In the long-awaited follow-up to his 2018 surreal satire Sorry To Bother You, Boots Riley turns his iconoclastic gaze upon the inequities of globalised late capitalism through the kaleidoscopic point of view of a group of shoplifters who find bizarre new ways to fight the power of an evil fashion designer.
Stew Mott
54 posts
Poland’s doyen of beautifully understated efficiency completes a trilogy of historical dramas with this pocket biopic that focuses on a road trip taken by Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his bohemian daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), following the suicide of his son and her brother, through the proud ruins of post-war Germany.
Martin McDonagh’s latest stroll around his favourite theme of hilariously toxic masculine friendships finds him treading on a few real-life thorns of twentieth-century political history. Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich team up as a pair of ageing CIA agents sent to Coventry (well, Easter Island), where they can rifle through the spilled guts of their careers while the real action carries on without them.
Olivia Colman lends her estimable talents, both comic and dramatic, to this endearing and hilarious fairytale for grown-ups. She plays a fisherwoman whose ripe profession ensures a certain amount of social ostracism in her tiny village community, and it’s only exacerbated when she asks the local basket weaver to build her a husband out of any bits and pieces he might have lying around.
..transplants a familiar SF / horror trope on to the gym-toned body of the superhero movie, and although it musters a few insights into the ugliness of human vanity, it’s chomping at the bit to unleash its malleable anti-hero so he can wreak his revenge.
In a moment of darkly comic madness, a primary school teacher gets so frustrated with the one endlessly disruptive pupil in her class that she decides to lock him up in her basement until either he calms down enough to learn, or they forge some kind of ersatz emotional bond.
In this hackneyed psychological thriller, a struggling writer (Dakota Johnson) is contracted to complete the latest novel by a reclusive bestselling author (Anne Hathaway) following her mysterious accident. But when she moves in, and gets sidetracked into researching her employer’s difficult family life, she finds far more than she bargained for.
An open marriage turns out to be more closed than its participants thought when a third wheel screws himself on to their conjoined chassis in this refreshingly sophisticated sex comedy. With gleefully heavy-handed metaphor, the plot is kicked into gear by a literal car crash that brings two couples together and flings their combined marital problems all over the highway.
Jessica Chastain plucks malevolently on her apron strings in a dual role as both goodie and baddie in this one-line pitch of a horror movie about a mother fighting off a supernatural being who competes for her young daughter’s attention by taking on her appearance.
Following the brilliant Barbarian and the even better Weapons, comedian-turned-filmmaker Zach Cregger completes a horror hat-trick by stamping his directorial personality all over this tense and surprisingly imaginative reboot of the barely-mourned franchise based on a popular computer game.
The legendary jazz pianist gets the biopic treatment, albeit with far less crowd-pleasing flash and far more character-based introspection, very much in keeping with the playing style of the subject and the musical idiom in which he flourished.
...complex comedy-drama about a film-maker struggling with problems both professional and personal, and all the while another film-maker is figuring out how to tell her story in a way that reflects his own equally difficult life.
Willem Dafoe is in quiet and self-effacing mode in this bittersweet comedy drama based on the Arthur Schnitzler novella about Ed, a long-retired poet rediscovered by a clique of young New York hipsters determined to lionise him until he re-enters their bohemian world by way of writing a memoir.
Claire Foy processes her grief over the death of her father through an obsessive commitment to a Eurasian goshawk in this middlebrow but emotionally affecting riff on Ken Loach’s Kes, which dramatises the popular 2014 memoir of nature writer Helen Macdonald.
...metatextual slasher movie about a young film-maker working on a reboot of a 1980s classic, while developing a penetrating relationship with the reclusive star of the original.
...everyone’s favourite friendly neighbourhood superhero has to contend not only with colourful new villains (and a couple of colourful old allies) but also with body-wide mutagenic changes that are turning him into a brand new kind of Spider-Man.
The stakes are raised to even more diabolical levels in this sequel to the gleefully violent and acutely socially aware 2019 horror hit, in which Samara Weaving’s plucky bride evaded the murderous attentions of her new in-laws. This time, she teams up with her sister (Kathryn Newton) against a whole illuminatum of super-rich families seeking to consolidate their power by any means necessary.
Deadites roam the screen in search of a vicious game of psychological torture and an easy buck (as far as the proprietors of this venerable intellectual property are concerned), when a bereaved and dysfunctional family finds itself stuck in a house in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do but go insane and try and kill each other as disgustingly and spectacularly as they can.