Tim Robey

If there’s a chink in your emotional armour, there’s simply no resisting what this film has to offer.

Everything builds with implacable skill up to, but not quite including, the finale, which is played for a table-turning punchline that feels more crowd-pleasing than strictly satisfying.

It’s consistently absorbing as well as evocative to the harsh finish, with mordant plot surprises Connolly keeps smartly tucked away.

Leslie Mann’s warmth and air of charming confusion have helped many a film before. But she gets some definitive moments for the clipreel here.

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

Great art it's not – but it's frisky, in charge of itself, and about as keenly felt a vision of this S&M power game we could realistically have expected to see.

The film needs no excess melodrama even at its bleakest, because the visual language Sharrock has constructed is inhospitable enough. It’s his concentration on these faces, in the 4:3 ratio of Nick Cooke’s gravely beautiful cinematography, that gives it all a redemptive glow.

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.

There’s bad fun to be had in the final stretch – if you go in fully aware that the production flew off the rails.

On his broadest canvas yet, Trapero mounts a saga about the role of conscience, which might seem old-fashioned if it weren’t so urgently imagined. An added fillip is Michael Nyman’s stirring score, his best in years.

Landing the perfect ending is a challenge for any such story; A Star is Born, for all its guts and pathos, peaked early. Wild Rose holds its horses, and lets Rose-Lynn soar only when she’s worked out who she is.

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.

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

It has a straight-down-the-highway momentum, interesting stakes, and more textured character work than you can shake a stick at.

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]

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.

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.

Blanchett makes us feel the creeping horror of professional disgrace, the fear and stigma, however unfair Mapes argues her treatment may have been. We watch a polished professional come apart at the seams, caught up in self-incrimination and spiralling neurosis.

Compellingly stumped by its own heroine, the film simply can’t make its mind up about Tonya Harding. If it did, it wouldn’t get away with being such a blast.

It’s the rapport between the actors – or the anti-rapport, to start with – that makes this such a winning diversion.

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.

When Good Time’s good, it’s properly electric, and the star turn goes off like an illegal firework.

There’s nothing Saulnier does better here than unveil his premise and bring the siblings together for their handful of scenes, but his film remains deftly shot and dynamic to the end.

This is hardly the sound of artistic burnout. No mean videographer either, Hoon departed with a great deal left to say.

There are moments which directly recreate Oshii’s best scenes, with real sets and actors performing a balletic kind of stunt-karaoke. But the story is far more graspable – more streamlined – and the gracenotes, action-free, tend to be the highlights.

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.

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.