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‘Marty Supreme’ Directed by Josh Safdie (R) ★★★★ The Timothée Chalamet movie that’s arriving on Christmas Day is “a 150-minute-long heart attack of a film,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In “a career-best turn” that’s “a feverish go-for-broke tour de force,” Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, an aspiring table tennis champ in 1950s New […]

“Brave” is an overused word in film reviews, said Wendy Ide in The Observer – applied to anything from an actor’s weight gain for a role to “an unconventional editing decision”. But Iranian director Jafar Panahi really is brave. His films have been acclaimed abroad, but at home they have put him at odds with […]

It’s the year’s last dying breath, which means holiday rush, travel stress and last-minute gift purchases. Two new December films are appropriately inspired by the turmoil of real events: one, a historical fiction based on Shakespeare’s life and the other, a fast-paced sports dramedy inspired by the career of an American table tennis player. This […]

‘The Secret Agent’ Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (R) ★★★★ “This is one of the year’s best films, and one of the most distinctive,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. An award winner at Cannes, the sixth feature from Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho is “a drama, a satire, an intriguingly laid-back espionage film, and […]

Rian Johnson’s detective series “Knives Out” is one of “the most likeable cinematic developments of recent years”, said Patrick Cremona in Radio Times. This “excellent” third instalment sees Daniel Craig return as the brilliant Southern super-sleuth Benoit Blanc, tasked this time with cracking an “impossible crime” that has left local police baffled. “Weirder”, “darker” and […]

It has taken nine years for Disney to follow up its animated blockbuster “Zootropolis”, said Helen O’Hara in Empire. Set in a metropolis populated exclusively by anthropomorphic animals, that film saw earnest rabbit cop Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) team up with sly fox con artist Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) to expose city-wide skullduggery. This sequel […]

“Marty Supreme” is the “best film of the year, and exactly the jolt the coming Oscars season needed”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. Timothée Chalamet stars as Marty Mauser, a “ping-pong prodigy” who “bounces frenetically around 1950s New York, as if being thwacked back and forth” by a pair of invisible bats. Working in […]

‘Hamnet’ Directed by Chloé Zhao (PG-13) ★★★★ The “violent beauty” of Chloé Zhao’s new film “rips your soul out of your chest,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. An adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, Hamnet proposes that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a response to the death from bubonic plague of the playwright’s similarly named young son, […]

The delights of the action movie continue to thrill audiences around the world, often transcending linguistic barriers with their sparring dialogue and universal themes of heroism, vengeance and justice. And while many other genres feature thrilling action sequences, including science fiction, horror and fantasy, these are among our new quarter-century’s best action films set in […]

‘Wicked: For Good’ Directed by John M. Chu (PG) ★★★ John M. Chu’s highly anticipated second installment of Wicked “delivers what we might call the ‘whew factor,’ as in: Thank goodness, he didn’t blow it,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. But the film also does more. After last year’s Part 1 “succeeded in wowing audiences,” […]

The term “narco” is derived from the culture of violent crime that grew out of Latin American drug cartels. As the U.S. cocaine and crack epidemics exploded in the 1980s and the government declared a “War on Drugs,” filmmakers began to train their eyes on those cartels, depicting the crime, tragedy and corruption that they […]

Director Gaby Dellal’s latest film is an enjoyable portrait of “two women sorting their dirty laundry during a crossroads in their relationship”, said Hilary White in the Irish Independent. Fiona Shaw is “typically resplendent” as Kit, a wealthy, glamorous widow living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side whose sophisticated world is turned upside down by a […]

It’s impossible to miss the similarities between George Clooney and his character in this terrific new film from Noah Baumbach, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. Jay Kelly is a “silvery film star in his early 60s who is recognised everywhere he goes”, and often accused of playing versions of himself. Jay Kelly looks like […]

“Even the staunchest defenders of ‘Wicked’, the stage musical about the tragic origins of The Wizard of Oz’s Witch of the West, would have to concede that it peaks just before the interval,” said The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin. So splitting the screen adaptation in two meant that the second instalment, the newly released “Wicked: For […]

The audacious 2025 robbery of The Louvre museum was so outlandish that it seemed like it was dreamt up by Hollywood screenwriters. And indeed, many of the most famous heist movies, like “Bonnie and Clyde,” are based on real events. But the enduring allure of the get-rich-quick scheme means that movies based on elaborate heists […]

Jay Kelly Directed by Noah Baumbach (R) ★★★★ George Clooney’s newest film is “the definition of a movie that goes down easy,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Clooney plays the title character, an aging, George Clooney– like movie star, and director Noah Baumbach brings “a great deal of care and affection” to the task of […]

The arrival of director Kathryn Bigelow’s highly anticipated nuclear war thriller “A House of Dynamite” (in theaters and on Netflix now) heralds the return of a long-forgotten genre: the cautionary tale about atomic Armageddon. Filmmakers over the years have explored nuclear war both from the perspective of the decision-makers and the survivors who may wish […]

Yorgos Lanthimos’ films (“The Favourite”, “Poor Things”) tend to feature characters who have “untethered themselves from reality and accepted behavioural norms”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Yet even by his standards, “Bugonia” is an “unhinged and savage piece of storytelling”. ‘Deliriously preposterous’ A remake of a cult South Korean film from 2003, it stars […]

Asif Kapadia made his name with a trilogy of “vivid” documentaries about major cultural figures, said Ed Potton in The Times: the racing driver Ayrton Senna, the footballer Diego Maradona and the singer Amy Winehouse. Now he has turned his lens on Kenny Dalglish. Kapadia is a Liverpool fan, so it makes sense that he […]

Bugonia Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (R) ★★★ “If Emma Stone didn’t exist, some of her movies couldn’t exist—especially not the ones she’s created with edgy director Yorgos Lanthimos,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. The two-time Oscar winner “can play shrewd, silly, gorgeous, repellent, frail, and frightening simultaneously,” and she hits all those […]

Writer-director Kelly Reichardt is “versatile” but also “consistent”, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times. Whether her films are about a homeless woman searching for her dog (“Wendy and Lucy”) or eco-activist saboteurs (“Night Moves”), they are all, one way or another, “about the American Condition”. Her latest one is set in Massachusetts at the […]