipice of life. It begins like a beautifully slow comedy, filled with the quirks of Lucky’s daily routine and his almost mystical interactions with the town’s unique characters, but then it expands into a heart wrenching meditation on death; an unhurried…

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★★★★☆ Idris Elba’s impressive directorial debut is an adaptation of Victor Headley’s novel Yardie. A hugely successful indie book, sold in hairdressers, clothing shops and nightclubs, it went on to become a cult hit. The book was, at the time (1992), the first populist Black title aimed at a Black British audience, and its impact…

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★★★☆☆ Marking the film debut of Henson Alternative, a banner of The Jim Henson Company that specialises in adult content, The Happytime Murders is a puppet-based black comedy which definitely isn’t for kids. Based in a world where puppets and humans co-exist, the plot centres on puppet ex-detective-now-private-investigator Phil Phillips (Bill Barretta) trying to solve…

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★★★★☆ The Escape is an emotional exploration of a fractured marriage, but something much darker is at its core: depression and an existential crisis. Gemma Arterton is magnificent as Tara, the stay-at-home mother juggling never-ending laundry loads and repetitive breakfast routines for excitable children, whilst yearning for something more meaningful. Tara seems to carry the…

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★★★★☆ Daniel Kokotajlo’s debut Apostasy is a remarkable and authentic mediation on religion, belief, family and loss. Single mother Ivanna (Siobhan Finneran) runs a matriarchal household, raising her two adult daughters Luisa (Sacha Parkinson) and Alex (Molly Wright) in strict accordance with her devout Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. The daughters seem as pious as their mother, particularly…

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★★★★☆ It’s 2028 and rioting fills the streets of Los Angeles. Disputes over water, now privatised, have reached a volatile point and the city is put under curfew. With the water shut down, and a population desperate, the city’s residents have nothing to lose and take to the streets. Within the mayhem is a botched…

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