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Film Review: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
★★★★☆ No costumed crime fighter has been rebooted and re-imagined more times than Spider-Man, so we might be forgiven for sighing at the prospect of yet another iteration of old web head. Yet this animated feature spins an entirely fresh and innovative yarn with new hero Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) donning Spidey’s duds. The result is…
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Film Review: The Old Man & the Gun
★★★★☆ Director David Lowery’s latest is based on the real-life shenanigans of Forrest Tucker, played here by Hollywood great Robert Redford, and his aging ‘Over the Hill Gang’. Tucker’s gang robbed a series of banks in the 1980s, but rather than making a straight crime flick, The Old Man & the Gun merges genre cinema with…
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Film Review: Creed II
★★★☆☆ After winning the World Heavyweight Championship under the fatherly tutelage of Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), Adonis ‘Donny’ Creed (Michael B. Jordan) faces a new threat in the shape of Viktor (Romanian boxer Florian Munteanu), son of Ivan Drago – who thirty years ago killed Adonis’ father in the ring. Ryan Coogler’s Rocky revamp Creed surprised everyone in…
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Film Review: Disobedience
★★★☆☆ Hot from the success of A Fantastic Woman, Chilean director Sebastián Lelio returns with the sexually charged, emotionally restrained Disobedience. Rachels Weisz and McAdams star in this tale of forbidden love and community proscription, yet Lelio’s film exhibits a level of visual artistry far above typically bland awards bait. Ronit Krushka (Weisz) is working as a photographer…
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Film Review: Three Identical Strangers
★★★★☆ Tim Wardle engagingly recounts the fascinating story of a set of triplets who were separated at birth and reunited through coincidence when they were 19. The telling however slowly takes a darker turn as facts around the original separation are probed and frightening truths about science and human intent come to the surface. Three…
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Film Review: Ralph Breaks the Internet
★★★★☆ Where Wreck-It Ralph focused on the highs and lows of arcades games, specifically relating to the characters who inhabit them, their lives and individual crises, its sequel Ralph Breaks the Internet lurches forward, opening the world up exponentially as the arcade in which our heroes reside is plugged into the web. The plot sparks to…
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Film Review: Anna and the Apocalypse
★★☆☆☆ When Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg created the zom-rom-com in 2004 with their beloved Shaun of the Dead, even they couldn’t have envisioned just how many genre mash-ups could have been spun from the walking dead. Since then we’ve had further high-octane comedies (Zombieland), a heart-rending father and daughter yarn (Maggie), YA romance (Warm…
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Criterion Review: A Raisin in the Sun
★★★★★ Based on Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play of the same name, David Petrie’s A Raisin in the Sun is at once a searing, affirming and defiant portrayal of race, poverty and frustrated aspiration in America. Headlined with a barnstorming performance from Sidney Poitier, his beleaguered family man is a far cry from the quiet dignity of his other key…
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Film Review: Shoplifters
★★★★☆ Often compared in his distinctly Japanese minimalism to legendary compatriot Ozu, Hirokazu Kore-eda is a filmmaker whose graceful yet unfussy style contrasts with the knotty themes he has made it his trademark to tackle. Kore-eda’s films are dedicated to the dilemmas and tragedies of family life, from the loss of a child (Still Walking)…
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Film Review: Assassination Nation
★★★★★ Set in modern-day Salem, the events of Assassination Nation bear more than a passing resemblance to the town’s infamous hysterical witch-hunting history, even if heroine Lily’s (Odessa Young) claim that this is a true story has a whiff of “fake news” about it. In doing what all good satirists do, writer-director Sam Levinson constructs a twisted…
VENICE 2026