One Battle After Another is serious about racial politics
Behind the silliness and relentless action of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest thriller is a timely statement about America’s rightward drift.
ByFilm reviews
Explore the world of cinema with our selection of film reviews, providing in-depth analysis, thoughtful critiques, and captivating insights into the latest releases and timeless classics.
Cillian Murphy’s Steve captures fragility, guilt and compassion
This tense, 24-hour boarding-school drama is anchored by the actor’s commanding performance
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The Thursday Murder Club: how not to adapt a book
Netflix’s film misses the joy of Richard Osman’s novel – and now no one will make another version
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Spinal Tap and Downton Abbey refuse to bow out
Rock ’n’ roll will never die? It’s still a baby compared to the English class system.
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On Swift Horses is a plodding take on queer desire
Daniel Minahan’s film, set among gamblers in repressive postwar America, promises subversion but risks very little.
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The Roses: a failed story of a failed marriage
Jay Roach’s reimagined The War of the Roses updates the couple’s casus belli, but their relationship is never plausible.
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Eddington derails the western
The old certainties about genre are as blurred as the world.
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Sorry, Baby and the end of the trauma plot
Eva Victor’s award-winning study of sexual violence takes cinema beyond simplified vulnerability narratives.
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2,000 Metres to Andriivka is film-making at its rawest
Mstyslav Chernov’s new documentary viscerally throws its audience into the gruesome war in Ukraine. It is essential viewing.
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The return of The Naked Gun is a sparkling success
Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson have winningly silly on-screen chemistry.
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The Bad Guys 2 is the sequel this summer needed
DreamWorks’ animation addresses complex moral questions in exhilarating, raffish style.
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Superman’s new mission: to make the world “a bit nicer”
Might Lex Luthor be Elon Musk? Could Boravia be Russia? Or is it Israel? The latest DC superhero reboot isn’t…
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The Salt Path is Scientology for the middle classes
Fabrications and fabricators always find their marks.
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The picturesque picaresque of Barry Lyndon
Fifty years after it flopped at the box office, Stanley Kubrick’s 18th-century epic is now recognised as an outright masterpiece.
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Jurassic Park Rebirth is phoney and illogical
The seventh iteration of the dinosaur franchise leaves viewers feeling stupider and sadder the longer it goes on.
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A samurai lost in the wilderness
John Maclean’s revenge thriller Tornado showcases for Scotland’s beautiful landscape, but the film has little to say.
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Swiping left on Mr Darcy
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is too saccharine to reverse the slow death of the romcom.
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Ana de Armas’s licence to kill
This John Wick spin-off asks: what if women could shoot a gun too?
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Cinema’s apex predator
The Australian survival thriller Dangerous Animals is a long-overdue corrective to the sharks-as-man-eater genre.
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Picnic at Hanging Rock’s vision of girlhood
Peter Weir’s 1975 film, like Joan Lindsey’s original novel, understands that being a teenage girl is an experience full of…
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