Sarah Manvel 
Though no one has ever said so explicitly, The Mallorca Files was clearly designed to remind the British of the benefits of a close relationship with Europe. The show is filmed in a Spain where everyone speaks fluent English, with one British and one German lead actor, and a supporting …
A career woman finds herself unexpectedly pregnant? Snore. Without knowing who the dad is? Seen it. But pregnant with twins, by each of her suitors? Outstanding. Without hyperbole, this is the greatest concept for a romantic comedy in the history of time. Bad Newz then surpasses the excellence of its …
This inspired by true events biopic is crowd-pleasing cinema at its best. An ordinary Joe goes toe to toe with heartless billionaires, conniving moneylenders and unfair bureaucracy all in an attempt to make life better and easier for people like him. Will he succeed?? The set-up answers its own question, …
In 2020, director Lee Isaac Chung made Minari, the story of an immigrant family in Arkansas with dialogue almost entirely in Korean. An extremely insulting debate sprang up about whether the movie was American, only possible because the immigrants weren’t white and not speaking English. Mr. Chung has now responded …
Scarlett Johansson co-produced this movie as a vehicle for herself, which should automatically mean it’s worth watching. She has largely focused her career on how someone with a body like hers navigates the world, but here, her body is not the center of attention. Instead it’s her mind, specifically her …
It is always, always a delight to see a movie that should not exist. Whether the artistic ambition is implausible or the plot is incredible, it’s always a pleasure to see the impossible, especially when it’s so determined to entertain us. Hundreds of Beavers is a mixed-media (part live-action, part …
It’s been apparent to the discerning student of world cinema for a little while now that Indian movies are about to burst into the Western mainstream. (Modesty be damned, I mentioned this on my personal blog at the end of last year.) The ground-breaking Oscar for RRR was the beginning …
Someday, a movie in which a man defeats an attacking spaceship with a single punch will get a negative review, but today is not that day. Kalki 2898 AD is not only the most expensive Indian movie ever made, but also the first in a planned series of movies – …
It’s a tale as old as art – male characters do stuff, and female characters react to male characters doing stuff – but it’s rarely taken to such an extreme as in The Bikeriders. Kathy (Jodie Comer, more on whom later) quite literally narrates the story of the Chicago biker …
Tiger Stripes can be described as Carrie meets Turning Red, which unfairly minimizes the courageous central performance from young Zafreen Zairzal. But even with a fresh setting – an all-girls’ middle school in the Malaysian jungle – there’s regrettably no freshness in the plot. That makes this only a frustrating …
Meeting with Pol Pot is very loosely based on a memoir by an American journalist named Elizabeth Becker, who was at its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival. It must have been a very strange feeling to see a fictionalized version of some of the most important events in …
Roberto Minervini shared the best director prize in the Un Certain Regard strand of this year’s Cannes Film Festival for this mumblecore-style film about soldiers in the Wild West during the American Civil War. It’s the flipside to Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga (reviewed separately), which has broadly the …
There was one movie at this year’s Cannes Film Festival which was a passion project for the director that got all the attention: Megalopolis. But there was another movie, a passion project for the director, that also played Cannes, albeit not in competition: Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1. This …
Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo is kind of the ur-text for the modern adventure story. Published in 1844, it has it all: treachery, sword-fighting, injustice, long cons, false identities requiring elaborate disguises, secret children, hidden treasure, beautiful ladies, villains becoming heroes, heroes becoming villains, and revenge served …
Any description of The Shameless could make it sound like the most exploitative trash, so it’s stunning to realize that despite the grim setting, the exceptionally troubled characters, and the hopelessness of their situation, that it isn’t. This is a testament to the skill of writer-director (and Bulgarian-American) Konstantin Bojanov, …
Miguel Gomes won the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for Grand Tour, which he co-wrote with Telmo Churro, Maureen Fazendeiro, and Mariana Ricardo, because it is an impossible film. It’s an epic pan-Asian journey best described as a mash-up of Wisconsin Death Trip and Apocalypse Now, …
In an unprecedented move, the Cannes Film Festival jury awarded the Best Actress prize this year to the four actresses of Emilia Pérez – Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Karla Sofía Gascón and Adriana Paz. This is almost as startling as French writer-director Jacques Audiard making a primarily Spanish-language musical about …
The art-house multiverse is here, but this is not necessarily a good thing. The entire point of a multiverse is to enhance the ways in which people engage with each other, whether across time, the planets, or weird dimensions, and to offer space for human interaction not bound to the laws of physics. But the ways …
Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos need each other. Through Ms. Stone, Mr. Lanthimos has an entry into Hollywood and the chance for his work to go mainstream worldwide, and through Mr. Lanthimos, Ms. Stone gets the art-house credibility usually denied to actresses whose careers began in teenage sex comedies. But just because they make quite a pair, that doesn’t mean the work …
Other reviews compare Anora to Pretty Woman, but this is a bad mistake. The world has moved on considerably since 1990, and these days, capitalism is now second to oligarchy. Oligarchs are people for whom life is to be lived without consequences because their incredible wealth means anything, or anyone, can be bought. …