Jonathan Romney

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Los Angeles Times, Screen Daily, The Guardian, The Observer (UK)
For 297 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jonathan Romney's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 72
Highest review score: 100 The Other Side of the Wind
Lowest review score: 30 Woodshock
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 217 out of 297
  2. Mixed: 76 out of 297
  3. Negative: 4 out of 297
297 movie reviews
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    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Romney
    Fatherland
    Alongside its verbal and intellectual content, Fatherland is immersively evocative, genuinely making us feel as if we are visiting the two Germanies in 1949.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Colours of Time
    Colours of Time nudges its audience a little heavily, if cheerfully so, with its historical references, and self-confessedly (as per an end title) plays fast and loose in its accuracy, but is genially inventive in messing with the codes of period cinema.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    A Magnificent Life
    It feels like a gorgeous, decidedly dewy-eyed heritage hagiography.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Dreams
    A story which might seem the stuff of high melodrama is given a very different charge by Franco’s characteristic rigour – an uninflected cleanness and clarity in Yves Cape’s cinematography, and a minimum of narrative frills, driving the narrative towards a conclusion that is one of this director’s starkest yet.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Holding Liat
    Holding Liat is an emotionally rich, politically thought-provoking account of one Israeli-American family’s ordeal in the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)
    Landmarks may not strictly be the film that admirers of Martel’s formal radicalism have been waiting for: notwithstanding some eccentricities, it is a relatively conventional work. But it’s very much from the heart, and from the political conscience – a critique of colonial history and the enduring abuse of power in Argentina.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    What Does That Nature Say to You
    What Does That Nature Say To You may be a touch disappointing for lovers of the director’s wry understatement, as certain themes feel uncharacteristically emphatic and even, in a last-act discussion scene, too explicitly stated. Otherwise, a group of regular Hong players mesh with seemingly effortless grace in a way that is bound to click with fans and with the director’s regular international outlets.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Silent Friend
    While the three sections don’t tie up narratively, nor strictly conclude as such, they leave plenty of ideas in their wake – and a multitude of entrancing images.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Romney
    A House of Dynamite
    Precision-tooled, ambitious in scale yet bracingly concise, this is Bigelow’s boldest and most assured film yet.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    The Wizard of the Kremlin
    A screenplay dense with incident and ideological discussion is carried efficiently by fast-moving, sleek direction and sumptuous mise en scene that catches the tone of a changing society and its sudden explosion of capitalist excess. Yet it never quite comes to life as a character sketch.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    La Grazia
    What gives the film its emotional continuity is a commandingly downbeat performance from Servillo.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    The Blue Trail
    The Blue Trail is entrancingly unpredictable in its picaresque unravelling, tinged with magical realist touches.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Yes
    The result is bound to offend on a wide scale, but also exhilarate with its sheer rage and ebullient aggression. Not for the faint-hearted, and certainly not for fans of Israel’s political status quo, Yes promises to stir very heated debate.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Enzo
    Enzo makes a low-key but resonant coda to Cantet’s work, while thematically also being highly consistent with Campillo’s directorial output.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Two Prosecutors
    Two Prosecutors is crisply fable-like in construction.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Sirât
    Laxe maintains rising tension throughout, although to frustratingly inconclusve effect and somewhat at the cost of conventional dramatic satisfactions, but the boldness of the undertaking will appeal mightily to cinephiles hungry for movies that take real risks.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Last Swim
    Ziba is a genuine intellectual heroine, and Hekmat conveys a sense of how her introversion and seriousness might set her apart in a hedonistic high-school culture.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    When Fall Is Coming
    With a terrific lead from screen and stage veteran Hélène Vincent, this is Ozon in his fine-wine register, but with acerbic notes.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Kontinental '25
    This story of a guilt-ridden bailiff ostensibly resembles conventional social realism but then broadens its scope fascinatingly, foregrounding satirical intent and a mischievous degree of verbal overload.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Peter Hujar's Day
    The result is an undemonstrative but rich contemplation of memory, time and – as shown by the shifting nuances of expression on Rebecca Hall’s face – the pleasures of simply giving someone your undivided attention.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Love
    With contemplative slow pacing that is leisurely rather than laborious, and Cecilie Semec’s clean, luminous camerawork equally making the most of Oslo’s harbour area and the cast’s characterful, attentive faces, Love is a drama about choice, chance and the carpe diem imperative, especially in the face of illness and emotional distress.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    From Ground Zero
    A 21-film anthology on everyday life under bombing in Gaza, From Ground Zero offers a vivid range of insights into the daily challenges faced by civilians, particularly valuable given the restrictions on news reporting there.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Daaaaaalí!
    Daaaaaalí! is less about Dalí himself, more about the difficulty of capturing his mercurial essence.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Afternoons of Solitude
    Its immersive intensity makes it essential viewing for Serra followers, and for anyone interested in documentary’s ability to record, and make us think about, the extremes of the real world.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Romney
    Hard Truths
    Following his hugely ambitious period productions Mr Turner and Peterloo, the director returns to what might be considered the quintessential Leigh mode of tightly-framed domestic drama, and does so with exceptional bite.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Youth (Homecoming)
    Wang’s brutally revealing trilogy presents a challenging statement about working-class life, urban and rural, and urges us to think about economic exploitation and the nature of labour in the globalised world.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Apocalypse in the Tropics
    Her film definitely offers a chance to look more closely not just at the political condition of Brazil but, by extension, at the rise of far-right populism worldwide.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Youth (Hard Times)
    Hard Times, as the name title suggests, is not an easy film to watch, nor is it intended to be.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Pavements
    At once a documentary about the band and its recent live reunion, and a fictional embroidery around its status (and missed opportunities), Pavements is a joyous, slyly subversive celebration that, while unlikely to persuade newcomers to the music, nevertheless catches the band’s wayward spirit, as well as the downright ordinariness that came as an alternative to the bloated rock band ethos.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    The Room Next Door
    For a story which ponders on late-life exhaustion and loss of curiosity and pleasure, The Room Next Door strikes a defiant blow against ennui, staking out new territory for the director.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    The Brutalist
    The Brutalist is defiantly its own kind of construction, but longueurs and narrative inertia make it not quite the resounding statement it aspires to be.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    The Order
    As for Law – sporting a bristling moustache and some girth that evoke the weariness that Husk must fight in himself – he gives a sometimes warm, sometimes commandingly irascible performance that shows this actor moving confidently into middle-career authority. He and Hoult’s icy-eyed adversary combine to somewhat mythical resonance; a wrestle-with-the-demon duo that actually fits the political context to pointed effect.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice may not be that fresh or substantial – it’s basically comfort food for long-term Burton fans – but it’ll be hard for viewers to repress a pleased smile, or graveyard rictus.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Mexico 86
    Mexico 86 offers Béjo a substantial, compelling lead; it shows the Argentinian-born star absolutely at ease in a Spanish-language role, and using her characteristically low-key performance style to potent effect.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Starve Acre
    If Starve Acre seems to walk on well-trodden ground, Kokotajlo is nevertheless adept at inhabiting and revitalising the material. Familiar themes and moods haunt the film with their own uncanny insistence.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Misericordia
    This might suggest that Misericordia is ultimately a film with a message, and a more solemn one than we’re used to with Guiraudie. But any apparent clarity should be taken with a pinch of salt, the film’s meanings shifting as constantly as the erotic drives between the various male (and occasionally female) characters.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    The film is uneven: gripping when it maps out psychological stresses in a claustrophobic domestic setting, less so in the final stretches when it incongruously morphs into a women-in-peril thriller.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Grand Tour
    A hypnotic and inventive Asian odyssey ... The viewer may not know exactly where Gomes and his characters are headed, but the journey is pursued with wit, imagination and intelligence, and delivers oblique insights about the way we see the world and history.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Rumours
    Rumours doesn’t quite maximise the potential of its incongruous encounter between the living dead and the great and good, or between urbane boardroom satire and psychotropic freakiness. What sustains it, though, are the performances, performed with relish by an ensemble cheerfully riffing on national stereotypes.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Limonov: The Ballad
    Certainly the film comes across in its revved-up, fragmented, ramshackle way as a modern Russian epic – with Limonov as a unique anomalous individual, yet at the same time somehow exemplifying the contradictions and neuroses of a tormented modern nation. He also comes across as a human, flawed figure, self-aggrandising, self-pitying, sometimes helplessly romantic.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Armand
    The film starts by promising a bourgeois social drama about secrets and lies, suspicions and rivalries, and the troubled waters of juvenile and adult sexuality. What it ultimately becomes is much harder to define, but the result is resonant and haunting – and should spark plenty of post-screening discussions.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Oh, Canada
    Amid the formal fluidity, the forceful acting keeps us hooked.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    The Show
    Exuberant as it is, The Show treats its basic premise earnestly enough not to come across as merely spoofy. And there’s some considerable wit in the script.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    At Averroès & Rosa Parks
    At Averroès & Rosa Parks, which premiered in Berlinale Special, is a tougher watch than its predecessor, but an extremely accomplished and compelling work.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    A Traveler's Needs
    The newness is subtle and gently perplexing, but very satisfying indeed.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    No Other Land
    A documentary that is particularly urgent and eye-opening in the context of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Small Things Like These
    Murphy’s performance, Tim Mielants’s controlled direction and subtle emotional heft combine to make this low-key adaption of Claire Keegan’s Booker-nominated 2021 novella very much a proposition to be reckoned with.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Veni Vidi Vici
    Overall, though, the stylistic consistency and sustained chill of the black comedy make for a satiric focus far keener than, say, the farcical overkill of Triangle Of Sadness.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Evolution
    Emotionally intense and visually arresting, Evolution is rewarding viewing for those willing to enter its austere territory, but the technical virtuosity leaves it on the edge being perceived as of something of an academic exercise. It’s a film easier to admire rather than whole-heartedly engage with.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Ex-Husbands
    With a vibrantly charming lead from Griffin Dunne, and enough melancholic worldly wisdom to leaven the humour, Ex-Husbands is an accessible, ostensibly lightweight offering but one nevertheless carried off with expertise, intelligence and empathetic insight.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
    This magisterially simple version of a celebrated stage warhorse is a steely, no-nonsense final chapter to Friedkin’s career, as well as a stately farewell to cast member Lance Reddick, who died in March, and to whom the film is dedicated.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Coup de Chance
    Coup de Chance is not a major reinvention, but it does have more spirit and joie de vivre than anything Allen has done in a while. A sharp, lively cast shows that he is actually rather good at directing in French, and the stars seem accordingly to be having a good time in this light comedy that takes an unexpectedly dark turn.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    The Beast
    Each of the film’s three strands has its own dramatic flaws and virtues. But what is most intriguing is the way that the stories are braided, both in editor Anita Roth’s intercutting and in the establishing of visual parallels.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    The Killer
    The Killer is a masterfully engineered piece. Throughout, Fincher pitches his own methodical control against The Killer’s, but also signals the glitches in his protagonist’s logic and flawed self-knowledge.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Romney
    Poor Things
    Even as the film sails insouciantly into a rarefied imaginative stratosphere of its own, it’s anchored to emotional reality by a dazzling performance by Emma Stone – if anything, outdoing her revelatory turn in The Favourite.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Medusa Deluxe
    Whether Medusa Deluxe quite convinces us that it needed to be a one-shot exercise, it’s carried off niftily — the electric performances, from a super-alert, bristling cast, giving a feel of live event to the action, framed in Academy ratio.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    In Our Day
    Narratively spare ... Less substantial and approachable than Hong’s 2022 features The Novelist’s Film and Walk Up, the fragile, fragmentary In Our Day won’t earn Hong any new fans, but avid followers will enjoy its elusive felicities and love puzzling over its enigmatic gaps.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    The Animal Kingdom
    The Animal Kingdom sets itself up as a brooding chiller, jump scares, freaky coups de cinéma and all, but gradually shifts gear to become more poetic and tender.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    The Old Oak
    An intimate but ambitiously mounted ensemble piece, The Old Oak ranks among Loach’s foremost state-of-the-nation dramas.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Anselm
    Anselm is a portrait of eminent German artist Anselm Kiefer, exploring the man’s spectacular – and often spectacularly sombre – work. Wenders also delves into Kiefer’s biography and his political, historical and literary interests, which chime with the director’s own long-term fascinations to make this arguably the director’s most personal – and certainly most German – film in some time.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Youth (Spring)
    The result is the depiction of a seemingly sealed-in, quasi-carceral world, revealing how much China’s current economy – after decades, and multiple phases, of Communism – is now built on old-school sweatshop capitalism, with youth a readily available, and very disposable, commodity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Perfect Days
    For all its poetic charm, this is a slender work that comes across as something of a ’mindfulness movie’, in a faintly self-satisfied vein.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Fallen Leaves
    Fallen Leaves may not set the film world on fire, but is guaranteed to cast a warm glow.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
    The do’s, don’t’s and don’t-even-go-there’s of contemporary dating have long been standard fodder for US indie cinema, but they rarely get dissected quite so tartly, or with such weirdly impassive wit, as in The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Homecoming
    Taut, no-frills execution – notwithstanding some gorgeous but altogether untouristic landscape photography by Jeanne Lapoirie – helps to foreground the performances poignantly and compellingly.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    May December
    Haynes makes intriguing work of subtly metafictional psychodrama in May December.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Romney
    The Zone of Interest
    The Zone of Interest is a challenging rather than conventionally provocative film but, by any measure, essential viewing and a work that will be a vital focus of discussion both in the cinephile world and beyond.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    De Humani Corporis Fabrica
    Some cinema hits you in the gut – this film places you right inside the gut, and while it’s not always a pleasant place to be, it’s a visit you’re not likely to forget.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Perpetrator
    It’s McKirnan’s unflappable performance and energetic humour that hold it all together.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    On the Adamant
    It’s clear that this one is waving a flag for the positive possibilities of an empathetic, culture-centred approach to mental care.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Tótem
    Tótem embraces chaos and bustle in an ensemble drama of a family living through crisis. This thematically rich piece offers a set of vivid character studies, while musing on life, death and time – largely from a child’s perspective.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything
    As Maria, Burow shines in a phenomenally demanding role that challenges us to tune in empathetically to a character whose actions and motives are rarely less than problematic, but are always limned with a fine brush.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Afire
    While, on one level, it seems to belong to international cinema’s increasingly prevalent strain of climate catastrophe dramas, on another it’s a brittle character piece, a comedy of social embarrassment with a dark and ultimately tragic undertow. Until, that is, a coda ties it off in another register entirely.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Suzume
    Suzume is hardly a film for all tastes, but is certain to thrill anime buffs across all ages and continents.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Disco Boy
    While Disco Boy doesn’t entirely weave all its threads to satisfying effect, the film crackles with ideas.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    The Adults
    The Adults is a gift to its actors, allowing them to explore the tensed-up taciturnity of emotional repression but also to go haywire with the voices and the crazily choreographed body language.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Small, Slow But Steady
    The film refrains from diagnosing or analysing – either Keiko’s psyche or her condition – but describes and evokes her world with subtle detached insight. It does so on a miniature scale that some might find frustrating or non-committal, but that allows director Miyake to give us Keiko in close-up, yet in a manner that’s scrupulously non-intrusive too.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Let It Be Morning
    The situation of Israel’s Arab population is treated with poised satirical acidity in Let It Be Morning, a film mixing social comedy with a touch of absurdism that, though rooted in real-world conflict, has distinct echoes of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Passages
    Its dramatic heft and its stars’ upfront audacity make it a sexy proposition in every respect.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Corsage
    At moments, however, the pacing treads a fine line between stately and somnolent. What consistently mesmerises, however, is the lead performance by Krieps.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Freedom on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
    Mixing often horrifying war footage with testimonies from a wide range of Ukrainians of varying ages, Freedom on Fire is an urgent, somewhat hectic, at times cluttered film – but that’s partly explained by the fact that Afineevsky has been able to assemble it so rapidly, only six months after the invasion began.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Tantura
    Tantura makes for a fascinating, troubling watch, although it doesn’t altogether come across as rigorously objective, given rhetorical touches in both music (ominous ambient drones, ironically boisterous kibbutz songs) and visuals (thriller-style close-ups of Katz’s cassettes playing, a pointed insert of a see-no-evil monkey statuette).
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Master Gardener
    For all the film’s provocations, both serious and mischievous, it’s a remarkably elegant, subtle piece.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Romney
    No Bears
    A complex work of novelistic density, this is among the boldest and most accomplished statements from one of the world’s exemplary filmmakers.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    The Banshees of Inisherin
    There’s more than a hint of other-worldly tragedy here, limned in parallel with the allusions to political conflict whose root causes no-one can quite remember.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Dos Estaciones
    Given that it’s about a tequila factory, Mexican drama Dos Estaciones is as sobering as they come – but it’s also a bracingly potent distillation of drama, psychological portraiture and passionate flouting of clichés, both national and sexual.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    The Blue Caftan
    The Blue Caftan is a keenly tuned, non-judgmental exploration of an enduring relationship that has thrived despite the stresses of conflicting desires and the pressures of social norms.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    We Met in Virtual Reality
    British director Joe Hunting has made a tender, affecting documentary about love, friendship and people finding a place where they can be themselves.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Burning Days
    By the time we reach a genuinely unnerving climax, Alper has pulled off something special – a film that works at once as a highly-charged suspenser, a savvy piece of tightly-enclosed world-building and a sharp critique of machismo, populism and their very tangible dangers.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Rodeo
    [Quivoron] emerges as a formidably kinetic director, who could easily have a career making pedal-to-the-metal action movies - although her way with character and deep-dive exploration of working-class subculture suggest that she is way too individual to take a straight generic path.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Romney
    Tori and Lokita
    Moving, politically committed and with an absolute ring of hard-researched reality, this is at the very least their finest since 2011’s The Kid With The Bike, and arguably one of their very best.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Stars at Noon
    The result – something like a female-fronted version of Antonioni’s The Passenger - isn’t likely to entirely satisfy anyone in either the arthouse or mainstream camps. But if taken as an oblique tropical reverie, the film definitely has pleasures to offer – not least an oddball but often riveting lead performance by Margaret Qualley.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    EO
    A potent emotional charge, very contemporary eco-consciousness, and film-making that at its best fairly sizzles in its strangeness mark out EO as an animal film that stands defiantly on its own hooves.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Human Factors
    This deviously constructed puzzle film plays cat and mouse (or to be exact, pet rat) with the viewer, yields subtly disconcerting insights into the fault lines of bourgeois life, and features terrific lead performances from Sabine Timoteo and Mark Waschke.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Jane by Charlotte
    This small, engaging film doesn’t offer much in the way of introduction to Birkin for non-initiates - there’s nothing about her acting career, for example. But for the devoted audience of a star who can – for once – genuinely be called an icon, the film offers a tender and quite illuminating portrait of a mother-daughter relationship seen both within, and far away from, the public sphere of celebrity.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Intregalde
    Muntean leads us into a playfully caustic realm of social satire, as his characters find themselves in unknown territory without either GPS or a clear moral compass.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    The Novelist's Film
    Some small-scale but surprising formal twists, and much playfulness, will keep his admirers happy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Rimini
    Michael Thomas’ imposing performance will be the hook for a film that, while executed with Seidl’s typical steely control, might strike his followers as being a touch too familiar – while non-adepts will find its darker dimensions altogether too bleak for comfort.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Peter von Kant
    Both homage and critique, Peter von Kant astutely gets under the skin of the lesbian-themed original, ekes out new resonances and proves both authentically Fassbinderian and altogether Ozonesque in its ironic sensibilities.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Romney
    Both Sides of the Blade
    Some viewers may find it hard to credit the emotional extremes on display here, which seem more to do with the codes of French psychological drama than with the way people might actually behave in real relationships. Indeed, Binoche has not always convinced in conventional terms when playing women in a psychosexual fluster. Nevertheless, it’s something that she specialises in, and she pushes that register a lot further here – and far more compellingly - than in Denis’s Sunshine.
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