THE DRAMA**** (spoilers)

Kristoffer Borgli's THE DRAMA is a nasty little relationship drama and social satire about good people doing bad things and bad people who are po-faced and judgmental. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson continue to make challenging and interesting choices that belie their teen-star good looks.  They play Emma and Charlie - a young loving couple who seem perfect for each other until goaded into reveal the worst thing they have ever done by their best friends Rachel and Mike.  Emma reveals that as a young teenage girl she planned a school shooting but did not go through with it and is immediately shunned by her maid of honour Rachel (Alana Haim) despite the fact that Rachel didn't just plan but did something really horrific - imprisoning a young developmentally challenged boy and leaving him for dead. 

In fact, there is something wrong with the whole way in which the friend group reacts. Nobody thinks to ask why young Emma might have been so disenchanted and alienated and bullied that she felt she had to commit an act of mass killing.  Nobody asks how she is feeling now that she has revealed it.  Just judgy Karen being the true villain of the piece and dragging her poor husband Mike along with her.  And nice earnest fiance making poor Emma restate her motivations despite the fact that reliving the memory is making her throw up.  

The resulting film is a nasty, raw and occasionally mordantly funny drama. I really believed in Emma and Charlie and wanted their relationship to work.  I also really liked how Borgli was very consciously playing with rom-com tropes - the meet-cute, the dumb cutesy in-jokes, even the .... well... end-cute?  It's like he's saying I know this is dumb and makes no sense and is incredible but go with me because I am using this genre-bullshit to show you what's going on with this young black woman in this hyper-white judgy scenario.  And I was there for it. 

THE DRAMA is rated R and has a running time of 105 minutes. It was released earlier this month.

CALIFORNIA SCHEMIN'***

X-MEN actor James McAvoy turns director in this charming, fast-paced, you-cannot-believe-it's-true story of two young Scottish lads who adopt Eminem-adjacent American personas to fool the prejudiced London music industry into giving them a recording contract.  Unable to attract interest as "the rapping Proclaimers", Billy and Gavin get a recording contract as their California avatars Silibil and Brains, and predictably proceed to exploit their new-found access to booze and girls.  They want to reveal their true identities on a famous MTV show live on air, and show up the music industry as bigots, because will they have the courage to go through with it? And if they don't, what will lying to their colleagues, friends, family and even to themselves to do their psyches?

The arc of this film is pretty unexciting and predictable. Decent kids get fame, go crazy, fall out with each other, turn their backs on all that is wholesome and true, before a last-act redemption.  What makes the film worth watching are the kinetic, grab-you-by-the-balls direction;  the compelling central performances from Samuel Bottomley and Sean Maclean Ross, who have to rap as well as act; and the sheer insanity of the story.  After I watched this film, I went on to watch the documentary, "The Great Hip Hop Hoax", and to read the real-life Gavin's autobiography. If anything, this feature film re-telling underplays just how good the boys were musically, just how far they got in the music industry, and just what utter nightmares they were when they started exploiting alcohol and women. 

A special shout out to actress Lucy Halliday (currently starring in The Testaments), who forms the calm moral centre of the film.  There's something really transfixing about her stoicism and quiet, understated performance.  Where another actress or another director might have asked her for histrionics, Halliday just radiates good sense, disenchantment and a quiet fierce strength as Billy's girlfriend Mary.

CALIFORNIA SCHEMIN' has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Toronto 2025 and is currently on release in the UK.

A PALE VIEW OF HILLS***

Writer-director-editor Kei Ishikawa has finally brought a version of Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel to screen, nearly 50 years after it was first published. It's a story about generational trauma and conscious and subconscious dissembling through memory. 

The primary expression of this is through the character of Etsuko (the word "character" used advisedly here.)  In the early 1950s she is a submissive pregnant housewife recovering from the trauma of having survived Nagasaki.  Her husband is a typical salaryman, but she seems to have a fondness for her father-in-law.   She is attracted to the strength and radical modernity of a woman called Sachiko - also a Nagasaki survivor, and single-mother to her young daughter Machiko. Sachiko dreams of escaping to America with her lover Frank - a dream that Etsuko may or may not believe in. Both women are trapped and seeking escape. Friendship with Sachiko encourages Etsuko to be braver. Both suffer from prejudice, trauma and fear.  Nagasaki survivors are seen as tarnished and damaged: and perhaps contagious.  

The secondary expression of the theme of confronting the past and one's own role in it, is played out in the story of Etsuko's father-in-law.  He seems like a lonely old man desperate to reconnect with his son Jiro. But in reality he is visiting Etsuko and Jiro to facilitate a confrontation with an ex-pupil, now teacher, who denounced the father as a nationalist who preached propaganda in the classroom. As the ex-pupil says - Japan has changed - it's a brave new world - and everyone must change with it.

Just how far they have indeed changed, and own that change, or whether that change is authentic or appropriated, is part of the slipperiness and puzzle-aspect of the film.  I really enjoyed seeing the characters in the Japanese setting, even though the pace of the first hour of the film was too slow for me.  The cinematography and production design are beautiful, with some lovely tableaux. I also love how the small-town feel contrasts with the forbidden dangerous wild grassland across the river, cordoned off because of nuclear contamination. This is a world where conventional bourgeois life lives knowingly and perhaps dangerously right alongside danger.

Where I thought the film suffered was in its early 80s framing device. A now widowed Etsuko, having settled in Britain, is selling the family home. Her daughter Niki is an aspiring journalist, and thinks that the personal story of her mother's experience of Nagasaki will make for a good story.  But this too is a ruse. She wants to know her family history and this is a means to coax it from her reluctant mother.

The film gave me a lot to think about and I really loved some of the performances.  Suzu Hirose and Fumi Nakaido as young Estuko and Sachiko are superb.  But I really didn't like the framing device and found both the dialogue and performances of Camilla Aiko as Niki and Yo Yoshida as the elder Etsuko stilted and uninvolving.

A PALE VIEW OF HILLS played Cannes Toronto and London 2025. It will be released in the UK on March 13th. It has a running time of 132 minutes.

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" **

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" does not work on its own terms because Emerald Fennell does not pick a lane, because she has no good original ideas, and because she has no cinematic taste. She thinks she’s daring and transgressive but actually she’s just crass and juvenile and undercuts any attempts her actors are making to inject credibility or elicit sympathy from the audience. Hong Chau is good as Nelly and Jacob Elordi tries hard as Heathcliff in a straight drama. Isabella is played - problematically - for broad knowing laughs in a second separate film. Martin Clunes is playing a Dickensian villain in a third. Margot Robbie is just too old and haggard to play Cathy at any age. Ultimately though this is Fennell’s failure. I laughed at the screen when Clunes died amidst two piles of empty gin bottles. I laughed harder when Atlanta was burning. We get it Emerald: you watched GONE WITH THE WIND and REBECCA. Now please do fuck off and direct music videos. 

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" REALLY does not work as an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s actually transgressive novel. The juvenile absurd emotions turned up to eleven revenge psychodrama that Cathy and Heathcliff put each other through only makes sense when you know they are adolescents - when Cathy dies at 20. The idea that marrying Heathcliff would degrade Cathy only works when money won’t wash over his “otherness” because he is either the son of a black slave or a gypsy or a lascar. There is no evidence in the book that they ever had sex. It’s not a love story. It’s a story of psychosexual sadism carried over three generations. Eliminating Hindley means we have no Hindley-Heathcliff-Cathy triad to mirror the Edgar-Heathcliff-Cathy triad or the Hareton-Heathcliff-Cathy2 triad. 

Of course Emerald Fennell is narcissistic enough to think we give a shit about how SHE felt reading the novel at 14 and that the book is unfilmable. But Andrea Arnold made a superb film of the first half off this book. And I hate to break it to you Emerald, we watch this because of Bronte not you. 

And don’t even get me going on a deeply privileged white woman blathering on in press tours about how this is a female made movie as if this allows her to erase the fact that the lead actor should be a person of colour and that the entire story is about him being diminished for being brown. And then - just to add insult to injury - Margot Robbie parading jewelry stolen from Mughal India and ascribing its ownership to Liz Taylor - erasing its actual origin. Either they are racist or stupid or both. 

WUTHERING HEIGHTS" is rated R and has a running time of 136 minutes.  It gets a star for Hong Chau and a star for Martin Clunes. 

More thoughts: Heathcliff’s continual demand of consent from Isabella was deeply troubling. A joke, played for recognition. But also part of the overall softening of Heathcliff and Cathy - to make them “likeable” and credible as a love story gone wrong. Young Cathy isn’t pinching and punching staff. Heathcliff doesn’t kill Isabella’s dogs. Eliminating the back half of the book makes Heathcliff a lot less violent and indeed borderline necro. I also feel that making Cathy’s baby die early in the womb so that Cathy then dies of septicaemia is a way for Emerald to keep Cathy/Robbie looking “pretty” and unpregnant to the end. It allows Cathy and Heathcliff to keep pretending that they are starcrossed lovers in arrested development.  Emerald can’t handle them being culpable adults as much as they can’t.

DHURANDAR aka MASTERMIND*****

DHURANDAR is an epic super-long spy-mafia-thriller set in the political powder-keg that is contemporary Indian-Pakistani politics.  And let's be clear up front:  writer-director Aditya Dhar (URI: THE SURGICAL STRIKE) is definitely in the Indian nationalist camp, telling his story from the perspective of a country trying to defend itself from horrific real-life terrorist attacks like Mumbai 2008.  There is no attempt here to understand the Pakistani side of the conflict although there is nuance to the lead Pakistani character, Rehman Dakait.  How else to explain a proud Balochi helping the state that oppresses his people?  As a result, for those of us critical of Narendra Modi's Hindu Nationalist politics, it's easy to write this film of as propaganda.  Your mileage my vary.  I found its handling of recent terrorist attacks fair.  My only problem with it - and it's a big one - was a statement in its final minutes that not only is the Pakistani state behind attacks such as Mumbai (fact), but that it's behind "ninety percent of all terrorism" (not fact). That's a dangerous piece of hyperbole but I trust the audience to parse the fact from the propaganda, all the while enjoying what is a really superb film.

The movie opens with Indian officials negotiating the release of airplane hostages, and then zips through the terrorist attack on India's parliament building.  This prompts the Indian security services to send in a sleeper agent to infiltrate the gangs that work in cahoots with Islamic terrorist and the Pakistani state.  This infiltrator is "Hamza", played in a series of glorious hair-pieces by the ever-charismatic and muscle-bound Bollywood superstar Ranveer Singh.  

Hamza poses as a Balochi waiter in Karachi's Lyari district and slowly infiltrates the gang of the aforementioned Rehman. Rehman is himself pursued by Pakistani cop SP Aslam. Later Hamza will romance a rival politician's daughter, presumably so we can have some filmi romance scenes and songs.  More pointedly, Hamza will witness Major Iqbal planning the Mumbai attack, but fail to prevent it.  All of this is based on real-life criminals and real-life politicians and real-life terrorists. In the most searing moment of the film, the director Aditya Dhar chooses to show real life audio from the night of the Mumbai attacks, with the handler egging the terrorists on to greater acts of violence.  It's a brave and powerful moment. 

Come for Ranveer, stay for the golden oldies!  The joy of this film is not in Ranveer's physically committed performance, but in seeing so many older actors given superb roles and sinking their teeth into them.  There's been a lot of internet chatter about just how good Akshaye Khanna is as Rehman, and boy he acts everyone else off the screen.  From affable wedding guest with a memed weddding entrance, to a truly scary purveyor of vengeful violence, to a skilled populist politician. Khanna has the prime role in this film and it's one for the ages. It's an Oscar-winning performance that dominates the film and transforms it into something really special.  But kudos also to Sanjay Dutt as SP Aslam and an almost unrecognisable Arjun Rampal as Major Iqbal.  And Madhavan is always great - not least playing Ajay Sanyal here.

This film is so good that after nearly four hours of viewing I could easily have watched it again, and cannot wait for its sequel.  This is Bollywood at its most provocative and handsomely produced. 

DHURANDAR has a running time of 214 minutes and is rated 18 for strong violence. It was released last December and is now on Netflix.

SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES*****

It's decades since I watched the original rock-mockumentary SPINAL TAP, so I can't remember the specifics of any of the jokes bar 'turning it up to eleven", Stonehenge and ill-fated drummers. And since then we've had the tragic murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. I just didn't know how I was going to react to this sequel.  I am happy to report that it's just delightful:  silly, sweet, sometimes melancholy, with some insane cameos and so many moments where I was guffawing out loud. 

The movie opens with our ageing three rockers retired and variously running a cheese shop, a glue shop, and writing muzak for crime podcasts.  The daughter of their old bandmate wants to bring them back for a shameless cash-in reunion concert in New Orleans, masterminded by a thinly veiled evil Simon Cowell-Simon Fowler-style impresario played with relish by Chris Addison (The Thick Of It).  Along the way we get old beefs rehashed, and the introduction of a new drummer played by Valerie Franco.  We get to see Tap interact with evident real-life fan Elton John in an extended and tremendous cameo.  It's just a bloody good time - just so well-meaning, so funny and so full of people pretending but actually writing good rock songs and enjoying playing them. In fact, the final 25 minutes is basically just a filmed real Tap concert.  Loved every second of it.

God bless Rob Reiner and all who sailed in him. 

SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES has a running time of 83 minutes and is rated R. It was released last October.

H IS FOR HAWK****

H IS FOR HAWK is a deceptively simple, desperately moving, but never manipulative, film about a middle-aged woman coming to terms with the death of her father. Its success rests on a typically brilliant central performance by The Crown's Claire Foy as the protagonist, Helen. We spend so much time with her, trying to parse her feelings as she hides away from her grief, her family, her colleagues and her friends. Her distraction mechanism is caring for a goshawk called Mabel - a beautiful and fiersome creature of epic strength, who ties our protagonist back to her father's love of nature. At the peak of her depression, Helen literally hides away in a large cardboard box, and we are alone with her and Emma Levienaise-Farrouch's string-heavy ethereal score. This is a film that has the courage to allow grief its appropriate space, and to depict it in all its oppressive power. It takes quite the actor to take on this kind of role, and quite the director to understand what this kind of story needs.

The film is directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and is based on a tremendously successful book by Helen MacDonald.  Lowthorpe, who previously adapted THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL, adapted the book alongside screenwriter Emma Donoghue, who worked on the Oscar-winning ROOM. I wonder if there's something in the fact that a lot of the behind-the-lens talent is female, because this film is a rare depiction of how vital and at times life-saving true female friendship can be.  We should all wish for the kind of friendship that Helen has with Christine (Andor's Denise Gough).  In that respect, this film reminded be of Eva Victor's SORRY BABY, insofar as it showed how sometimes friendship is all about persistance.

H IS FOR HAWK has a running time of 119 minutes and is rated PG-13. It played Telluride and London 2025 and is released in the USA and UK today.

DRAGONFLY****

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams (LONDON TO BRIGHTON) has created a really haunting and stunningly well-acted film in DRAGONFLY. It's basically a two-hander between Brenda Blethyn as Elsie and her next-door neighbour Colleen, played by Andrea Riseborough.  As the film opens, Elsie has had a fall so her well-meaning but distant son arranges for her to have a carer come to the house. The carers are heavy-handed and cut corners and don't actually listen to what Elsie wants and needs. This is where Colleen steps in.  She is a traumatised and introverted woman hiding away from life with her gigantic dog - menacing to all others but clearly providing some kind of emotional safety support to its owner.  

The brilliance of Williams' script and Riseborough's performance is that we can never quite figure Colleen out. Is she using Elsie financially, or even emotionally? They seem to form some kind of genuine odd-couple friendship, bound together by mutual loneliness in a world that wants to park the damaged and the elderly out of sight and out of mind. This is the attitude summed up in Elsie's son, played in a brilliant cameo by Jason Watkins. He seems to be suspicious of, and resent, Colleen's help but unable to step up and provide that care himself. Something that Colleen is not afraid to point out, with devastating conseqences.

I really loved this film. It's spare and taut and keeps us in an increasing state of suspense and anxiety. The ending is brave and will sit with me for quite some time.  Kudos to all involved. 

DRAGONFLY has a running time of 98 minutes and is rated 15. It played Tribeca 2025 and opened in the UK last November.

LOLLIPOP****

Writer-director Daisy-May Hudson's debut feature LOLLIPOP is a beautifully acted, deeply moving portrait of a single-mother ex-con caught in a well-meaning but ultimately brutal social care system.  As the film opens, our protagonist Molly (Posy Sterling) is shocked to discover that her young son and daughter are not with her mother, as she had thought, but have been given up to social care. The problem is that she cannot apply for housing for all three of them until she gets them back, but can't get them back until she has a place for them to live.  

Living with her mother is unfeasible.  Her mum only has a two bedroom house but it's also really clear that beyond the logistical issues, it would be completely unsuitable emotionally.  Molly's mum is a grieving widow and alcoholic who is deeply manipulative of her daughter. We see this in a chilling scene where she forces her daughter to sing at a wake. That said, she's not a pantomime villain:  we understand that there is deep loss and sadnes at her core, and that a lot of her isolation and drinking is a coping mechanism.

And so we see poor Molly driven to distraction and anger by well-meaning but ultimately "computer says no" bureaucrats who cannot help right an entire system that is set-up to thwart her.  We often see Molly lose her temper, in a way that would seem to justify the system's judgment that she is a borderline unfit mother, except that we know what she's going through. Her judgment is often bad, her reactions volatile, but we know beyond doubt that she does love her kids.  

Apparently the writer-director wrote this film based on her own experience and it absolutely comes across on screen.  There's a grinding authenticity to the way women like Molly are judged and boxed-in and given no substantive help.  There's also a lot of brilliantly depicted internalised self-judgment.  When Molly comes across a childhood friend, who is also a single-mother, called Amina, we soon realise that Amina is being standoffish because she's ashamed of living in a half-way house.  The kids are also really well-portrayed - the mixture of loving their mum but being frustrated by her broken promises and their unsettled lives. 

This is a quiet, brilliant film featuring a really strong central performance from Posy Sterling that's really worth seeking out.

LOLLIPOP has a running time of 100 minutes and is rated 15. It was released in the UK in June 2025 and is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

THE CEREMONY****

Writer-director Jack King's directorial debut is a fascinating and beautiful social realist drama.  It takes us into the lives of people we might see at car-washes in our supermarket and municipal car-parks but not really give a second thought.  His film is set in a car-wash in Bradford, in the north of England, that is staffed by a hodge-podge of illegal immigrants from Central Europe and beyond.  The action begins when a client accuses one of the car-washers of stealing his Rolex from his BMW.  Cue lots of bigotry, not just from the client, but from within the workers, with men of all nations mistrustful of each other, not least because they don't speak the same language.  The tension is greater because the men know that any police investigation is going to put a spotlight on their illegal immigrant status. And so, when the accused man (Mo’min Swaitat) shows up dead, the gang boss Zully asks Romanian migrant Cristi (Tudor Cucu Dumitrescu) and Kurdish Yusuf (Erdal Yildiz) to throw the body in the back of a white van and dump it somewhere out of sight.

The first half of the film is sparky and spot on in its depiction of contemporary Britain's diverse official and unofficial population and the thin economic thread upon which everyone's lives are built.  But for me it's the quieter, more melancholy, more contemplative second half of the film that really impressed. The black and white cinematography of the bleak, oppressive Yorkshire landscape is stunning and I loved Yuma Koda's off-kilter, spare score. We get snatches of backstory and a deeper understanding of their situation.  The final burial scene is one of beauty. 

This really is an extraordinary, sometimes beautiful, insightful and deeply humane film.

THE CEREMONY has a running time of 92 minutes and is rated 15. It was released in the UK last August. It is available to rent on all the major streaming services.

SONG SUNG BLUE**

I have no idea why Kate Hudson has been nominated for an Oscar for her performance in SONG SUNG BLUE other than that she seems really nice, is probably very popular in Hollywood, probably should have been nominated for her work in ALMOST FAMOUS, and is unlikely to ever get a meaty dramatic leading role like this again.  Her performance is good, don't get me wrong.  And it's by far the best thing in this deeply mediocre musical biopic.  But man, what a mid film this is. 

Hudson and Hugh Jackman star as a husband and wife musical tribute act to Neil Diamond working the small bar circuit in small-town 1980s America.  Of course, this being a biopic, we know something super-bad is gonna happen, and when it does we get to see some of Hudson's talent in depicting a strong but angry and frustrated woman at risk of losing herself.  And then of course we see the redemption or recovery arc before Chekhov's medical check-up strikes again.  Along the way, we see lots of Neil Diamond songs performed, although it's kind of a running joke that Jackman's character really doesn't want to perform Sweet Caroline because there's so much more to Diamond's catalogue than that. 

Writer-director Craig Brewer (HUSTLE AND FLOW) moves through the story in a fairly conventional and plodding manner. I am really not sure why this needs to be a film.  Hudson seems to be having a good time. I liked the 80s fright wigs and bedazzled outfits. But there was nothing that really gripped me or got me. Maybe because Jackman seemed to mechanical and... tired. 

SONG SUNG BLUE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 132 minutes. It was released in the USA on Christmas Day 2025 and in the UK on New Year's Day 2026.

THE LIBRARIANS*****

I was a nerdy, poor immigrant kid insatiable for books and my local public library and my school library were like treasure caves. I will forever be grateful to the librarians who guided me to books I might like based on my reading and provided a wonderful childhood of expanding horizons. The idea that anyone could villify and dox and physically threaten this wonderful profession of largely mild-mannered nerdy women is shocking to me.  And yet that's what's happening in Trump's America, where bigoted, illiterate, judgmental politicians and their activist lackeys are banning books and attempting to prosecute those that defend free speech and children's access to what are actually harmless titles.  Because this is never about child protection, and always about censorship and coercion. You may NOT learn about being gay or queer or feminism or racial or social injustice. I grew up with this bollocks too, in the shape of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, that banned teachers from being openly gay or "promoting a gay lifestyle".  

Kim A. Snyder's documentary is urgent, angry-making, and beautifully constructed. It foregrounds the real heroes - ordinary teachers and librarians and community activists who are showing up, week-in week-out, to school board meetings and local government meetings, often at extreme personal risk. They are people who are being coerced out of their jobs, forced into hiding, to arm themselves. It's beyond absurd. A lot of the footage is taken from meetings where we, in turn, see activists on either side of this issue taking iphone footage of each other, to be used later on social media and to whip up a storm.  And as Snyder points out, this so-called grassroots movement of conservative moms is in fact funded by major oligarchs.  

This is a fantastic must-see documentary.  I know that when people are literally being shot down by ICE the ability to read books might seem trivial. But this is where fascism starts. Almost a year ago we were in Berlin for the Film Festival and our hotel room overlooked the public square where the Nazis burned books.  Tourists were taking selfies at the commemorative spot. Let's not sit still on history when it's repeating itself before our eyes. Watch. This. Now.

THE LIBRARIANS has a running time of 92 minutes and is rated 15. It played Sundance and SXSW 2025. It was released in the USA last September and is available to stream in the UK on BBC IPlayer.

PILLION****

I thoroughly enjoyed writer-director Harry Lighton's brave, bold and strangely heart-warming coming-of-age drama PILLION. Harry Melling, last seen as Call-Me Risley in Wolf Hall, stars as geeky, shy Colin, who lives in a bleak British town and sings in a barbershop quartet with his dad. As the movie begins, Colin meets the desperately handsome Ray (Alexander Skarsgard) and begins a relationship that is all about being subsmissive and not at all about genuine intimacy or romance. At first, Colin seems genuinely happy, adopted by Ray's biker friends and experiencing his first true physical fulfilment. But as the movie and Colin develop, we and he realise that he needs and deserves more. He asks Ray for a normal day-off where they can on a date, and as much as Ray is willing to give it a go, it's just not him.

What I love about PILLION, aside from its moments of genuine hilarity, is that it deals with a lot of serious stuff in what feels like a real and authentic way. I loved a scene where Ray goes for dinner with Colin's parents (Lesley Sharp and Douglas Hodge) and we see their concern for their son played back to them as bigotry. And I also loved the denouement. Without spoiling it, it's fascinating to see which of the characters is truly brave.  

PILLION has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London 2025. It was released in the USA last October and in the UK last November.

ALL THAT'S LEFT OF YOU**

Writer-director-actor Cherien Dabis's ALL THAT IS LEFT OF YOU is an ambitious multi-generational story of a Palestinian family.  

It begins with the death of a young sprightly man called Noor during the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1988, at which point his grieving mother Hanan tells us that to understand her son, we have to understand his father. And so we go back to the 1948 "Nakba" when the father Salim is a young man, watching his own father Sharif forced to grapple with whether to leave Palestine as the new Israeli state is established, or stay and protect the family farm.  We discover that the choice to stay is a tough one. They are moved off their family farm and into town.  

We then fast forward to 1978 in the West Bank, and the young Salim is now himself married and a father.  Even small things like picking up medicine from a pharmacy is complicated by arbitrary curfews and humilating police interrogations.  Salim's son Noor grows up seeing his father humiliated, frustrated, angry, so is it any surprise that he is swept up in the demonstrations of the First Intifada? 

The problem with Cherien Dabis' clearly heartfelt film is that it's so simplistic in its politics. Everyone in the family is good, and the Israelis are all bad. The military, policy, the heartless bureaucrats....  Maybe there is some hope for nuance in the final more contemporary act, but not really, because that's not what this film is interested in. So it's heartfelt, and I have a lot of sympathy with the predicament of the protagonists, but it would have felt more earned if it hadn't felt like such a heavyhanded piece of agitprop. 

ALL THAT'S LEFT OF YOU has a running time of 145 minutes.  It played Sundance 2025. It went on release in the UK last November and in the USA last week.

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT**

Famed Iranian director Jafar Panahi's IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT works better as political discourse than as a film. What I mean by this is that it poses interesting questions about political trauma and culpability. But the high-concept set-up is just too outlandish and absurd, and the characters too much like ciphers, for us to be emotionally engaged by the content.

The film opens in contemporary Iran. Husband, heavily pregnant wife and child are in a car bickering, when the husband runs over something, and needs to pull into a garage. The schlubby middle-aged attendant, called Vahid, recognises the husband as a prison guard who tortured him and makes the absurd snap decision to abduct him.  The problem is that Vahid isn't actually sure that this was the guard, as he is relying on aural rather than visual memory. So he drives his captive around in a white van, drawing in a group of fellow ex-prisoners to try and identify the man and adjudicate his fate. They are more or less ordinary middle-class people, far out of their depth in this brutal situation.  

I think Panahi wants to show us how ordinary people are coerced and made complicit in autocratic regimes and lose their moral compass.  And the movie has its moments of dark comedy as well as a haunting and truly tragic ending, no matter how you interpret it. But it somehow didn't cohere for me. It was a film I more admired than enjoyed.

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated PG-13.  It played Cannes 2025 where it won the Palme D'Or, and London 2025. It was released in the USA last October and in the UK last December.

SIRAT**

Frack me, SIRAT is a steaming pile of pretentious wank. I rarely agree with Peter Bradshaw's reviews in the Guardian but he was absolutely spot on in calling this the most over-rated film of 2025.  He wrote that the final part of this film descends into Monty-Python-esque absurdity and once you see that it's hard to unsee it. I felt that writer-director Oliver Laxe might have been trying to make some deep and meaningful point about the savagery of life but got lost up his own backside.  It's actually a real shame because Laxe clearly knows how to create a stunning visual and how to score it. Maybe he should just do music videos?

The movie opens in Morocco where middle-aged schlubby dad Luis (Sergi López) and his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) are derping around raves trying to find their missing daughter/sister.  They join up with a group of feckless hippies on a humbug and start journeying across a desert in a convoy of vans trying to find another rave that the daughter might be at. It all seems rather vague.  There are some soldiers - it's unsafe - there are landmines.  Anyways, bad stuff starts happening and keeps on happening - to the characters and to the viewers.  The movie lurches off-piste and then gives up all hopes of any kind of emotional impact or gravitas. 

SIRAT is rated R and has a running time of 115 minutes. It played Cannes 2025 where it won the Jury Prize. It also played the BFI London Film Festival. It went on release in the USA last November and will be released in the UK on February 27th.

THE BALTIMORONS****

THE BALTIMORONS is an utterly delightful, low-key melancholy romantic comedy that absolutely won a place in my heart.  It stars Michael Strassner as a thirty-something stand-up comic recovering from depression, cancellation and alcoholism. He's engaged to his ever-vigilant fiancee Brittany (Olivia Luccardi) but still seems to be drifting and struggling.  The movie opens on Christmas Eve morning. Cliff needs an emergency dental repair and the only dentist open is the the world-weary but admirably strong middle-aged dentist Didi (Liz Larsen).  Her daughter bails on her for Christmas to spend it with her dad and his new younger wife.  The balance of the film sees Cliff and Didi just hang out, derping around the wintry quiet streets and shoreline of Baltimore. They seem to really connect, to be kind, earnest, hurt but open to each other. It's a genuinely beautiful romance in the making.

What I love about this film is how real and complex and nuanced the characters are. Even Cliff's fiancee Brittany is given the grace of genuinely caring for him and understanding how hard it is to move forward with a relationship intercut but recent trauma. I also love how natural Strassner and Larsen are together on screen. Despite the age gap and the financial gap they really seem like they could make it.  I also really like Jay Duplass' directorial style here. The film has a beautiful, gentle, earnest quality and could become a stealth Christmas favourite. There's something about the Peanuts adjacent soft-jazz score that makes everything feel cosy and heart-warming even as the film handles some pretty gnarly subject matter.

THE BALTIMORONS is rated R and has a running time of 101 minutes. It played SXSW 2025 where it won the Audience Award, and was released in the USA last September.

THE SECRET AGENT*****

Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho has created an operatic, beautifully acted, and fascinating film in THE SECRET AGENT. I am utterly unsurprised that it has wowed critics and is cleaning up this awards season.  

The film is basically about corruption, oppression and memory, and it takes place over many time periods to show us the corrosive nature of autocracy.  The heavy cloud of violence is shot through by an on-going absurdist folk-tale of the "hairy leg" and jaunty popular music, both of which seem to say, look what happened, isn't it insane?

As the film opens we are in the late 70s in Brazil.  The state is corrupt at every level.  The actor Wagner Moura (CIVIL WAR, Pablo Escobar in Narcos) is driving his beaten up car to his home town in the middle of carnival. He pulls into an isolated gas station where a decaying corpse lies under cardboard.  Pretty soon the police pull in but they aren't here for the body and provide no help to the petrol pump attendant. Rather they just want to shake our protagonist down.  Welcome to Brazil.

As the film goes on we realise that our "secret agent" is just a university professor called Armando and he's on the run because a local corporate boss with govenment contacts wanted the value of his research.  He shows up in Recife and stays in a safe house full of similar political "undesirables" including a couple who have fled from Angola. The eccentric den mother/landlady fits them out with new identities. In flashback, we see our young idealistic professor get ensnared in the corruption of the system.  In a third timeline we will see a young idealistic researcher uncover audio recordings and newspaper clippings describing the escape lines run by our den mother, what happened to Armando and to his now grown son, who claims to have no memory at all of the events.  Is he lying? Is it a coping mechanism? Is it just safer?

The film is beautifully constructed, not least in its visual and musical evocation of late 70s Brazil. The costumes, cars, locations, score are all superb in evoking a beautiful but oppressive culture. I loved the interweaving of the hairy leg stories and the patience to tell us about Angola and the various ways in which cruelty suffuses the world - not least in an iconic final performance from Udo Kier as a jewish immigrant. I also loved the construction and scoring of a final act chase scene.  But ultimately this film rests on the shoulders of Wagner Moura, who plays two roles in three timelines and captures the idea of a good but not perfect man caught in an inescapable trap. His performance is mesmerising and deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Leo DiCaprio in ONE BATTLE.  Speaking of which, there's an essay to be written on the thematic and plot similarities between the two films, and the sense in which the late 70s paranoia provides the perfect analogy to our present time.

THE SECRET AGENT is rated R and has a running time of 161 minutes. It played Cannes, where Wagner Moura won Best Actor, Telluride, Toronto and London 2025. It was released in the USA in November and will be released in the UK on February 20th 2026.

EAST OF WALL****

Writer-director Kate Beecroft's debut EAST OF WALL is a really fascinating and affecting drama set in a horse ranch in the Dakotas. Much like Chloe Zhao's NOMADLAND, the film mixes actors and a fictionalised story with real people and a real place. The result is a film that gives the audience a glimpse into a world they might not otherwise see.  

The real life, ludicrously charismatic horse trainer Tabatha Zimiga stars as a lightly fictionalised version of herself.  In life as in this film, she runs a ranch that takes in troubled teenagers and gives them purpose, all the while raising her own kids as a widowed mother. Her real life daughter Porshia also stars as an incredibly talented horse-rider who shows off the ponies that they try to sell for a profit.

Beecroft places two real actors into this real situation. The first is Jennifer Ehle (SHE SAID) as Tabatha's straight-talking mother.  It's a character that could be a bit of a cliche - feckless, not exactly top-draw parenting, but a heart underneath it all. Ehle makes her credible in comparatively short screen time.

The second fictional character is the rich rancher Roy Waters, played by Scoot McNairy (A COMPLETE UNKNOWN). He offers the financially struggling Tabatha the chance for financial security but it's no free lunch: he has emotional needs that he has to fulfil. 

This is a film that takes us deep into a slice of life we might not otherwise see. The cinematography is stunning - both of the landscape and in capturing the incredibly skilled riding. The characters are credible and charismatic.  It adds up to something unique and memorable.

EAST OF WALL is rated R and has a running time of 97 minutes. It played Sundance 2025 and was released in the USA last summer. It is available to rent and own in the USA and UK.

EEPHUS***

Writer-director-cineatographer-editor Carson Lund's EEPHUS is a low-key funny, low-key melancholy film about male friendship and baseball. The entire film takes place over the course of a day and in a single location - a local baseball ground where two local rival teams are playing their last match before their ground is lost to redevelopment.  We see them banter with each other as a desultory group of spectators watches. There's low-key shit-talking and some home truths about how far any of them are actually friends and will keep in touch beyond the singular bond of playing sports together.  In the film's final act we see the last holdouts attempt to keep playing, even though night has fallen and they're relying on car headlights to light the pitch. It's a none too subtle metaphor for trying to cling onto something that's lost.  It's a charming enough film but too meandering and ultimately weightess for its running time. But hey, at least I learned what an eephus is, and maybe the gentle, unhurried pace of this film is the point.

EEPHUS has a running time of 99 minutes. It played Cannes and London 2024 and was released in the USA last spring.

REBUILDING***

Writer-director Max Walker-Silverman's REBUILDING is set in the American West, amidst a community whose houses and land have been destroyed by wildfire.  They now find themselves living in FEMA trailers, attempting to rebuild their lives. There's a well-meaning but ultimately useless bureaucrat who needs them to fill out the right paperwork and submit it online - absurd when they don't have computers or wifi.  And a loan officer who delicately informs our protagonist that it will be years before his farm will be productive again.

The film is centred around Dusty - a farmer who has inherited a farm that has been worked by generations of his family. It feels as though Dusty has a romantic sentimental approach to making a living, something his ex-wife calls him out for.  As the film opens, he has to take care of his daughter Callie Rose after a long hiatus, and a lot of the gentle joy of the film is seeing them try to re-establish a relationship, and for both to come to appreciate the ramshackle group of people they are living with.  It's a film about refound actual family, and newly adopted found family.  

The film is not without its longeuers in its central chapters, but I found myself really rooting for the characters and moved by the film's resolution.  I appreciated Josh O'Connor's central performance, eschewing the theatrics of an exxagerated accent, and allowing his subtle facial reactions to do the talking.  I also liked Meghann Fahy as his ex-wife. It was also to a pleasure to see True Detective's Kali Reiss back on screen.

REBUILDING is rated PG and has a running time of 96 minutes. It played Sundance 2025 and opened in t the USA in November.  It will open in the UK in April 2026.

FAMILIAR TOUCH****

FAMILIAR TOUCH is the deeply affecting directorial debut from Sarah Friedland featuring a stunning award-winning perfomrnace from Kathleen Chalfant (OLD).  Chalfant plays Ruth - an old woman suffering from dementia - and the movie centres her experience as she leaves her own house and moves into a dementia-care facility.  The performance is stunning because Ruth moves between moments of apparent clarity and her old sassiness and moments of bewilderment.  We learn about her situation as she discovers it - the gentle realisation that Steve (H Jon Benjamin - ARCHER) is actually her son, and that she had actually toured and approved moving into the facility some week's prior.  We watch Ruth amused by the memory games her nurse plays with her, and part of the film's sadness is knowing that while she thinks she's figuring it out, she doesn't really know what's going on. We watch her ask for a menu as if she's at a restaurant rather than in a nursing home, and later try to relive her life as a chef, cooking in the kitchen and even attempting to buy groceries. So much of the joy of this gentle, patient, film is just spending time with Chalfant's Ruth. Perhaps as befits her theatre background, she has an ability to infuse melody and clarity into the simplest sentences.  There's a real poetry and magic in how she lists different foods in her recipes.  And a melancholy in knowing that while these evocative lists are what she can still remember, she no longer recognises her son. This is a unique and beautiful film, and it's delightful to see that a performance like this can beat out contenders from bigger, better marketed and distributed films. It's really worth seeking out. 

FAMILIAR TOUCH has a running time of 90 minutes. It played Venice and London 2024 and was released in the USA last summer. Chalfant recently won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress.

ONE OF THEM DAYS****

There aren't enough genuinely funny, genuinely heartwarming buddy comedies out there, let alone buddy comedies starring black women. So it's a pleasure to report that ONE OF THEM DAYS, directed by Lawrence Lamont and penned by Insecure's Syreeta Singleton, is a really good time. It came out almost a year ago and I am utterly unsurprised that it was such a commercial hit and that it's getting a sequel. I am equally unsurprised that it has been nominated for Independent Spirit awards. 

The film stars Keke Palmer (HUSTLERS) as Dreux, a hard-working fast-food worker applying to become a franchise manager. She lives with her best friend Alyssa, a talented but uncompromising artist played by the musician SZA in her screen debut.  The plot is set in motion when the two girls need to make their rent by 6pm to avoid being evicted, because Alyssa's feckless boyfriend squandered the money.  Added to this, they need to get Dreux to her interview and avoid a local gangster who thinks they nicked his rare kicks. So the movie is set up as a zany caper full of madcap adventures and setbacks and quirky characters. My favourite of these are the loan-shark played by Larry David's Curb nemesis Keyla Monterroso Mejia and the madman standing outside her loan-shop called Lucky. Everything resolves beautifully, as we would expect, thanks partly to a white girl ex machina played with disarming earnestness by Euphoria's Maude Apatow. 

This film has a lot to say about how this economy is screwing over Gen Z - about housing unaffordability, gentrification, unequal opportunities, and the prison system of credit scores.  But it does so with gusto and fun and I really found myself rooting for, and believing in, the female characters. I will definitely be watching the sequel.

ONE OF THEM DAYS has a running time of 97 minutes and is rated R. It was released last winter.

TWINLESS****

TWINLESS is a slippery, dark, brilliantly constructed dramedy about co-dependence and the lies we choose to believe. It stars Dylan O'Brien (MAZE RUNNER) in a superb performance as a twin grieving the death of his brother in a car accident.  He finds comfort in the friendship of Dennis (writer-director-actor James Sweeney) who he meets at a support group for newly winless grieving siblings.  Dennis also sets Roman up with his co-worker Marcia (Aisling Franciosi).  The problem is that Dennis is a deeply lonely, sad, and unstable young man, who becomes unnaturally obsessed with Roman, and is seeking far more than mere friendship.

The resulting film is genuinely funny but also really dark, and its construction really keeps you guessing as to where Sweeney is going to take us.  It would pair well with Alex Russell's LURKER as it covers some of the same subject matter. I won't say more for fear of spoiling it. Suffice to say that this is a film of astonishing assuredness and dexterity for a new director. I also feel that the central double-performance of O'Brien deserves a lot of praise.

TWINLESS is rated R and has a running time of 100 minutes. It played Sundance 2025 where TWINLESS won the Audience Award - Dramatic. It  also played London 2025.  It was released in the USA last September. It will be released in the UK on February 6th.

SPLITSVILLE****

Writer-director-actor Michael Angelo Corvino has created an absolute banger of a romantic-comedy with SPLITSVILLE.  It's an absurd set-up and yet within that gets to some real deep truths about thirty-something marriages and contains one of the funniest punch-ups on screen. You can really tell that Corvinho and his co-writer and co-lead actor Kyle Marvin are best friends in real life.

The movie is about the relationships between and within two couples. The first couple comprises Carey (Marvin) and Ashley (Adria Arjona).  Carey thinks they are happily married but Ashley actually wants a divorce because she doesn't feel physically fulfilled.  She drops this bomb on Carey when they're on their way to see good friends Paul (Corvino) and Julia (Dakota Johnson). We think Paul and Julia are happily married, and they even have a young son, but we discover that they are in an open marriage.  Thus inspired, Carey and Ashley decide to start seeing other people, leading to a tour de force scene in which we see the camera move between the various partners that Ashley is hooking up with.  Apparently this was shot in one take which is truly impressive.

What we learn from this scenario pushed to an extreme is that there are real feelings involved when you cheat or even just hook up after a break-up.  These people are all flawed but they're fundamentally good and all care for each other. There's a lot here about insecurity and ageing and feeling that you have to be more for your partner. More hopefully, there's also something rather lovely in the community that comes together of the people Ashley is seeing.

It struck me watching SPLITSVILLE that despite the craziness, it all feels way more credible and relatable than THE MATERIALISTS, in which Dakota Johnson also stars. It's also far far funnier.  Adria Arjona proves that her hilarious performance in HIT MAN was no accident. Johnson is allowed to be real. And the two male leads are just absolutely superb. This truly is one of the funniest films I've seen in a while.

SPLITSVILLE is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Cannes 2025 and opened in the USA last summer. It will open in the UK on February 20th.

A LITTLE PRAYER****

A LITTLE PRAYER is a rare film of quiet humanity, compassion and nuance. It's a family drama in which believable real people face real challenges with no easy answers.  It's unafraid to confront dark material and yet left me feeling deeply hopeful. 

Writer-director Angus Maclachlan (JUNEBUG) situates us in contemporary North Carolina.  David Strathairn (GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK) and Celia Weston play Bill and Venida - two quietly decent straightforward Boomers and small business owners. They don't seek out confrontation but neither are they blind to what's going on around them.  The smallest pieces of dialogue hint at an emotional hinterland and past marital struggles.  

Bill and Venida not only share a business with their feckless son David (Will Pullen) but also live with David and his wife Tammy (Jane Levy).  The film is really centred around David's fondness for his daughter-in-law and disapproval of his son's affair with their co-worker Narcedalia (Dascha Polanca).  We also get the family rhythms disrupted by the arrival of Bill and Venida's self-absorbed and chaotic daughter Patti (PITCH PERFECT's Anna Camp) and her young daughter Hadley.  But even as Patti might be a caricature of a distracted and careless mother, we realise that she may also be dealing with a dark home situation scare by opioid abuse.

The movie is really about parenthood.  Bill has an amazing conversation with Narcedalia where he disabuses her of her expectation that parents can control their kids and that a parent-child relationship provides a more secure kind of love than that between romantic partners. He seems bewildered and exasperated by his own children and incredibly tender toward Tammy.  And Tammy, while conflicted about her own infertility and ability to bring a child into such a difficult relationship, seems like more of a mother to Patti's young daughter than Patti is. 

I love how patient and nonjudgmental this film is.  The character of David might easily have been a villain, but even he is granted a scene of humanity.  Narcedalia could have been seen as a villain too but her story is heartbreakingly credible and admirable.  But really this film belongs to Jane Levy and David Strathairn, and a central pivotal scene really shows Levy's talent. I am not surprised that she has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. It's one of the most affecting performances I have seen this awards cycle. 

A LITTLE PRAYER is rated R and has a running time of 91 minutes. It played Sundance 2023 and then went into distribution hell. It was finally released in the USA last fall and is available to stream. It does not have a UK distributor. (I watched it on a FISA streamer).