3 h. ago MOVIE REVIEW: We get to know horror sequel 'The Strangers: Chapter 2'

Middle entry of trilogy stalls amid dawdling script, while mystery surrounding its killers unravels.

Events

25 h. ago Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home review – an extremely moving look into the rock icon’s final months

This fly-on-the-wall documentary was meant to follow the couple as they left LA for Buckinghamshire. It turned into a compellingly intimate memorialAs sad as it was, there was something undeniably poetic about Ozzy Osbourne’s death in July, 17 days after his final performance with Black Sabbath in their native Birmingham, and only four months after he moved back to the UK. Consider Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home the explanatory notes accompanying that eerie, strangely elegant verse; a documentary following the rock icon’s final months as he reflects on his life, roots, work, ill-health and impending death. As for that last one, the 76-year-old didn’t believe in heaven or hell. And he was incandescent at the prospect of dying in his adopted home of America and lying for eternity in a “McDonald’s version of a cemetery”.Ozzy had been suffering from a slow-progressing form of Parkinson’s disease for the past two decades, which in conjunction with a 2019 spinal injury significan...

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30 h. ago Good Boy review – crafty supernatural horror leads with a heroic dog

A lovable pet is unlikely protagonist of 73-minute haunted house riff that has ingenious moments but gets repetitiveIn the horror genre, you’d be a fool to ignore the concerns of a dog. While cats are mainly lurking in dark spaces waiting to collaborate with the orchestra on a cheap jumpscare, dogs are quick to alert their owners of nefarious goings on, acutely sensitive to threats whether they be human or not.In the often ingenious new horror film Good Boy, a pet dog isn’t just an easily dismissed harbinger of evil, he’s the main character. Like last year’s Presence, which saw Steven Soderbergh tell a ghost story through the lens of the ghost, and In a Violent Nature, which gave us a gory slasher as seen by the killer, we’re given a fresh perspective on a story that’s anything but, this time a haunted house horror as seen by Indy, a loyal retriever. He’s worried about his owner Todd (Shane Jensen, whose face we barely see), who’s retreating to his grandfather’s remote cabin after a...

Events

34 h. ago GoldenEye review – Pierce Brosnan’s ‘sexist, misogynist dinosaur’ makes his Bond movie debut

The 1995 spy adventure introduced Brosnan as 007 and Judi Dench as M – blending high-octane action with a cheeky post-Soviet self-awarenessThis James Bond film from 1995, reissued for its 30th anniversary, is named after Ian Fleming’s own “Goldeneye” estate in Jamaica – though perhaps oddly, the film’s only Caribbean location is supposed to be Cuba. There’s a fair bit to enjoy here, although perhaps it’s best experienced on TV over Christmas in a Quality Street stupor. GoldenEye was the first to star Pierce Brosnan as 007, the first to see Judi Dench as M, and the first film to challenge its own franchise identity. As M crisply says to Bond: “I think you are a sexist, misogynist dinosaur and a relic of the cold war” – although her criticism of her star agent begins and ends with that description.The film gamely attempts to reposition itself in the new post-Soviet world, with a key scene (and some of the opening sequence) taking place among the discarded, crumbling statues of Soviet ...

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7 d. ago MOVIE REVIEW: We check out family frights in horror 'The Dark and the Wicked'

Director Bryan Bertino's fourth stab at horror is dripping with dread and atmosphere.

Events

7 d. ago Melania: The Opera review: 'First Lady satire that is somehow moving'

This opera about Melania Trump manages to straddle both comedy and tragedy

Politics

2 w. ago MOVIE REVIEW: We see if Netflix's 'The Thursday Murder Club' is a killer adaptation

Twee mystery runs on star power with worthy final reveals - although probably one too many.

Events

2 w. ago Swiped review – breezy drama gives dating apps the origins treatment

Lily James plays former Tinder employee who became founder of Bumble in an illuminating yet corny rise-to-fame taleIn 2012, a plucky, headstrong young entrepreneur crashes a startup mixer in Los Angeles, desperately trying to get their big idea off the ground. Naive and ruthlessly ambitious, they brave the skeptics, the losers, the people too good to talk to them and the people who don’t take them seriously. Eventually, inevitably, their genius – obvious, unsinkable, perhaps diabolical – collides with opportunity. Voilà! An origin story is born.Swap out the date and the city, and this would describe a pivotal scene in any number of recent movies and TV shows that take cinematic interest in the self-mythology of entrepreneurs. The dramatic logic and iconography of the origin story, basically true but always highly glossed, is by now so recognizable it almost writes itself: initial rejection, dogged persistence, chance meeting, lightbulb moment, big break. We’ve seen it in a wave of b...

Events

2 w. ago Swiped review – Lily James leads a girlboss Social Network that is half film, half Bumble advert

This Disney+ biopic treats Whitney Wolfe Herd’s often harrowing experiences in the male-dominated tech industry with appropriate seriousness, but ultimately becomes a bland PR exercise

Economics

2 w. ago Movie Review: ‘London Calling’ is Just Good Enough To Pick Up

Movie Review: ‘London Calling’ is Just Good Enough To Pick Up  InSession Film

Politics

2 w. ago MOVIE REVIEW: Were we hooked by horror 'requel' 'I Know What You Did Last Summer?'

Lazy writing and too many callbacks hinder shock reveals and some gnarly kills.

Events

2 w. ago 'Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle' opens to $70M, biggest anime debut in North America

“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Infinity Castle” carved out a place in box office history this weekend, slicing straight to No_ 1 to outpace the horror sequel “The Conjuring: Last Rites.”

Politics

3 w. ago The Wrong Paris review – Netflix Bachelor romcom makes few right choices

Miranda Cosgrove plays a woman involved in some reality show drama in another of the streamer’s many low-grade background watchesOne could argue that The Bachelor, the ABC reality juggernaut that has reified Christian-lite dating norms for 27 seasons, should be considered scripted content. The connections can be genuine, and the feelings often real, but the situations are contrived and manipulated, a pioneering brand of deliberately saccharine, hokey and ridiculous in the name of love and for the sake of entertainment. Watching The Bachelor and its spinoffs, as I occasionally have over its two-plus-decade run, is to be baffled, frustrated, annoyed and ultimately hooked. The show, with its in-group rituals and shocking sincerity, casts a strange spell over its contestants and its viewers; if you stick through one episode, you’re liable to start caring about what happens.No such spell exists for The Wrong Paris, Netflix’s latest attempt to build an in-house Hallmark Channel, in which ...

Politics

3 w. ago The Fence review – Claire Denis stumbles with a grim and grating misfire

Toronto film festival: French director has made of one her least effective movies with this dull and clunkily adapted version of 1979 play with a miscast Matt Dillon at its centreAfter trips to space (2018’s High Life) and Nicaragua (2022’s Stars at Noon), the French director Claire Denis has returned to more familiar territory: post-colonial west Africa. Denis, who grew up in several Francophone African countries, has made several movies that inquire into the troubled heart of such places, and now reaches into that well again for her new film, The Fence. In some ways, the film is hallmark Denis, flinty and strange and sometimes inscrutable. But it is also a disappointment, a leaden film whose points Denis has made more convincingly elsewhere.The Fence is based on a 1979 play by the late Bernard Marie-Koltès called Black Battles with Dogs. It tells the story of three white people living in a protected construction zone in a rural part of an unnamed west African nation. A fatal accid...

Events

3 w. ago Went Up the Hill review – icy ghost story feels a little empty

Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps star as a pair of strangers tethered by a late mutual relative who begins to inhabit their bodies. It’s deadly serious – too seriousWent Up the Hill is one of those stiff, formally austere films that critics feel obliged to describe as “meditative” or “cerebral”. It’s a deeply pensive ghost story with a difference, following Jack (Dacre Montgomery), a man who learns about his mother, Elizabeth – who abandoned him as a child – via unconventional means. She speaks to him through her widowed wife, Jill (Vicky Krieps), after her death by suicide. And vice versa, she can also enter Jack and speak to Jill, creating a strange dynamic with three characters in two bodies.In a more conventional horror production, these “from the grave” conversations might be staged with wild eyes, demonic voices, spinning heads and splattering fluids. But this is a steely, deadly serious work, directed by Samuel Van Grinsven with a hand so steady it could thread a needle in a...

Politics

3 w. ago The Long Walk review – Stephen King death game dystopia is the grimmest mainstream movie for some time

Fifty young men compete in an endurance event, during which they are shot in the head at point-blank range if they slow down, in this horrific buddy story adaptationIf you like your dystopian scenarios lean and extremely mean, then look no further than this Stephen King adaptation, which is surely one of the grimmest mainstream movies we’ve had for some time. The blunt premise is custom built for death and suffering: 50 young American men are selected by lottery for an annual marathon march. If any walker slows to less than three miles per hour, or strays off the road, they are removed from the competition – by being shot in the head at point-blank range. The final survivor wins whatever they want, they’re promised.Why these men would volunteer for a competition with such unfavourable odds we’re left to wonder, as the broader authoritarian society in which the story is set – which looks a lot like 1960s America – is barely seen or explained. It’s clear who we’re rooting for though: ...

Sport

3 w. ago Couture review – Angelina Jolie is the wrong fit for inert fashion drama

Toronto film festival: the Oscar winner is adrift in Alice Winocour’s uninvolving film about three thinly written women involved in a Paris fashion week showThe otherworldly beauty and consuming, tattoo-strewn look of Angelina Jolie hasn’t always allowed for a great deal of versatility as an actor, a difficult face to seamlessly slot into most stories. The star hasn’t seemed to be all that interested in acting for a while anyway (since 2012, she has physically appeared on screen just seven times) and has preferred to spend time behind the camera and focusing on both her family and her philanthropic pursuits. Her films as a director have been of both genuinely noble intention and minimal cinematic value (her last effort, Without Blood, premiered at last year’s Toronto film festival but still doesn’t have US distribution) and as she enters her 50s, it seems like she’s rediscovered her passion for acting again.The catastrophic box office for her ill-advised entry into the Marvel univer...

Events

3 w. ago Cronos: The New Dawn has me excited for the future of survival horror on Nintendo Switch 2

After also recently launching on more powerful consoles, Bloober Team's latest sci-fi horror also plays brilliantly on Nintendo's sequel hybrid console.

Events

3 w. ago The Christophers review – Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel spar in smart Soderbergh original

Toronto film festival: the actors play off each other beautifully in an intimate London-set comedy drama about art, commerce and the mess in-betweenIt seems like Steven Soderbergh might have developed a late case of anglophilia, the retirement-teasing director situating himself in London for three films within the last two years. The first was a needless, throwaway Magic Mike sequel, but then this spring he gave us the delicious spy caper Black Bag, a juicy riff on both John le Carré and Agatha Christie that dared to imagine a monogamous and supportive marriage as the epitome of sexiness. Unlike Woody Allen, who cursed us with a string of London-set clunkers after Match Point (Cassandra’s Dream, a film that cast Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor as cockney brothers, easily the most heinous), Soderbergh seems to be sticking around for reasons other than a nice holiday, his second offering of 2025 also feeling notable. It’s a quieter project than his last, a delicate two-hander closer t...

Politics

3 w. ago Ballad of a Small Player review – Colin Farrell wins us over in flashy, slight gambler tale

Toronto film festival: Conclave director Edward Berger makes a less cohesive follow-up with an over-stylised adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s novel sold by a killer central performanceIt was easy to understand why Edward Berger’s name was being bandied around in relation to the reinvention of 007, the director having shown himself to be more than capable of both extravagantly staged action (his Oscar-winning breakout All Quiet on the Western Front) and knife-edge intrigue (his Oscar-winning follow-up Conclave). He dismissed speculation at the time (with some mild annoyance) and the job has since landed at the feet of Denis Villeneuve – but his latest, China-set gambling drama Ballad of a Small Player, adds flashy bombast to his résumé and helps to explain why he even though he might have passed on Bond (and recently Ocean’s too), he’s in development on a Bourne.Berger is a canny commercial director, confidently switching between genre, language and location, the kind of able film-ma...

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