Tara Brady

The dynamic between Bowser and his son, and the Frozen-like sisterhood between Peach and Rosalina, are jettisoned as quickly as they are introduced. Subplots remain half-formed. New additions – especially Glen Powell’s inexplicably underused Fox McCloud – barely register. The abrupt conclusion feels like an abandonment. At least it’s short.

The film attempts both an in-depth portrait of the late author and a scattershot meditation on the persistence of his ideas.

Taking its cues from those ancient remains, Rosi’s deserving Special Prize winner at Venice gifts us a pristine, durable snapshot of Naples.

Sorrentino supplies the occasional surreal house-style flourish – a drifting tear observed in zero gravity – but mostly the director leans into the quiet complexities of Servillo’s turn.

Working from a blackly comic script by Austin Kolodney, Van Sant fashions a shouty standoff in the tradition of Network and Dog Day Afternoon.

The Bard’s most famous creation may be many things, but Scarlet’s earnest moralising about empathy and collective responsibility feels more like Polonius’s vibe.

The director comes seriously close to re-creating the elegiac spell of In the Mood for Love, but, unlike Wong Kar-Wai’s film, the emotional core remains frustratingly out of reach.

What once felt coolly stylised now seems mannered, even silly. The cufflinks gleam from the heritage cosplay: the razor has dulled.

There are technical blips. Occasionally, the 3D character animation and frame-rate stutter in the margins. But the film’s approximation of temporal confines never leaves the viewer feeling stuck in a moment.

A bruising character study that challenges the audience to sift genuine catastrophe from psychic projection.

In Mendonça Filho’s slippery moral universe, revelation offers neither catharsis nor closure, only the squeamish knowledge that some nightmares end, and others are obscured by history.

Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s debut feature is a formally playful, gorgeously rendered, emotionally impactful adaptation of Amélie Nothomb’s autobiographical novella from 2000. Bring tissues.

The zingers could be zippier. But what makes the film feel radical is its welcome and unwavering confidence in 2D animation as a comedic anvil. Sight gags pile up, frames stretch and snap, and the fourth wall is wobbly. In a genre increasingly marred by CG realism, Looney Tunes revels in its cartoonish artifice.

Grief is seldom this entertaining.

My Father’s Shadow, which was coproduced by Element Pictures, is not a conventional political drama. Instead it quietly marries personal and national histories, offering a deceptively sprawling portrait of Lagos, a family and the fragile, frantic ways people try to hold on against tyranny.

For all its craft and atmosphere, this is folk horror that makes the ears twitch yet rarely raises goosebumps.

It makes no grand claims for itself, gesturing briefly at ethical complexity before pegging it towards efficient, blood-soaked mayhem.

The problem here is not insight but narrative stagnation. Too often H Is for Hawk confuses slowness with contemplation, repeating emotional beats and trumpeting parallels between Helen and Mabel.

The film never attains the Shakespearean-sized tragedy of the Korean director’s Decision to Leave or the bludgeoning impact of OldBoy.

As ever, Mustaine is unmistakably himself. The tunes are good, too. Godspeed, Megadeth.

[Hania] carefully sidesteps ethical questions about the use of performance alongside archival evidence with a clear-headed chronicle of a tragedy and of wider Palestinian suffering.

The chronological leaping around to pop tunes by Taylor Swift, Boygenius and Billie Eilish is the most interesting thing about Brett Haley’s sunny, saccharine film. The rest is flimsy.

It lacks the wild provocations of Schrader’s scalding recent trilogy, but Oh, Canada pokes and probes in quieter, sneakier ways.

At a moment when truth is increasingly relative, Cover-Up acknowledges the grim continuation of the state apparatus that Hersh first exposed in the aftermath of My Lai. Without journalists of his calibre, we’d be none the wiser.

This is a fond requiem from a Bowie fan, made with reverence for his art and respect for his privacy.

Wiseman has made films about bureaucracies, city halls and cabarets, but here the institution is pleasure itself. It’s a feast that will leave many viewers ravenous.

Whishaw’s performance is a theatrical masterclass in controlled ramble; Hall’s is the art of listening, with responses that range from concern to a slightly cocked head. Their chemistry enlivens the most throwaway anecdote.

Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man may be the most chilling film of 2025, not simply because of the notoriety of Julian Assange, its subject, but also as a clinical exposé of the elaborate machinery of state power, media hostility and private opportunism.