10 h. ago MOVIE REVIEW: We decide if video game adaptation 'Until Dawn' is worth spending a night with

Director hindered by basic premise that makes it hard to root for lead quintet.

Culture

44 h. ago Bride Hard review – Rebel Wilson action comedy is hard to endure

The star makes for a charmless lead in a rubbishy attempt to mash a female-led wedding comedy and an action caperIn Apple’s 2023 car crash Ghosted, things went from worse to genuinely never been this bad when the sounds of Uptown Funk erupted during another shoddily choreographed action sequence. It was a marriage so heinous that one would be tempted to think it was parody had it not existed in a film so entirely devoid of humour and self-awareness. The Chris Evans/Ana de Armas vehicle became the new nadir of the action comedy, a subgenre that has been run down into the sewer by streamers, carelessly cobbling together big stars and bad quips on an almost weekly basis.But as dreadful as it was, there was something fascinatingly dreadful about it, a cacophony of bad decisions that became almost instructive to the industry in its of-the-moment awfulness. In this week’s Bride Hard, the latest tinny genre mix to get chucked at us, when Rebel Wilson’s shoddy kitchen-based fight scene is s...

Politics

56 h. ago 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland return to the zombie-infested world of ‘28 Days Later’ with interesting, if mixed, results

Politics

3 d. ago F1 the Movie review – spectacular macho melodrama handles Brad Pitt with panache

The cherubic sixtysomething stars as a supercool old-school driver returning 30 years after a near-fatal crash to break all the rules of Formula One racingWith that amused-cowpoke face of his squashed into his safety helmet, making his sixtysomething cherubic chops bulge in towards his nose, Brad Pitt gets behind the wheel in this outrageously cheesy but fiercely and extravagantly shot Formula One melodrama. Along with a lot of enjoyable hokum about the old guy mentoring the rookie hothead (a plot it broadly shares with Pixar’s 2006 adventure Cars), F1 the Movie gives you the corporate sheen, real-life race footage with Brad as the star in an unreasonably priced car, the tech fetish of the cars themselves (almost making you forget how amazingly ugly they are) with brand names speckling every square inch of every surface, the simulation graphics writ large, and the bizarre occult spectacle of motor racing itself.This is a movie which (like Barbie) has been licensed by the brand, with...

Events

3 d. ago The Brad Pitt vanity project F1 is just a bad version of Top Gun: Maverick

This Lewis Hamilton-produced sports film is a soulless endeavor, and far too infatuated with the near-mythical bravado of Pitt’s racing veteran to really work

Politics

7 d. ago Dangerous Animals review – serial killer meets shark movie in this formulaic fizzer

Jai Courtney eats up his role as the crazed captain of a tourist boat – but he can’t quite wrestle this creature feature from its straitjacketGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailFor a long time, serial killer and shark movies were separate forms of cinema; never the twain did meet. In Dangerous Animals they’ve been blended into one foul fishy stew, theoretically delivering the best of both worlds: a Wolf Creekian adventure with a creature feature twist. But, sadly, this collision of genres hasn’t resulted in any real freshness or flair, playing out with a stinky waft of the familiar.Jai Courtney gets the meatiest and most entertaining role as Tucker, the owner of a Gold Coast business that ferries thrill-seekers out into shark-infested waters, where they observe the great beasts from inside an underwater cage. After they’re hauled back on to the boat, Tucker kills them and feeds them to the sharks, while filming their grisly deaths on a camcorder for his personal collection o...

Events

1 week ago Finding Margaret by Andrew Pierce review: A moving tale of abandonment

Andrew Pierce’s moving memoir is dedicated “to Betty and George, my real mum and dad”. That puts the story that follows in perspective. It’s about his search for his birth mother. But we know at the start that it has a happy ending, because Betty and George were there for the little boy, who grew up to be a distinguished journalist.

Politics

2 w. ago MOVIE REVIEW: We see if 'Final Destination: Bloodlines' breathes new life into horror franchise

Sixth instalment honours series' legacy as well as adding to its lore.

Events

2 w. ago Straw review – Taraji P Henson rises above Tyler Perry’s tortured Netflix thriller

The Oscar nominated actor gives a powerhouse performance as a woman pushed to the edge but the punishing film around her does a disserviceTyler Perry is not beating the allegations. For decades, the content-creating studio chief has been roundly criticized for making the traumatization of Black women a persistent theme in his work. In Straw, his latest exercise in misogynoir for Netflix, he pulls out all the stops to break the camel’s back.The guinea pig for this cultural stress test is Janiyah (Taraji P Henson), an apex Perry caricature who is past the point of exhaustion. Her loud, hot and dumpy apartment isn’t all that keeps her in perennial discomfort. There’s also a precocious young daughter (Gabrielle E Jackson) with nagging medical issues, and that eviction notice on the dining table. She can’t make ends meet despite working three jobs, and her cashier’s position at the local food desert grocery store is especially thankless. When an angry customer spikes a bottle of fizzy dr...

Politics

2 w. ago Strategic defence review live: Starmer says UK moving to ‘war

PM outlines new measures to put nation on war footing

Events

3 w. ago MOVIE REVIEW: We decide if you should feel compelled to watch exorcism

Wastes its genre-flipping premise and several actors we’ve seen do much better work.

Politics

3 w. ago Marriage Material at the Lyric Hammersmith review: a raucously funny and often moving family saga

Even when it stretches plausibility – those wigs! – this sprawling immigrant aspiration story is a pleasure to watch

Politics

3 w. ago Along Came Love review – l’amour, loss and lingering shame in eventful French relationship movie

Director Katell Quillévéré explores the ravages of romance in an intelligently performed period piece about a shamed mother and a closeted husbandThe title of Katell Quillévéré’s first movie, Un Poison Violent from 2010, was taken from Serge Gainsbourg’s song Un poison violent, c’est ça l’amour, and the awful toxicity of love is a theme that has run through her work ever since. It is an underground stream that has become very much an overground stream in this new, heartfelt movie. It’s robust and a little unsubtle, without the nuances and indirections that govern her best work, but handsomely produced and resoundingly performed, avowedly autobiographical and inspired by her grandmother. Quillévéré has said that her influences are Maurice Pialat for the tough realism and Douglas Sirk for the melodrama and the sense of buried shame. I wonder if there isn’t some David Lean in there for the final scene at the railway station.Madeleine is a young single mother played by Anaïs Demoustier;...

Politics

3 w. ago Bring Her Back review – Talk to Me directors return with a film you’ll watch from between your fingers

Sally Hawkins is intensely disturbing as the foster parent from hell, with Jonah Wren Phillips playing a creepy kid for the ages in the Philippou brothers’ new horrorAustralian horror film-makers have spectacularly overdelivered in the last few years, conjuring various nerve-shredding bangers including Late Night with the Devil, You Won’t Be Alone, You’ll Never Find Me, Sissy, Leigh Whannell’s underrated Wolf Man reboot and Talk to Me. The latter – which revolves around thrill-seeking teenagers who converse with spirits instead of taking recreational drugs (kids these days!) – marked the fiendishly good debut of Adelaide-born directors Danny and Michael Philippou.They’re back – or baaa-ack! – with another serving of macabre bravado pulled from the black cauldron. Bring Her Back is lighter on thrills and spills for the midnight movie and heavy with thick, abject horror and despair, featuring an intensely disturbing performance from Sally Hawkins as a foster mother from hell. She play...

Politics

3 w. ago Ellie Simmonds: Should I Have Children? review – fails to properly tackle the stigma around disabled babies

The Paralympian’s thoughtful documentary about whether to become a parent is a compelling watch. But it doesn’t go far enough to address social prejudices around disabilityFor the makers of Ellie Simmonds’ new documentary, Should I Have Children?, the most powerful moment of the show is clearly supposed to be when she finds out why she was given up for adoption. It is emotional viewing: her birth mother speaks of her difficult circumstances (she had kept her pregnancy secret), the purely negative information she had been given about Ellie’s dwarfism, and, most poignantly, how she thought of Ellie every day in the decades before they met again. It is deeply moving, for Ellie and the viewer.For me, though, the most powerful moment is altogether less charged. It comes when Ellie visits David and Megan, whose pregnancy she follows after they are told their baby almost certainly has Down’s syndrome. We watch them grapple with the ramifications of the diagnosis including their fears for t...

Events

4 w. ago MOVIE REVIEW: We see if 'It Feeds' satisfies horror fans' taste buds

Little originality on show but still works. on its own merits - just.

Events