gsygsy

Tense, occasionally exhausting but always engaging revenge drama envisaged and realised by the ever-excellent Dev Patel, here making his auspcious directorial debut. If you enjoy the films he references, in particular the John Wick quadrilogy, you'll love this.

Patel the director pushes Patel the actor, always a sympatthetic presence on screen, into finding hidden reserves of rage. I remember watching him reaching for anger in a scene in Armando Ianucci's adaption of DAVID COPPERFIELD, and feeling that it didn't sit easily with Patel, that fire was not his element. I no lnoger have those doubts. Here in MONKEY MAN he explodes, burns, blazes, smoulders. One helluva performance.

The supporting cast are terrific, a wonderful collection of larger-than-life character actors. The villiany is split between Sikandar Kher's vicious, corrupt cop and. Makarand. Deshpande's serpentine baba, both very hissable.

Maybe it's over-edited, maybe the mystic elements won't be to everyone's taste, but the photography (Sharone Meir) is full of invention and the score (Jed Kurzel) is superb.

I can say with confidence that DUNE:PART TWO is neither better nor worse than Part One. Visuals are impressive. Writing is dismal. The actors do what they can. Austin Butler is welcome as the psychotic villain -- the villains, as so often in these epics, get the most bang for the buck. Non scenery-chewers tend to come off worse, but somehow Rebecca Ferguson and Zendaya emerge from it all as people you might bump into -- quite an achievement in Ms Ferguson's case, given how ludicrous her role is. Timothee Chalamet, in spite of his essential gentleness and small frame, is able to dig deep and bring out a Shakesperean actor's energy when he needs to, which is just as well, as he does need to here. The whole project is mired in dismal quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo, permitting the kind of mentality that luxuriates in conspiracy theories and is turning our planet into an impossible place to navigate. It is, literally, unhealthy.

This is a tough-talking film, following its own logic to the most chilling ending I can remember in any movie ever. Blaga's troubles and the choices she makes to solve them are charted with crystal-clear, dispassionate directing, photography, writing, editing and acting -- this last in a tour-de-force by Bulgarian veteran Eli Skorcheva. There's tremendous power in the control of pace exerted by.director-cowriter Stephen Komandarev. I don't remember seeing anything quite like this before. Blaga's dilemma is the kind of thing the Coens might create, but their tone would never be as real-world as this is. The question the film puts is: would we behave any differently to Blaga in the circumstances in which she finds herself?

The book this film is based on was published in 2001, yet, as AMERICAN FICTION points out with wit and weary melancholy, here we are in 2023 with nothing much changed as far as mass-marketing of African-American identity. The script is sprightly, with interweaving narratives and metanarratives, with the central character writing a story within a story, which soon develops into a film within a film. That sounds as though it might be pretentiously arty, but it isn't at all. It's often very funny. But because there is a central story of great poignancy, led tenderly by Leslie Uggams, as the protagonist's mother, and Myra. Lucretia Taylor as her longtime help and friend, the movie as a whole is less daunting, and therefore perhaps less challanging, then a piece by, say, Charlie Kauffman, who might have been much more astringent with the same material. So, less austere than it might have been, but intelligent all the same, compassionate and entertaining. The cast is excellent throughout. Jeffery Wright, who is a wonderful actor, really ought to get an Oscar nomination for his work in the central role, but the Academy never recognises fine acting in anything other than Grand movies. This is simply a good movie.

An emotional rollercoaster of a film charting the journey of two young Senegalese cousins as they cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean to find their fortune in Europe. It gives the lie to those who demonise, to advance their political ambitions, such migrants. Technically, the film is astonishing, especially notable for Paolo Carnera's superb cinematography and. Marco Spoletini's sensitive editing. Everyone in the large, mainly non-professional, cast is superb, with a massive shout-out to Seydou Sarr, who finds himself as the eponymous captain. Director and co-writer Matteo Garrone, a great filmmaker, has delivered another masterwork.

This is one of the weakest movies I have seen in quite a while. It exhibits the worst faults of a biopic, with none of the compensatory pleasures. It contributes nothing to our understanding of the challenges faced by successful, celebrated people, instead trotting out clichés that go back at least as far as the 1940s. Career-obsessed husband, long-suffering wife, wealth,jealousy. We can safely feel superior, in this day and age in societies likely to screen this movie, that Bernstein's bisexuality can be addressed. In fact, it's pretty much the only thing that's addressed in Maestro. The trajectory of Carey Mulligan's Felicia Montealegre (Mrs Bernstein) is one of acceptance to rejection to acquiescence which, however reactionary that may be politically, at least gives this otherwise spineless piece of work a little spine, and enables me to give the movie one star for Ms Mulligan's performance.. I should really award another for make-up maven Kazu Hiro's remarkable work in transforming Mr Cooper face, but the realism in that department didn't spill over into the performance as a whole. Here, as in A Star Is Born, Mr Cooper is attracted to characters with gravitas, but he isn't able to convey that quality at all. We watched the remarkable Michael Fassbender in a movie the other night: he is someone who is what Orson Welles called 'a king actor'. Bradley Cooper, notwithstanding his many gifts, isn't that.

Nor do his talents seem to extend to writing. He's credited as co-author on this project, so therefore half-responsible for the toe-curling sections of thudding name-drops, the embarrasing lines uttered by almost everyone, and the lack of investigation of Bernstein as a political animal. Tom Wolfe's infamous essay about the Bernsteins hosting a party for the Blank Panthers is noticeable by its absence. Indeed, the environment is spectacularly white. There's a Latino housekeeper who has little to say, an African-American student who Lenny takes a shine to. Of course, the world in which he moved was indeed overwhelmingly white: the point is, he was sensitive to it, aware of it. Omitting this side of him to focus on the domestic is a valid artistic choice, I concede that; but to realise that artistic choice in the behind-every-great-man-is-a-woman trope does no service to anyone involved, including the audience.

Cooper the director makes puzzling and irritating decisions as far as camera positions are concerned. The most puzzling is fliming the climactic confrontation between the Bernsteins in an unchanging two-shot, as if it were a scene in a play. The result is uninvolving, cold. And there are lots of meaningless shots of the countryside, and the huge estate that, naturally, the Bernsteins owned. If you've got it, flaunt it, right? That's the American Way.

Trite, dismal, pretentious. Don't waste your money.

Michael Fassbender is a first-rate actor. It's always good to see him on screen. But even he can't save this one. I guess the point might be to get us to appreciate the dissonance between The Killer's philosophical voice-overs and the numerous obstacles that he has to overcome to even get close to the position that philosophy outlines, but even as played by Fassbender, with all his charisma, his skill, his sheer sexiness, the guy is such a bore I kept urging the credits to roll. There are a couple of excellent scenes -- a protracted fight between Fassbender's Killer and Sala Baker's Brute; a sort of bravura act-off between Fassbender and Tilda Swinton -- and a couple of notable supporting performances from Kerry O'Malley and Charles Parnell. But on the whole, I felt the whole enterprise was a waste of time, talent and money.

There's a lot to enjoy in this movie. It's well-paced, beautifully presented in terms of production design and cinematography, Barry Keoghan in dazzling in the leading role, and he is well supported by, among others, Jacob Elordi. Archie Madekwe, Alison Oliver and Richard E. Grant. Rosamund Pike, putting her essential chilliness to good use, is surprisingly amusing. But there are few other surprises as we tread through the familiar world of the English upper class and its pampered progeny. Taking a sort of semi-critical stance, writer-director Emerald Fennell summons up the memory of a number of films that examine the British class system. Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Servant, The Go-Between, The Hireling...I even caught a whiff of the very obsure American film Black Flowers for the Bride. I can't work out whether or not Ms Fennell thought she was on to something new. If she did think so, she was clearly mistaken.

A towering achievement. The grandeur of the film's structure reveals itself in a powerful scene towards the end, to which the whole, carefully-paced, brilliantly-acted edifice has been leading. Not a minute too long, not a detail too small. I love Scorsese's work. This seems to me to be his crowning glory. Maybe it's got something to do with the fact that for the first time there is a female character who is as important to the story as the males who are usually the centre of attention. Lily Gladstone is mesmerising, easily holding her own opposite Leonard DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. Superb supporting players include Jesse Plemons and Tantoo Cardinal. Photography, editing, music...great. All at the service of a sorry tale, around a century ago, of avarice, duplicity and self-deception. The world, unfortunately, hasn't changed that much.

A languidly-paced, portentous, self-consciously arty franchise movie. It borrows heavily, as so many of these do, from Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER and David Fincher's SE7EN. It has a high-calibre cast. But it also has Robert Pattinson.

How to explain Mr Pattinson's career? Here, in THE BATMAN, we have several superb actors. Paul Dano, John Turturro, Colin Farrell, Jeffrey Wright, Peter Skarsgaard, Andy Serkis...I hope there won't be anyone who doubts the excellent quality of that bunch. In movie after movie, they have proved their artistic worth. Zoe Kravitz hasn't had such a long career as those other guys but she is classy in this film and easily able to hold her own with them. And remember that this is a genre film, which brings its own problems for performers. As likely as not, they're going to have to speak convincingly many ridiculously melodramatic lines of dialogue. THE BATMAN is packed with such wannabe profundities, usually whispered in an attempt to disguise their banality. All the above-mentioned actors use their considerable skills to help us forget how hokey is so much they have to say. That's certainly one sign of a quality thesp.

However, in the leading role here, that perpetual knitwear model Mr Pattinson wanders around looking haunted without ever commuicating that there's anything at all going on behind the eyes. I've seen a lot of his films, not because I've wanted to see him in them, but because something else has drawn me to them and he happens to be there. Clare Denis' HIGH LIFE is an example. She makes interesting movies, but for some reason she chose Pattinson to be in that one, as did Antonio Campos for his THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME, in which Tom Holland rose to the challenge of conveying a complex character who goes on a tortuous psychological journey. Mr Pattinson took the role of a drunken preacher. A peach of part for an actor. Something to grab, something to chew the scenery with. Pattinson meandered through it as if it were catwalk show. To be fair, he rose to the challenge of Robert Eggers' THE LIGHTHOUSE, but I have a theory about that, which you can share if you read my review of that remarkable flim.

Anyway, here, our eponymous Batman, is Robert Pattinson, not a good actor. How does he get these wonderful parts? Is it because of his huge success with the TWILIGHT series, in which he had little to do but pose, and which, like Zoolander, is something he knows how to do? His name attached to a film brings his TWILIGHT fans with him, like casting Daniel Radcliffe guarantees a movie the worldwide Potterhead community. Radcliffe, like Pattinson, is not a good actor, and like Pattinson has been given many acting challenges because from a producer's point of view there's reduced financial risk for such projects than there might be due to the adoring fans. Baffling. I can't understand why, with so many wonderful actors out there, even artistically ambitious directors (it's debatable whether Matt Reeves is one of those) put their faith in the Pattinsons, the Radcliffes and the Emma Watsons. They may be lovely people, for all I know, but, honestly, they are not good actors.

So, THE BATMAN is ok, as such films go. But it would have been a whole lot better with a proper actor in the lead.

Magical Egotism is the current vogue in American non-franchise moviedom. Leading practitioners are David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, Noah Baumbach....and now the old hit-maker Steven Spielberg proves himself a master of the genre. This blancmange of a film is redeemed in part by Michelle Williams' remarkable performance and an all-too-brief one by Judd Hirsch. Otherwise, it's tooth-rot.

Spielberg's great talent is for genre movies, so he should be on firm ground here. But the sad fact is that any time he touches anything even remotely serious, there is a whiff of fakery that, in some of his work, becomes a stench.

It's some irony that in this movie, his alter-ego Sam Fableman assesses his early attempt at an 8mm adventure as 'Fake!'. That is THE FABLEMANS.

This film affected me powerfully. My childhood was overshadowed by a volatile father of whose potential for violence we lived in fear. He wasn't a drunk, so, compared to many who lived and live in such circumstances, I guess I got off lightly. But my mother didn't. And this is what WOMEN TALKING suddenly brought back to me. The helplessness of her situation, at a time when divorce was hard to get unless you had money, and even then carried a shroud of shame.

On the day I write this, the Taliban in Afghanistan have banned women from universities. A woman's life in that country is structurally little different from that lived by the women depicted in Sarah Polley's film. It may have a period setting, but it could be many women's lives today.

WOMEN TALKING counterpoints beautiful expanses of farmland with unspeakable cruelties. Hymns are sung to help down howls of pain. The ensemble cast, which includes a couple of stunning performances by theatre veterans Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy, as well as several newcomers, is superb.

Excellent, urgent, important, unmissable.

I really should give this movie.9/10, docking a mark for a certain photographic self-indulgence of the Terrence Malick variety. It's debatable as to whether or not the extensvie coverage of the beautiful scenery, lovingly shot by DOP Ben Davis, helps or hinders the film. But, in the end, it is no inconvenience to drink it all in, as the sad story of a failed friendship is played out against the backdrop of an indifferent natural world.

So, it's 10/10 for a masterpiece of writing, superb performances, and -- except for those minor Malickisms, tactful and sensitive direction.

As the Irish Civil War blasts and rages on the mainland, different kinds of struggle take place in the lives of four islanders. The emotional journeys are charted with exceptional compassion and skill by Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Kerry Kondon and Barry Keoghan. Farrell in particular, in the role of a lifetime, moves believably and poignantly from skin to stone in the course of couple of unforgettable cinematic hours:

The supporting cast boasts several treats, my favourite being the venerable Sheila Flitton, enjoying herself hugely as Mrs McCormick, one of those people we go out of our way to avoid.

A missed opportunity if ever there was one. The story of the so-called Business Plot is serious, especially for Americans in the MEGA era. Yet David O. Russell decides it is worthy of a confectioner's approach, emphasising romance and whimsy.

Having said that, the romance and whimsy, if you can bear them in truckloads, are well enough handled. The cast, except for an anaemic cameo by Taylor Swift, is full of big hitters. Christian Bale seems to be playing Willem Dafoe, but he does so with his trademark transformational bravura: I doubt there's a more genuinely versatile Hollywood A-lister around right now. John David Washington, Margot Robbie and Zoe Saldana give the movie much needed warmth, Robert De Niro brings his unique authority to his role of a top military man; and there's solidly eccentric support from Remi Malik, Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough, Michael Shannon and Mike Meyers.

Technically, it's rather self-conscious. Emmanuel Lubezki's camera swoops and dances around Judy Becker's largely studio-set production design, to the accompaniment of Daniel Pemberton's innocently piping score. It's the make-up department, for which Russell provides some real challenges, which proves to be the film's greatest asset.

Well written, beautifully directed and sensitively performed, this ends up being a deeply moving film. Director Colm Bairéad keeps his nerve as far as pacing is concerned, and as a result I expect there'll be some who find this too slow-moving for their taste. But stay with it. It's worth it.

I've never been the kind of moviegoer who wonders what happens to the characters after the film has ended, but it's difficult not to speculate in that way after The Quiet Girl's extraordinary final moments.

An excellent film that overcomes a hurdle that no other historical epic I'm aware of has managed, which is to find a unified style of acting which matches the intensity of the action. The obvious comparison is with THE VIKINGS, Richard Fleischer's grim 1958 effort; take any scene between any three actors, and they all might as well have been in different films. Robert Eggers, however, gets thrilling, gigantic performances from everyone in his cast, including some unlikely scenery-chewers such as Ethan Hawke and Nicole Kidman. What Eggers has realised is that to be in the same film as the fights and the scenery and the mythology, the actors have to give as much size to their characters as those other elements in order to be remotely believable. Full marks to the whole cast, but especially Alexander Skarsgård, who bears the brunt of the story on his broad shoulders.

Eggers' other triumph is that the point of view of his film is that of his characters. Because they are committed in such a big, emotional way to the rituals and visions and moral code, we are too. We might be repelled by it, but the world that is conjured up is so completely lived in that it's immersive for us. That's assuming it's seen at the cinema on a big screen -- a must for this film. It's completely pointless seeing it on your phone.

I read somewhere that Eggers is claiming that the film is some kind of critique of what is now being called toxic masculinity. If that is what he thinks, he's deluding himself. If THE NORTHMAN ends up with wannabe fascists drooling over it and using the hero Amleth as a role model, Eggers can hardly be surprised. I doubt whether the fate to which the character entruists himself will cause such people a moment's pause. Eggers and his team have made a brutally powerful, mythic movie.

Paul Thomas Anderson has written and directed so many excellent films that it saddens me to declare this one to be underwhelming, but that's the way it is. It feels like one, long in-joke masquerading as a coming-of-age movie. Lots of talent involved, including, fortunately, Alana Haim, around whom the movie seems to have been built, given the rest of her family play the rest of her character's family. That's all fine and funny. But there's something icky in the presence of Hollywood princes and princesses such as Cooper Hoffman, Willa Hoffman, Tallulah Hoffman, Sasha Spielberg, Dexter Demme. Not to mention Leonard di Caprio's dad. George. It's as if we're intruding on a home movie. Maybe that was the idea. If so, I'm surprised that Mr Anderson didn't realise how patronising that might seem.

There are minor joys in the bravura turns of Christine Ebersole, Tom Waits, Sean Penn and Bradley Cooper, though perhaps the last goes so over-the-top he's probably in orbit by now.

Come back soon, Paul Thomas Anderson, and bring us another good movie. We'll call this one a blip.

This is a self-consciously arty amalgam of Murakami short stories that might have been better derived from just one. As it is, the greatest pleasure is the film's travelog aspect, with three distinct sections set in contrasting parts of Japan. Most wearying is the way writer/director. Ryusuke Hamaguchi underlines the connections between the film's story and those of Chekhov's UNCLE VANYA and Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT, just in case we're too stupid to work them out for ourselves. In between these extremes of pleasure and irritation are lesser pleasures and irritations, which balance out in my case as wondering whether it's worth sitting through the film's lengthy runtime. There's a lot of "it's a masterpiece" going on out there, but for me it's too pleased with itself to be any such thing.

I've never seen anything quite like this film before. It is so truthful it could easily pass for a documentary about the life of young schoolchildren. But it is also as skilful a piece of storytelling as any mainsteam movie. Above all, it contains within it an unspoken but ever-present warning that , unless we're careful, we can end up fighting playground battles all our lives.

Genre-defying film in which the central character's status and intentions are continually in doubt. A fine achievement from director/co-writer Michael Pearce. Riz Ahmed, a massively impressive actor, adds another masterpiece to hang in his performance gallery. He is given brilliant support from the two young actors, Lucian-River Chauhan and. Aditya Geddada, who play his sons. Octavia Spencer is on hand to provide her unique blend of sensitivity and authority.

The film's major concern is demonstrating the limitations of the conventional models of masculinity, In this, it succeeds completely, thanks to Ahmed's magnificent range as an actor, able to give reality to every emotional twist and turn. Definitely worth seeing, probably more than once.

Most prison movies do not ackowledge the fact of same-sex love. Most prison movies go out of their way to ignore it. There are exceptions, such as Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), and the jail episode of Todd Haynes' portmanteau work Poison (1991). Grosse Freiheit rises above all of these by dint of its complete absence of sentimentality, the power of its performances, its complex but clearly-told time-frame, and its commitment to effectively portraying love in the hearts of otherwise lost souls. It carefully weaves imagery that would not be out of place in a novel into the story of Germany's incessant persecution of homosexual men, which only stopped when the hated paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code was reformed in 1969.

The film runs on three time lines, in the three decades during which the central character, Hans Hoffman, finds himself in jail for pursuing his desires. Production design and, especially, make-up and costume, work with enormous tact but great effectiveness to conjure up each era. The structure of the film, its story-telling, is really beautifully put together.

There are really only four main characters, of which two are our main concern. They are played brilliantly by Georg Friedrich and, as Hoffman himself, Franz Rogowski, in as shattering a screen performance as you'll ever see.

The final section of the film is perhaps a little glib, but it's a very small flaw in an otherwise masterly movie.

Visually spectacular but woefully tedious, portentous, pretentious, pompous movie. A reminder to be wary every time a director says that it's been a lifelong dream to bring a particular project to the screen. The result is likely to be over-reverence, as we have here. The real villain is the source material, which was already old-hat in the 1960s and now feels painfully over-familiar. Its sticky religiosity separates it from its predecessors such as Asimov's 'Foundation' trilogy. However much George Lucas may have taken from Frank Herbert, by creating the character of Hans Solo he saved the Star Wars franchise from being humor-free. There isn't a smile to be had from DUNE. Not even an unintentional one.

As in all such epics, the actors who don't have to pretend to be real come off best. Fine talents such as Mr Chalamet and Mr Isaac, whose characters have 'journeys', do their best but inevitably flounder because of the drivel they have to speak. Simpler, two-dimensional figures, however, can give a well-cast performer something to chew on, and this proves to be the case with Stellan Skarsgård, barely recognisable as the villain, and Jason Momoa, who is touching as a valiant and loyal soldier.

Female characters rarely prosper in this latter-day Cecil B. De Mille style, so well done Rebecca Ferguson and Sharon Duncan-Brewster, who find ways to give the impression there might be life in the corpse of the genre.

I was going to say that there's too much noise and too much music. But on reflection I understand that they drown out a good deal of portentous, pointless dialogue.

Kudos to DOP Greig Fraser, production designer Patrice Vermette and their respective teams, who obviously worked tirelessly on creating all the worlds on display. But I'll never get back the two and a half hours I wasted on this nonsense. I resent it.

And, heaven help me, it's only Part One!

Well-written western, with an excellent central performance from Tim Blake Nelson as a farmer with more to him than meets the eye. Nelson is given top-flight support from Scott Haze and Stephen Dorff. I'm not so sure about the choice of Gavin Lewis, who plays Nelson's teenage son; he's less well cast, and feels urban in a way that the other actors in the cast don't.

It is a boy's night out, no question -- there aren't any female characters at all. Still, it's a nicely-made movie, carefully paced, with a tumultuous last reel.

Film adaptations of novels can be weighed down by their literary origins, but not this one. Thanks to Jane Campion's skills as a writer-director, this is cinema of the highest calibre.

A tale of dangerous repression and emotional manipulation, the tension in the telling is almost tangible. Campion achieves this without resorting to melodrama, but by sheer intensity. The quartet of leading actors is unbeatable, with revelatory performances from Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst. They are well matched by Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee, in less rangy but nevertheless demanding roles.

Campion has, as ever, brought the best out of her collaborators, notably cinemtographer Ari Wegner and editor Peter Sciberras. The magnificant score, a classic if ever there was one, is by Jonny Greenwood.

James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan are brilliant in this exploration of lockdown dynamics. Writer Dennis Kelly uses the camera, and therefore the audience, as a kind of silent therapist for the characters, a married couple who may be are or may be not at the end of their relationship. There are some bravura solos and duets, carefully charted by director Stephen Daldry. The whole thing is both highly artificial and entirely natural, a real triumph for all concerned. I had a couple of reservations about one of Horgan's monologues -- the writing, not the performing -- in that it felt a bit more like a newspaper column than a speech, but that apart I was grateful for the sheer quality of what I was watching. It's a relief to be treated as an adult.