REVIEW: The Last Sacrifice

England still likes to remember itself its B&W heyday: BBC newsreels narrated in perfect RP, thatched cottages, fields rolling merrily into eternity.

Rupert Russell’s The Last Sacrifice starts inside that bucolic dream — and then slashes it open.

On Valentine’s Day, 1945, on Meon Hill, Warwickshire, elderly farm labourer Charles Walton was found murdered with his own tools; pinned to the earth with a pitchfork, his neck slashed by a billhook.…

REVIEW: Frankenstein (LFF 2025)

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a film of exquisite surfaces.

Every frame glows with painterly attention: the flicker of candlelight on stitched flesh, a crimson-lacquered angel, a rider frozen mid-gallop in a snowbound tableau. It’s as if Del Toro has built an anatomical model of Frankenstein – every bone polished, every vein visible – but forgotten to breathe full life into it.…

REVIEW: Hamnet (LFF 2025)

We all know how it ends.

That’s the strange power of Hamnet – its inevitability.

The film, directed by Chloé Zhao, adapted by her and Maggie O’Farrell’s from O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, begins beneath the shadow of this foreknowledge: Shakespeare’s young son will die, and from that death will come the greatest tragedy in English literature.…

REVIEW: Wake Up Dead Man – A Knives Out Mystery (LFF 2025)

Its title sounds like a declaration of an in-built twist, but Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson’s latest addition to the Knives Out universe, has loftier ambitions in mind.

After the classic manor-house intrigue of the original Knives Out and the sunlit, self-refractive satire of its sequel, Glass Onion, we find ourselves in the isolated parish our Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, in Chimney Rock, upstate New York.…

REVIEW: Mickey 17

Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s latest, is a Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie, but one that fails to come to life.

Our titular iterative protagonist, hapless sad-sack Mickey (Robert Pattinson; endearing, like a naïfish Looney Tune), discovers that intergalactic travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, when he realises he’s signed up to be an Expendable.…

REVIEW: Nosferatu (2024)

Robert Eggers’ remake of F.W Murnau’s prototypical horror classic is a gothic fever dream of carnal obsession and spiritual repulsion.

Winter, 1838: Estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult; acquitting himself as the thwarted hero) departs Wisborg, Germany. His destination is the castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård; essaying another classic movie monster), his firm’s mysterious new client, in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania.…

REVIEW: Conclave [London Film Festival 2024]

What happens when a group of men, sworn to humility, are given the power to elect the Vicar of Christ? Can personal fallibility be kept in check when the stakes are divine?

Conclave, directed by Edward Berger and based on Robert Harris’ novel, explores these questions as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) reluctantly presides over the election of a new Pope after the sudden death of the current pontiff.…

REVIEW: Joker: Folie à Deux

2019’s Joker was a comic book movie for people who don’t like comic books. Its newly-released sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, is both that and a musical for people who don’t particularly like musicals.

I told myself I wasn’t going to be sarcastic, but it’s tough when the director of the film you’re reviewing doesn’t seem to have much of a feel for the genre in which he’s working.…

REVIEW: Sing Sing

We open onstage, blue light and garlands.

We are in the presence of Divine G (Colman Domingo), wreathed and quietly commanding. One line he utters, essaying the role of Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, could serve as a statement on the whole film that is to follow: “And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’”…