Cinema

Going for Gold is a biographical drama about a forgotten star of the 1970s. Frankie Lucas was a middleweight boxing champion, born on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, who won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 1972. Although he lived in London he wasn’t picked for the England team and instead he wore the colours of his native land. He did them proud. Frankie Lucas seems to have spent 42 years sitting in a council flat, smoking weed and sulking The script, by Lisa Lintott, emphasises Lucas’s virtues and downplays his rackety personal life and his habit of smoking bales of cannabis on a regular basis. His

Toy Story or The Godfather? Which way would Paddington in Peru go? Would the third instalment of a much-cherished series prove even better than the second (which was even better than the first)? Or would it be a thumping disappointment? The anti-climactic answer turns out to be a firm ‘neither’. While enjoyable enough, this is a rare example of a film that’s both too cautious and wildly over the top at the same time. What really powers the film is the goodwill of the audience towards the franchise It begins with Paddington – voiced as irresistibly as ever by Ben Whishaw – getting a letter from the Reverend Mother at

The Room Next Door is Pedro Almodovar’s first film in the English language and if it is his last we can probably live with that. The film, which is adapted from a novel by Sigrid Nunez, stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, who are terrific whatever they do, and it is aesthetically divine (the knitwear, in particular, is sensational). But dramatically it’s thin gruel. The subject matter is euthanasia, so you’d expect Almodovar to hold back on his usual flamboyant playfulness, bounciness and humour. But what is there to care about? Why do these two women matter? Where is that knitwear from? Spoiler alert: no answers are forthcoming. Take the

When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in the early 1940s, he pointed across the room at André Breton and said: ‘That is surrealism.’ Even today it can seem as if no other answer is available, so tenacious was his grip. A former student of neurology and psychiatry, with no qualifications other than an instinct for the coming thing (‘an astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms’, as he later described his fellow conspirator Louis Aragon), Breton encountered the early writings of Freud as a medical orderly on a trauma ward, during the first world war,

Joker: Folie à Deux is the sequel to Joker (2019), and you have to admire Todd Phillips for returning with a jukebox musical, co-starring Lady Gaga, and not giving fans what they expected – or wanted. (There were quite a few walkouts where I saw it.) It feels like a film that hates its audience. And itself But it’s not what anyone else wanted, either. It’s so inert and pointless that if staying the course isn’t the issue it’s only because staying awake is. I don’t blame Joaquin Phoenix; no one has worked harder at trying to sing since Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia!. He deserves some recognition for that

Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man is ‘a darkly comic psychological thriller’ that plays like an inverted Beauty and the Beast. What happens when the handsome prince turns out to be not all that? The three central performances are magnificent, and there’s a wry absurdist humour at work but unless you’re a fan of body horror it’s not an easy watch. I often had to look away. I can’t, therefore, say I particularly enjoyed seeing it, but now I have seen it I don’t regret it. Is that, dear readers, fudged enough for you? Sebastian Stan stars as Edward, an aspiring actor who lives in New York and has neurofibromatosis, the

Megalopolis, which draws parallels between the fall of the Roman empire and modern-day America, is a film by Francis Ford Coppola – and it couldn’t, in fact, be more by Francis Ford Coppola if it tried. He wrote, produced, directed and self-financed it ($120 million; ouch) and even found the time to be its greatest fan. On the film review sharing platform Letterboxd he has awarded it five stars. Way to go, Francis. We’re behind you even though, to be honest, you lost us quite early on. The movie is often baffling, and plainly nuts, but I’d prefer to see something baffling and plainly nuts by Francis Ford Coppola than,

Both horribly familiar and wonderfully shocking, this body-horror film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat does a very traditional thing – turning the scramble for youth and beauty into a monster of immeasurable disgust and immorality – in a huge way. There is nothing minimal or restrained or overly clever here; nothing of the nuance in language or wit that makes its forerunner, The Picture of Dorian Gray, so haunting. This is a presentation of the horror of ageing for the bombastic mash-up age, melding vampire, sci-fi, feminist tragicomedy and dystopian genres. It’s like a reverse Barbie but with lashings of Poor Things, Blonde, the uncomfortably up-close Marilyn Monroe biopic,

The Critic is a period drama starring Ian McKellen as a newspaper theatre critic famed for his savagery and it did sound as if it had all the makings of an entertaining and nicely savage little film. But through a surfeit of plot, it rather loses the plot, and the result is a surprisingly bland melodrama with the small-screen feel of one of those Agatha Christies the BBC forces upon us every Christmas. When is anyone going to properly appreciate what we critics go through? It’s a pity, as critics don’t often make it on to the cinema screen, unlike war reporters. War reporters, war reporters, why is it always

The Terminator is James Cameron’s first film, made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger, is celebrating its 40th anniversary – there’s a 4K restoration out in cinemas – and I’ve never seen it. I’m not wholly ignorant of 1980s action films, it may surprise you to hear. I’ve seen Diehard. I know a single fella in a vest can see off an entire army. But Terminator passed me by and now I’m glad to have rectified that. It’s engrossing, suspenseful, has a personality all of its own and absolutely stands the test of time. That last scene with the crawling, whirring, clanking arm? Best scene ever. Cameron, who would go on

In the Alien films, a xenomorph is a monstrous, all-consuming life form that exists only to make more and more copies of itself. Once the first xenomorph appears, it’s only a matter of time until all those gleaming chrome walls will be covered in creepy black goo and the humans suspended lifeless from the ceiling in webs of slime with their chests ripped open. The xenomorphs are not curious about the world. They don’t care that they’re in a spaceship in the middle of outer space. As far as they’re concerned, we’re all just warm bodies in which to incubate their young. The only thing they want to do is

Didi is a coming-of-age drama by the Taiwanese-American writer-director Sean Wang. It’s set in the summer of 2008 and based on his own adolescence – and here’s the bottom line: it’s an absolute joy. It’s funny, moving, authentic and takes you right back to being 13. (Agh!) The main character here is Chris (Izaac Wang), who is called ‘Didi’ by his family as that’s the Chinese for ‘little brother’. He is 13, lives in Fremont, California, and is about to start high school. There’s no father in the picture as he’s working back in Taiwan. His flustered, put-upon mother, Chungsing (the magnificent Joan Chen), can’t comprehend her children’s American ways

Horizon: An American Saga is a Western directed by Kevin Costner. It also stars Kevin Costner and is co-written by Kevin Costner and has been bankrolled by Kevin Costner – so if it’s Kevin Costner you’re after, happy days. This is Chapter One, and there are three more chapters to come, so even though it’s a whopping three hours long it’s only a quarter of a film. Sienna Miller doesn’t get to do much except look golden. She deserves better, I think Now I have to say something positive about it because, you know, Costner re-mortgaged his house to fund it and everything. Sienna Miller is a positive. I liked

Freud’s Last Session stars Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode and is a work of speculative fiction asking what would have happened if Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis had met to debate the existence of God. What if two of the greatest minds of the 20th century had the chance to thrash it out? Thrash it out they do but, alas, they cannot thrash any life into this film. If you are planning to see it at the cinema, a few espressos beforehand may not go amiss. It is directed by Matthew Brown, who co-wrote the script with Mark St Germain, on whose play it is based. It takes place on

Within the first five minutes of Two Tickets to Greece you know what it is and where it’s going. It’s based on what I call ‘the hate-love formula’ with its in-built guarantee: any two people who can’t stand each other at the outset of a film will have bonded by the end. In this instance it’s a womance featuring two middle-aged women who were inseparable at school but haven’t seen each other for 30 years. One is Blandine who, as an adult, is reserved and buttoned-up, while the other, Magalie, is – gulp – a ‘free spirit’. (Run, Blandine; run like the wind!) But while the film is predictable, it

Bruce Robinson is ramming a huge log into the grate of his ancient fireplace in mud-clogged Herefordshire. He’s 77 and the film for which he is famous, Withnail and I, is about to open as a play. Isn’t it curious it hasn’t happened before, given that the comedy is about two thirsty, unemployed actors and is a sort of love-hate letter to the theatre? ‘I was living on 30 bob a week – I could either afford fish and chips or ten gold leaf’ ‘I wasn’t fond of the idea of staging it,’ says Robinson, who wrote and directed the 1987 film based on his own boozy life as an

Sometimes I Think About Dying is one of those titles you want to shout back at – what? Only sometimes? It is co-produced by, and stars, Daisy Ridley from the Star Wars franchise who, in going from a blockbuster to an interesting independent film, is taking the opposite of the usual career trajectory. Perhaps you can only fight the Dark Lords of the Sith for so long? But it has paid off, as this is an understated little gem. It is directed by Rachel Lambert and written by Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Katy Wright-Mead and Kevin Armento. It’s hard to say what it is exactly. A dour, deadpan romantic comedy probably

When the trailer for Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic of Amy Winehouse, Back to Black, first landed, her fans were gracious. ‘This,’ they said, ‘is going to be terrific.’ I’m winding you up. They were horrified. It’s too soon, they said. It’s exploitative and trashes her legacy, they concluded, from having watched two minutes of footage. I can only say that, one, fanatical fans are like that whatever you do, and two, this is better than I expected (although my expectations were low). It does seem softened at the edges, and one can never forgive a falling-in-love montage set at London Zoo – ever – butI (mostly) didn’t cringe and it is

As the overture to Candide blazed away during the ovation for Maestro at the Venice Film Festival, three members of the audience flung their arms around in an imitation of Leonard Bernstein’s conducting style. They were his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, and their reaction said it all. Bradley Cooper, the film’s star and director, had pulled off a piece of cinematic chutzpah worthy of Lenny himself. His secret? The last quality you associate with the most embarrassingly flamboyant genius in American musical history: understatement. It’s easy to imagine the ghastly three-hour biopic Cooper didn’t make. West Side Story goes from near-catastrophe to wild triumph. Children all over America are