Tim Robey

This comedy-drama with a surrealist edge is more than strong enough to be worthy of praise beyond Byrne, who is legitimately fantastic.

There’s no breakneck pace, no urge to pulverise the audience with action. Bart Layton’s film is methodical and moody – that mood being one of bone-weary fatigue. These are stuck lives, the products of bad luck and unfortunate choices

It’s very much the point of Athale’s screenplay that life was too short for such a grudge after the epic association these men had. By saying so, Giant hoists itself out of sports-biopic ordinariness and becomes really quite moving.

Seyfried reads the tone of this hokum better than anyone, and knows restraint is hardly called for, using every excuse in the book to go completely bananas.

Without a doubt, it gives us the oddest couple of the year in Alexander Skarsgård’s Ray and Harry Melling’s Colin. For that, and many other reasons, this fresh, funny and poignant pairing is one to be cherished.

The film has clout, vitriol and an impressive payload of blackly comic despair.

The energy, gruesome thrills and craziness of this flick are hard not to admire.

It’s quite cheeky that Cooper should swipe the biggest laughs himself in what he intends as a love letter to the New York comedy scene. Equally, though, the fact that he can’t resist being part of this sparring, riffing ensemble is an endearing indication of how much he adores it.

Roofman has heart, energy and personality fit to burst. If the cinema gods decided that it was finally time for Channing Tatum to have a chance at an Oscar nomination, they could hardly have equipped him better than with this role.

Fast becoming one of the most reliable character actors we’ve got, Strong gives a quietly heroic rendition of Landau which bolsters White’s performance beautifully.

The scenario is so familiar it could have been the same old story, but the texture of all this street life gives it rather a special shine.

As a feat of adaptation by Max Porter, from his 2023 novella Shy, it’s quite fascinating.

The film scores highly as a Highsmithian three-hander, and particularly excels at illuminating all the ways this trio have failed to grow up. It shimmers, convinces and thoroughly absorbs.

Chaves has become a skilful enough craftsman that he deserves parole to pastures new. Meanwhile, Wilson and especially Farmiga, who have lent gravitas to so much that’s profoundly trumped up and silly, can take a long-deserved bow.

None hold a candle to the main event: pulverising verbal jousts between two stars who can toggle between serious and silly like few others. Watching them cajole, manipulate and savage each other is effervescent bloodsport: you want neither to win, or the fun will stop.

Weapons manages to keep its powder dry – a feat of crafty editing by Joe Murphy – for a knockout finale that’s twisted, hilarious and savage, all at once.

It’s the opposite of a gateway horror for the trepidatious. It beckons in the brave.

Anyone interested in animation needs to pay attention to what these films are doing. The writing formula may be crude, but the whiz-bang aesthetic is sensational.

We’re stuck with Key, a stand-up virtuoso who is thankfully amazing playing a windbag who can’t read the room – a ludicrous ruiner of sunsets, or any other vaguely peaceful moment.

Ramsay’s main tour de force is with the Andrew-Wyeth-esque weirdness of the countryside: counting the insects buzzing on the soundtrack could make the viewer go insane. We’d be right there alongside Grace, whose rebellious freak-outs should be alienating – she hates the world – and yet thanks to Lawrence feel majestically raw from beginning to end.

It is carnage for connoisseurs. Nothing in the series so far can quite prepare you for the intricate sadism of these set pieces.

Novello again, in an underrated road-to-ruin melodrama, plays a public-school rugby champ disgraced when he takes the fall for getting a waitress pregnant. Visual experiments abound and there's a justly famous scene with the curtains of a Paris nightspot being pulled back, exposing its superannuated regulars to the unsparing sunlight. [14 Jul 2012, p.4]

What The Gorge does supply is a novel science-fiction premise and some captivating bursts of suspense.

Abbott, almost invariably good (we’ll forgive Kraven the Hunter), is perfect here: he gives us a guy striving too hard to be a great dad, unlike Blake’s own father, and neglecting the husband side of the equation.

The songs put Wicked to shame in every way. They cluster neatly around entwined themes: spreading your wings versus the tug of homesickness; finding your path but daring also to lose it. With a running time that brings us briskly ashore, the film is a grand voyage in miniature – a taster epic. Further feasts, if you stay seated for the end credits, are thrillingly promised.

The moral maze of the premise is tautly negotiated. Shrewd casting helps, as does Eastwood’s trump suit: a forensic seriousness of purpose. Grappling with the mechanisms of justice and the workings of a lone conscience, he puts both in the scales, and no one’s off the hook.

This makes a better case that she was the first model everyone found relatable.

It’s a film that exploration boffins will cherish most, but there’s plenty of grizzled male hardship here to engage fans of The Terror or The North Water. Unlike in those, you’re assured of at least one happy ending, too.

A Real Pain is a very welcome throwback to a type of indie comedy-drama that had all but disappeared. It manages to be ruefully perceptive and laugh-out-loud funny, often at the same time: that’s not easy. It also presents characters with issues we grow to understand, and doesn’t set about artificially “fixing” them: how refreshing.

Rightly treating the book as a new American classic, Ross doesn’t try to supplant it so much as do the best possible job of illustrating it: a deference to the source that makes his film a modest triumph.

Astutely judged for the most part, and reflective on what Reeve meant to people in all phases of his life, the British documentary Super/Man is an emotional rollercoaster with some undeniably walloping moments. The relationships that quite literally saved Reeve come to the fore.

Jackson inhabits the film beautifully, if more gently: in the role of peacemaker and sounding board, he’s the least pushy of all these performers, but finds the music in Wilson’s words and wastes none of it.

Re-entering Mike Leigh’s stomping ground in Hard Truths is both a solace and, in the best possible way, a slap in the face. It’s also an impressively funny ordeal, in that unmistakably morose way no one has ever mastered better than Leigh.

You needn’t have the faintest idea who Ilana Glazer or Michelle Buteau are. It’s enough that this pair of US comics spark and connect, hilariously, as two lifelong friends who complete each other’s sentences.

The film is thoughtful, tender and generally quite beguiling.

[Lhakpa's] resilience and sunny disposition light the film up, but it certainly shows a tough life, riven by conflicts, taking its toll.

Only about once every two or three years does a horror-thriller as good as Longlegs lope into view. It crackles with eerie dread. Nested away is perhaps the most terrifying performance of Nicolas Cage’s career – among the funniest, too.

Poignantly lyrical as a city symphony, it branches out for a sequel, when the characters abscond to the coast to figure out what to do: at once a respite and a reckoning, ghostly and mysterious.

Audiard’s trick is to make the overblown mélange into something amazingly confident – it’s clever, earnest, ridiculous, knowing, forceful and absolutely bonkers. It’s hard to believe he pulls it off, but he does.

It’s the casting of Moore, though, and her willingness to denude herself at 61 – emotionally, as well as physically – that gives The Substance a startling connection with its themes. Not for 30 years has she owned a film with anything like this certitude. Watching her confront the Demi Moore in the mirror, and do it so mercilessly, is extraordinary.

Cage commits, again, to his latest malcontent on the verge, without troubling himself with an Aussie accent in any way, which is classic Cage. It’s a performance that belongs quite high up in the canon.

It knows its audience and doesn’t waste time. It also heightens the fun with elaborate practical effects, rather than blitzing us with eye-tiring CGI any more than it must.

This is a film of piercingly perceptive moments, even if, as some say of Haneke's own work, it is cold to the core. [28 Dec 2001]

Franco is more skilled at getting us to think: not only about memory loss, but everything we choose to forget and can’t, and how these distinctions make us who we are.

Baker’s tingling delicacy of touch makes it a subtly distinctive experience: it’s a film I already looked forward to revisiting while tiptoeing through it the first time.

Keegan chose a man of few words to make his stand, and Murphy, very much the man of the moment, steps up to play him with a heroic understatement that could move mountains.

Given that this family-friendly confection looks, sounds and tastes a treat, you’d have to be fussy to quibble.

Society of the Snow is wrenching, deeply harrowing, but crucially dispenses with sappy takeaways about the triumph of the human spirit.

You couldn’t accuse the film of outstaying its welcome for even one of these 81 pristine minutes.

The film’s strength is its plainness and melancholy, as it sketches the history of a marriage – ardent, in times gone by, and still movingly dedicated.

Other directors might have escalated this into the zone of outright horror, with gory payback awaiting. Not Green, who has the level intent of keeping it chillingly real.

With her actors, Belo captures moments of staggering grief that are moving in their restraint: we deal, usually, with the stricken aftermath.

Camping out at the film’s doleful core is a very skilled Baruchel, so crestfallen and cowed as Lazaridis that to watch him is to feel the years ebbing away in virtual real time. Rise-and-fall stories so often gloat after the bursting of the bubble, but this one is all condolences.

The film is heroically unabashed about the power of love, expressed through extraordinary photography (by Jamie D Ramsay, who lifted Living), and a quartet of stars bouncing off each other to hit stratospheric acting highs. It shimmers, and it aches.

Nothing at the cinema this year has a hope of beating Past Lives for romantic delicacy, the cosmic yearning it puts into the three words, “I missed you.”

The film grabs your attention with verve, but also has a vision: it’s not mortal danger it finds freaky, but what’s waiting on the other side.

The sum total is superior in every way to what he dished out last time. With a third one openly teased at the end, the fog has lifted: Hemsworth has landed on his Bourne, and this is his Supremacy.

The further down the film descends, the more transfixing its images tend to get, as if Rohrwacher and Louvart have teamed up on an archaeological dig for their own treasures of texture and light.

Aatami is like some figure out of folk myth let loose on his persecutors, shaking off a ridiculous assortment of injuries between one set piece and the next.

Law is horribly good.

This whole film has a wizardry to it which you’ll be thinking about for days.

It’s about acting, denial, wrongdoing and the age of consent, but also about growing up, and the different ways we tread through that process, or fail to.

To call Fast X one of the most ludicrous action films ever made would be a borderline tautology for any instalment in the Fast and Furious franchise. But this one takes the cake.

Bessa’s contained fury goes haywire in this stretch, and brilliantly so: it’s a tour de force of social-realist acting to be notched up with the likes of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.

Suzume is perhaps Shinkai’s most spookily beautiful work to date, while remaining treasurably odd.

Even at practically Kubrickian length, though, the lockstep slaughter barely gives you pause for breath. It’s a barrage, and a blast.

This is Sachs’s eighth film and one of his best.

Reality transcends staginess as a strikingly well-realised piece of filmmaking, using judicious sound design and expressive lighting to gain a surreally vivid edge.

The film mounts its thesis while hardly needing to verbalise what’s going on: it mesmerises by reaching inside them to listen, even while others talk.

It's so rare in British cinema to see the "L" in "LGBTQ+" up there in such bold type, which makes Blue Jean not only a biting look at this historical moment but a riveting act of redress.

The endgame could be… sharper. There’s an elaborate hoax that’s too easy to suss out – even for us, and we’re not the seasoned con artists on the receiving end. At this point, the film’s own confidence seems to falter just a fraction. Then again, the chinks in these crooks’ cynical armour are what give it texture, a mottling of human desperation. Instead of smug gotchas, it traffics in mistakes.

From a premise of purest hokum, the Sixth Sense director wrings out an impressive amount of sweat – it's a real return to form.

Whatever one’s familiarity with this searing chronicler of lives on the margins, the film is riveting and essential.

Marketed cannily towards Gen Z – for her meme value is beyond compare – M3GAN is essentially the anti-heroine of a catnip horror film which tips far more towards the “campy fun” end of the spectrum than the raw terror end. No one will be quailing under their seats during her campaign of slaughter, but that was never the point.

Unashamedly rousing and immaculately crafted, The Swimmers is up there with Creed as a sports drama with more at stake than individual glory – a global-humanist purview to which it ascends without getting the slightest bit preachy.

Deadwyler does magnificent work in it, making bold, risky choices to communicate a near-operatic range of emotion.

Lindholm’s stealthy restraint fits the material like a glove, and both get under your skin.

The middle stretch is genuinely scary, though, thanks to the film’s clammy aptitude for trapping us alone in the dark. Somewhere in here, there’s a thesis brewing about how predators ply their trade and cover their tracks while purporting to be the good guys. The product of their actions is ghastly, and it’s lumbering at us fast.

Much of the film’s success comes down to Plaza, who has left that deadpan sphinxlike mode of hers some way back in the rear-view mirror. Grit replaces irony, and it’s fascinating to watch her think her way through every predicament here, deftly and in detail, weighing the percentages.

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s epic drama springs off the success of Black Panther and roars into action: it’s every bit as propulsive, as detailed, as richly imagined. It’s fast, and it’s loose, and it totally works.

Causeway is an excellent, moving, determinedly low-key slice of US indie cinema.

Mark Chappell’s script has a refreshingly high laugh-rate as these things go, with a seam of pure English silliness that sets it well apart from Knives Out, without gunning for anything like that league of plot ingenuity. It’s closer, really, to doing for Christie what Scream did for the slasher flick – goosing the formula with winks and tickles.

Smart comedy is already a rarity; smart comedy that looks this good is a once-in-a-blue-moon event.

Taken as a speculative romance, and in the right matinee spirit, it’s lushly engaging, with a star pairing that – appropriately – rivets.

The script makes a heavy meal of Naru’s personal growth, where a concentration on pure survivalist reflex would have made it leaner and meaner. But when the film knuckles down in sequences of wordless action, it slays.

It would be hard to overpraise Burghardt, a debuting actress on the spectrum whose scenes are so tender, relaxed and generally sweet she deserves at least half the credit.

With its watch-through-your-fingers cringe factor, this is an excellent black comedy of amiss-ness all round. It’s about millennials, their fibs, and their failures.

Achieving the gossamer profundity of one of Alice Munro’s short stories, her film is about the uninterrogated privileges success brings and the envy they can easily spawn.

The film’s craft, with its shivery wooded landscapes and deep focus, is consistently strong, and the acting – especially from State, but also many of the bickering village ensemble – spices up what might have been a route-one polemic.

It’s profoundly compelling, expertly made, and quite intentionally horrifying.

The shot-making is sensational, and the film knows it; the camera does things you’ve never seen before, say with focus in an interrogation room mirror, and the whole saga’s edited as though Park can’t wait to show you what’s up his sleeve.

Moonage Daydream, a wildly creative tribute to everything Bowie achieved over four and a half decades, sets a sky-high bar as cinematic fan-service, and it leaves you buzzing.

The film has a beguiling looseness – it captures that familiar holiday feeling of good days and bad days, or moods turning for no particular reason, other than maybe spending a bit too long in each other’s company.

Seydoux has unfakeable chemistry here with a perfect-as-usual Poupaud, the leading man in French cinema who seems most incapable of putting a foot wrong.

Gray has taken a dicey risk here, by thinking through white guilt from such an unapologetically personal place. In this retrospective mea culpa, he’s trying to be honest about his own conscience and childhood regrets, but also examining the multiple failures of education that set these two kids on such divergent paths.

It’s as much a film about legal process as social injustice, and the nitty-gritty is eye-opening.

Daniel Roher’s shrewd portrait makes the point that Navalny is half-politician, half-journalist; blending the two with his affable charisma on camera, which even extends to goofing off on TikTok, he has exactly the man-of-the-people touch that would be most likely to qualify him as a political threat.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t – Alexander Skarsgård's Prince Amleth rampages through a mythological epic of savage beauty.