Mark Asch

After so many punishing stories, most recently 2022​’s Tori and Lokita, it’s hard to begrudge them the raw sentiment and mostly happy, hopeful endings of their newest one. But it comes too easy, in a film so artfully and opportunistically structured, which jumps from dramatic peak to dramatic peak as if skipping tracks on an album.

Seidi Haarla gives a winning, intelligent performance as a naturally very clever person made to feel small and helpless in a strange land. But Yuriy Borisov pops from the first moments you see him: his hunched-shoulders posture; his abrupt, agitated movements and boxer’s duck-and-weave walk; the animalistic way he tears into food, impatiently and avidly.

After the self-contained and simmering Assistant this feels like Green’s attempt to make similar material more accessible.

It’s a rosy, adoring view of pubs and clubs as explicitly, perfectly Marxist – a coal country – accented chorus rising in a single voice to inspire us all to a more perfect union.

Like Imitation of Life, The Last Showgirl treats high-gloss femininity as a form of false consciousness, an ideal imposed upon women that ends up alienating them from each other, particularly mothers from their daughters.

This is simply a generic and brutally efficient tearjerker – like its title, it aspires to archetypal grandeur and lands somewhere blander.

Sono has flow to spare, but samples heavily from icky fanboy culture.

As an awards-bait biopic, Christy is basically solid; as another chapter in the star text of a soon-to-be-28-year-old woman basically no one on the internet can ever be normal about, it’s interesting – and also, given the entrepreneurial Sweeney’s social-media savvy, quite a canny bit of positioning.

Without the captivating veneer of fiction, Stone’s “JFK Revisted: Through The Looking Glass” comes off as a much more rhetorically dishonest work. And without the brio of Stone’s highbrow-Sam Fuller imperial-phase filmmaking chops, it’s merely a wan appendix.

The scenes of Jennifer’s childhood are endless montages, with repetitive blown-out happy-families memories and blatant Terrence Malick ripoffs of the same hand caressing the same strands of wheat from several different angles, and the whole thing is tied together with pretentious and solecistic voiceover delivered by Dylan Penn and surely written by her father as they laboured to salvage the movie in the edit.