Film

At last, a film about the G7. There have been more movies than you can shake a stick at set in the Oval Office and No. 10 and other citadels. But not once has cinema gathered democracy’s prime septet in the same frame, the way the annual Group of Seven summit does. Until Rumours. ‘Did you cast me because you couldn’t get anyone else to do it?’ Blanchett asks To play the leaders of the free world at this geopolitically sensitive moment, Rumours has attracted stars of magnitude. Cate Blanchett is the German chancellor, Charles Dance the American president. Roy Dupuis plays Canada’s pin-up prime minister and Alicia Vikander gives

Nightbitch stars Amy Adams as a mother who is so full of rage about her loss of identity it makes her feral and she starts turning into a dog. It’s weird and there is nothing I can say to make it sound less weird – she grows a tail! Extra nipples! – but it’s actually a more regular and less wild story than you might have imagined. In other words: once you get over the dog, it’s fine(ish). If you can’t get over the dog, forget it. It is directed by Marielle Heller (Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood) and

Conclave is a papal thriller based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris and it stars a magnificent Ralph Fiennes. If he doesn’t win an Oscar I’ll eat my hat and also yours. Luckily, the film is also well written, smart, taut and visually stunning. You’d think the costume designer (Lisy Christl) wouldn’t find too much to play with, given it’s all vestments and cassocks, but they are gorgeous. The cardinals can be catty and bitchy and deceptive but I will say this for them: they know how to work red – and those little caps. The cardinals can be catty and bitchy but I will say this for them:

Watching William Kentridge’s film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is like being submerged inside his mind, inside the coffee pot maybe. There’s so much going on both visually and intellectually that there’s no room at all for a viewer’s own feeble thoughts. ‘When a work lands the excitement is physical, like biting into chocolate. You feel it in your salivary glands’ Superficially, the film is a look inside the South African artist’s studio and an invitation to watch him work. Over four-and-a-half hours and nine themed episodes you see him making his familiar expressive drawings in charcoal and ink, but this studio is also a stage; there’s dance, puppetry, dips into

Sean Baker’s Anora won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is hotly tipped to win big at the Oscars and I know you won’t believe it’s as good as everyone is saying it is until you hear it from me so here you are: yes, it’s as good as everyone is saying it is. All the cast are stellar but Madison is mesmerising and carries the whole thing It stars Mikey Madison – who is a total knockout – as a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch. But this is not Pretty Woman. This film takes Pretty Woman and smashes that fantasy over its knee, but

It’s nearly 25 years since Ridley Scott’s Gladiator came out and you’ve probably been wondering what happened to the little boy in that film. I know I have. I can’t say it’s kept me up at night, but at the back of my mind it’s always been: where is Lucius, son of Maximus, nowus? Well, Lucius, son of Maximus, is nowus a strapping lad with thighs of steel who has been forced to become a gladiator and fight for his life just like his pop. This film borrows heavily from the first instalment. True, it does have some new elements. It has Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, monstrous man-eating baboons, sharks,

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

Heretic is the latest horror film from writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quite Place) and stars Hugh Grant, now enjoying the villainous chapter of his career. (See: Paddington 2, The Undoing, The Gentlemen, etc.) Here, he plays a fella who imprisons two young Mormon missionaries as he seeks to torment and terrify them into renouncing their faith. What Grant’s most good at, it turns out, is being thoroughly bad Though the film doesn’t quite land and may not be as clever as it thinks it is, it builds tension nicely, and it’s enjoyable watching Grant have so much fun. All those years as a rom-com star when what

The Apprentice is a dramatised biopic of Donald Trump, covering his early business years. He has called the film ‘FAKE and CLASSLESS’ and ‘garbage’ – but he wishes it well. I’m pulling your leg. ‘It will hopefully “bomb”,’ he has said. He hasn’t seen it, as far as anyone knows – I wish I could review films without seeing them; so time-saving – but even so, the writer, Gabriel Sherman, is ‘a lowlife and talentless hack’. If Trump had not trashed the film, you could say it had failed in what it was trying to reveal, which is: why does he behave this way? Where does his attacking mindset come

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

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

Firebrand is a period drama about Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr. It is sumptuously photographed – it’s as if Hans Holbein were behind the camera – and magnificently costumed. And Jude Law is tremendous as the monstrous, ailing Henry but be warned: it doesn’t play fast and loose with the facts so much as throw them out the window. This can work, if it’s for a good reason, but this, alas, never seems to find that reason. Law’s performance is so gloriously disgusting you can’t take your eyes off him The film, directed by Karim Ainouz and based on the book by Elizabeth Fremantle, states its aim

The most important thing to know about the filmmaker and writer Marguerite Duras is that she was a total drunk. ‘I became an alcoholic as soon as I started to drink,’ she wrote, proudly. ‘And left everyone else behind.’ It’s not something any of the academics who’d been drafted in to introduce each film in the ICA’s exhaustive Duras season thought to mention, even in passing. Instead they spent their time trying to convince us that her films were political: they were about Palestine, feminism, decolonisation. They aren’t. They’re about being bladdered. They’re about the fact that Duras would wake up by vomiting her first two glasses of booze, before

August is known as ‘dump month’. It’s when the most forgettable films are released on the grounds that people don’t go to the cinema much in the summer. But maybe they don’t go because the films are so forgettable? Either way, the best film you probably won’t go and see this week is Widow Clicquot. You may wish to make a note of that. Shall I go on? With this film you probably won’t see? Better had. This space won’t fill itself. Some weeks I wish it would. But we all have our crosses to bear – plus it’s hardly coal-mining. The best film you probably won’t go and see

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