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2/5
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Regretting You
(2025)
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Adrian Horton
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At a too-long two hours, Regretting You is at once mild and bumpy, any momentum jolted by basic hits of mourning or uninspired romance, mechanical delivery and off-timed humor.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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3/5
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Palestine 36
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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None of these characters quite flares passionately into life but all are persuasively portrayed, and it’s a vehement reminder of what doesn’t get taught in British schools.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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4/5
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Kenny Dalglish
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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Asif Kapadia has curated an absorbing portrait of footballer Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool’s legendary player and then player-manager, using a quilt of archive clips with voiceovers.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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3/5
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In Waves and War
(2024)
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Leslie Felperin
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Since few things are duller than watching someone else having an experience on drugs, the film opts to illustrate the trips with tasteful animation featuring images of our subjects spinning in space, surrounded by the memories that assault their senses.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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2/5
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Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
(2025)
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Mike McCahill
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Its gleeful perversity is semi-interesting: what the success of these titles tells us is that there’s an audience whose desires aren’t currently being met by Hollywood pencil-pushers. Man, is it male-oriented, though.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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3/5
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Writing Hawa
(2024)
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Phuong Le
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Throughout this touching film, moments of progress and setbacks often collide.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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5/5
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The Last Sacrifice
(2024)
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Phil Hoad
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It is a sophisticated analysis, clued in to how real life and fiction combine to stir up the silt of the imagination in ways propitious to manifesting the supernatural.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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2/5
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Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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A derivative, if well intentioned, piece of fan fiction.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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4/5
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Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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An intriguing, bittersweet family study.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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4/5
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Relay
(2024)
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Peter Bradshaw
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There are some very coolly orchestrated scenes in the big city and Mackenzie ratchets up the tension in style.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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3/5
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Boston Kickout
(1995)
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Catherine Bray
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None are exactly appealing characters, but all ring true.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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4/5
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Stoltenberg - Facing War
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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The film, for all that it finally verges on complacency and self-congratulation, subtly shows us that these temporary problems are in fact not so very bad for Stoltenberg and Nato.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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3/5
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Love+War
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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Addario is a smart, candid interviewee who is alive to the dangers of adrenalin addiction and a world in which journalists are increasingly considered fair game in war zones.
Posted Oct 22, 2025
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3/5
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Hedda
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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Hedda discloses a crazy world of hedonism and gossip; more Hedda Hopper than Gabler.
Posted Oct 22, 2025
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3/5
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Chain Reactions
(2024)
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Leslie Felperin
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No one says anything truly groundbreaking, but the bricolage of movie clips (thank fair use copyright laws) is well edited and deepens one’s understanding of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and horror film-making more widely.
Posted Oct 22, 2025
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3/5
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The Spin
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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Here is a goofy road movie comedy with some cheeky borrowings from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity; it’s a bit broad, and the ending doesn’t exactly gel, but it’s likable all the same.
Posted Oct 22, 2025
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1/5
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Shelby Oaks
(2023)
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Benjamin Lee
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There is no amount of late-stage patchwork that can hide what still feels awkwardly unfinished, a cheaply cobbled together head-scratcher that really doesn’t feel ready for a wide theatrical release.
Posted Oct 22, 2025
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3/5
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The Hand That Rocks The Cradle
(2025)
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Benjamin Lee
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As deeply unnecessary 90s nostalgia plays go, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is one of the less egregious examples of late, a serviceably entertaining retread that manages to add enough tweaks without losing the basic pleasures of the original.
Posted Oct 22, 2025
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4/5
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Sketch
(2024)
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Cath Clarke
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This is a family film with an IQ higher than the average.
Posted Oct 21, 2025
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Dracula
(1979)
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Derek Malcolm
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All all the skill of Peter Murton's production design and Gilbert Taylor's photography there is something missing.
Posted Oct 21, 2025
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3/5
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It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This
(2023)
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Cath Clarke
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It’s all fairly entertaining until the scary stuff starts happening. As if the movie were coated in Gore-Tex, the frights simply don’t permeate the surface.
Posted Oct 21, 2025
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4/5
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The Draft!
(2023)
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Catherine Bray
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Is there a sense of diminishing returns eventually, as the genre is endlessly remixed and sampled? Will horror eat itself? Not yet, says The Draft! -- or at the very least, it will make the act of autophagia a highly entertaining one.
Posted Oct 21, 2025
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2/5
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Diablo
(2025)
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Phil Hoad
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If the Cormac McCarthy rip-off wasn’t enough, Ernesto Díaz Espinoza’s ponderous thriller also gives El Corvo a couple of scenes lifted from The Terminator, and the villain from Enter the Dragon’s blade-hand for good measure.
Posted Oct 21, 2025
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3/5
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100 Nights of Hero
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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Gender, sexuality, status and power are all in flux here, a playful effect that is however withdrawn when we arrive at the sacrificial seriousness. It is a sweet tale which floats self-consciously out of the screen.
Posted Oct 21, 2025
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4/5
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Strange Harvest
(2024)
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Catherine Bray
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Ignore the film’s marketing, which seems intent on positioning it as a run-of-the-mill masked maniac movie; this is a fascinating and neatly realised horror riff on the 2020s’ most popular genre.
Posted Oct 20, 2025
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3/5
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Wilfred Buck
(2024)
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Phuong Le
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Moving between the sky and the Earth, from the personal to the collective, Jackson’s sweeping documentary conjures a universe of experiences with striking style and insights.
Posted Oct 20, 2025
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2/5
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Levers
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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Levers is clearly something which has been carefully authored with scrupulously intended meanings and associations. Yet it does not really come to life.
Posted Oct 20, 2025
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2/5
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& Sons
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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& Sons doesn’t deliver on the promise of all its film-making talent but Nighy is always amusing.
Posted Oct 18, 2025
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4/5
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Blue Moon
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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It’s a terrific performance from Hawke. This could be a stage musical -- but who will write the songs?
Posted Oct 18, 2025
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2/5
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Black Phone 2
(2025)
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Benjamin Lee
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Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.
Posted Oct 16, 2025
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3/5
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Ballad of a Small Player
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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It’s a movie of big moods and grand gestures, undercut by the banal inevitability of losing.
Posted Oct 15, 2025
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3/5
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Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie
(2025)
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Cath Clarke
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This film really is a sunny delight as the weather turns cold.
Posted Oct 15, 2025
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3/5
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The Secret of Me
(2025)
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Leslie Felperin
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The Secret of Me director Grace Hughes-Hallett has a slightly more tabloidy, heavy-handed style than that deployed by Cohen in Every Body, but the two films complement each other and serve this complicated, knotty subject well.
Posted Oct 14, 2025
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4/5
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Sunlight
(2024)
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Phil Hoad
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Conti manages the feat of being funny, emotionally astute and kinda sexy throughout.
Posted Oct 14, 2025
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2/5
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The Twits
(2025)
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Cath Clarke
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Any of Dahl’s gruesome sense of fun is obliterated by a bulldozing message of empathy and kindness... This is vile and revolting in all the wrong ways.
Posted Oct 14, 2025
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Stephen King's It
(1990)
|
Paul Bailey
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I don't give a Stephen King's Damn.
Posted Oct 14, 2025
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4/5
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Souleymane's Story
(2024)
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Phil Hoad
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The issues are fundamentally the same: the enforced invisibility of a class of economic migrants who are now so numerous that many game the system, doubling their exploitation. Sangaré’s exemplary, unfeigned performance helps them speak.
Posted Oct 13, 2025
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3/5
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H Is for Hawk
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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Philippa Lowthorpe’s intriguing, likably performed if slightly precious film addresses these questions, but can’t quite deliver the Hollywood redemption narrative that it appears to offer.
Posted Oct 13, 2025
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3/5
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John Candy: I Like Me
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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There’s an amazing lineup of collaborators and stars, and it’s good to see Candy’s uniquely likable and buoyant screen personality, but the tone borders on the stultifyingly reverential.
Posted Oct 13, 2025
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2/5
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The Woman in Cabin 10
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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It sounds fun on the face of it, and the sheer silliness of the situation almost keeps it afloat, but the cardboard quality of the drama gets soggy.
Posted Oct 13, 2025
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4/5
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Good Boy
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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There is something very theatrical about Good Boy -- I can imagine this on the London West End stage. Perhaps it would be much less with a lesser cast: Graham and Riseborough execute the bland nastiness expertly.
Posted Oct 13, 2025
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3/5
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Iron Ladies
(2025)
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Cath Clarke
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Forty years on, the hatred for Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady and the woman whose government defeated the strike, is still raw: “She was one iron lady, we were hundreds.”
Posted Oct 13, 2025
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4/5
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I Swear
(2025)
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Peter Bradshaw
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This is an absorbing, compassionate film.
Posted Oct 13, 2025
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Born Yesterday
(1950)
|
Guardian Staff
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A brilliantly accomplished comedy actress: the lines which [Holliday] has to deliver in her vacant, brittle little voice are wickedly barbed.
Posted Oct 13, 2025
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4/5
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Is This Thing On?
(2025)
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Adrian Horton
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Is This Thing On? starts with a punchline – sad divorced dad stumbles into a bar as a cry for help – and smartly works backward; like a great routine, beneath the jokes lurks something tender, grounded and real.
Posted Oct 11, 2025
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My Beautiful Laundrette
(1985)
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Derek Malcolm
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It is by no means a masterpiece, but that simply does not matter, because it is trying for something different, and something very important indeed.
Posted Oct 10, 2025
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2/5
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Vicious
(2025)
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Benjamin Lee
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There’s only so much cutting and hacking and stabbing that can distract from unsure writing that isn’t taking us anywhere or really pushing us into pondering the uneasy moral questions at its centre.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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Farewell, My Lovely
(1975)
|
Philip French
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Character takes precedence over suspense in this elegiac movie.
Posted Oct 08, 2025
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The Celluloid Closet
(1995)
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Derek Malcolm
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Narrated by Lily Tomlin, speaking Armistead Maupin's words, it posits the idea that our attitudes are shaped by the films we see and that, since almost all of them are mainstream, Hollywood has a lot to answer for.
Posted Oct 08, 2025
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4/5
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A Want in Her
(2024)
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Leslie Felperin
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If A Want in Her has a flaw it could do with a bit more in the way of narrative progression, a teleological shape that drives the story forward. That said, at least it offers some sense of closure.
Posted Oct 08, 2025
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