Our latest movie reviews

There’s an old joke that cave divers grow their hair long to cover the scar from where their brains were removed. You can probably apply it to big-wave riders too. Like leaping off a multi-storey car park on a dinner tray, these daredevils play chicken with the ocean as they cascade down 60-foot swells, with one misjudgment condemning them to serious injury, or worse. Forever in pursuit of the next colossal, unsurfed break, legendary big-wave surfer Andrew Cotton is a chilled dude ever so slightly on the edge in this free-spirited and quietly touching doc – a kind of west country Bodhi from Point Break (albeit his side hustle is plumbing not bank robbing). Aerial footage of the man riding the epic seas of Nazaré in Portugal offer a reminder of the enduring appeal of dry land. Cotton is one of the two contrasting poles in Mikey Corker’s cleverly constructed, bracingly told story. The other, English sailor and modern adventurer Matt Knight, is his partner on a quixotic mission to find that perfect wave. A journal written by a 19th-century treasure hunter called E F Knight serves as a kind of treasure map to their destination – a handful of rocky atolls in the Atlantic called the Savage Islands – and Charles Dance’s narration of the text is every bit as eloquent and evocative as you’d imagine. (‘The uneventful days passed by and I grew stout on laziness, salt beef and duff,’ recites Dance of a particularly glum moment for the mariner.) The spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson and s

It’s not every writer who gets a film made about them, let alone by legendary documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line). But then, not every novelist has had the cultural impact of bestselling espionage novelist John le Carré – real name David Cornwell – one-time spy and full-time cartographer of the Cold War’s shadowiest nooks and crannies.  Before his death in 2020, the man behind ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, ‘The Constant Gardener’ and ‘The Night Manager’ – and, indirectly, some of the greatest TV thrillers ever made – subjected himself to a series of interviews by the American filmmaker. On the table is, well, everything, as this formerly elusive man opens up about his disillusionment with the stuffy complacency of the British establishment, childhood abandonment, the cloak-and-dagger business of spycraft, and the imprint left by his roguish conman dad. With le Carré at one end of a grand table in an even grander library and Morris off-camera, there’s a delicious sense of two expert interrogators jousting, occasionally taking pause to explore the very nature of their conversation. Is Morris probing in the right areas? Can he win the trust of a man who knows all the tricks for extracting info from unwilling subjects?  Happily, this subject is here to talk. Like Morris’s The Fog of War, in which former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara took himself to task for the mistakes of the Vietnam War, The Pigeon Tunnel is a soul-searching confessional as much as a look b

The word ‘defector’ conjures up visions of atomic scientists and Cold War spies waiting for the moment to tiptoe through a border minefield and make a dash for freedom. But as this pulse-raising doc charts, for North Koreans, defection is less a political act than a bid for survival – an escape attempt where the price of failure is often death. American filmmaker Madeleine Gavin follows the stories of two escape bids: one by the five-person Ro family, including two young girls and an elderly grandma, who are hoping to reunite with relatives in Seoul; the other, the young son of a defector called Soyeon Lee, who is also attempting to cross the Yalu River and begin the long journey to join his mum in South Korea.The film’s greatest asset is incredible iPhone and flip-phone shakycam footage of the Ro family’s perilous flight, most of it captured by the so-called ‘brokers’ who run the escape networks for profit. And it is seriously perilous: the so-called ‘underground railroad’ spiriting North Koreans to freedom involves two major river crossings, almost impenetrable jungle, several mountains, and a seriously stealthy journey through China, Vietnam and Laos. Only in Thailand will they be free from the threat of arrest and a forceable return to Pyongyang, where torture and the gulag await.  The more uncertain progress of Soyeon Lee’s son, meanwhile, is captured through the fretful prism of a mum fearing for her boy’s life. Her hope that he’ll join her south of the border slowly cu

The first ten minutes of Michael Mann's ’50s-set Ferrari offer a wordlessly kinetic ode to industry: glossy racecars speed across open Italian tracks, stately trains glide into stations packed with anticipation, bedside phones jangle off hooks and onto nerves. But then the dialogue begins, and this carefully engineered movie starts its downshift into neutral. Though the movie is based on Brock Yates’ biography and Ferrari's own memoirs, Mann (Heat) narrows his focus to three months in 1957, when car magnate Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is facing bankruptcy. He’s already weighed down by a trifecta of personal burdens: the recent death of his beloved eldest son; a complicated double life with his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley); and the all-encompassing grief and fury of his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz). And now, he's got competition from Maserati – also based in his hometown of Modena – stalking him both on and off the track. Over the course of 130 measured minutes, Enzo slogs back and forth between his troubles. At home, Laura – with whom he started the business – gives him hell. Though she seems far sharper than Enzo, she has to spend most of her time reacting to every public dismissal and private rejection. Lina is more compliant, but not much happier. She’d particularly like Enzo to acknowledge their young son as his heir, even if he’s not ready to tell the world about her. Work is no easier. He needs outside money but can’t stomach outside influence. He wants more high-prof

Thought the silent movie renaissance began and ended with The Artist? Wordless wonder Pablo Berger is here to make you think again. The Spanish director has dug into Charlie Chaplin’s box of tricks to forge a gorgeous animation about friendship and connection – entirely without dialogue. Based on Sara Varon’s children’s graphic novel, visually as well as narratively, it’s set in the anthropomorphised, graffiti-strewn, Earth, Wind & Fire-fuelled ’80s New York, as if Saturday Night Fever had been invaded by the cast of Zootropolis. Our hero is Dog, a lonely mutt who lives alone, sadly passing the time playing Pong and awaiting the ping of his microwave macaroni.   Enter Robot, a mail-order friendship droid that quickly changes Dog’s life via the power of companionship. The previously baleful pooch comes alive as he rollerskates through Central Park and wolfs hotdogs with his new pal. Then the pair take a Labor Day trip to the beach and find themselves separated by a bad case of rust, a locked fence and a gruff security guard. Suddenly, Dog has a different sort of loneliness to contend with. If the animation style has a touch of the BoJacks, the story plays out a bit like super-loveable British buddy comedy Brian and Charles, where the A.I.-ness of the premise is almost beside the point. Like Charles Petrescu in that film, Robot is more game-for-anything kid than android, experiencing genuine joy and wonder with his new friend.  The visual gags embrace everything from Tati-esque

Sex, birth, death… the whole cycle of life is reflected in Smoke Sauna Sisterhood. Shot in an Estonian retreat, Anna Hints’ affecting debut moves to the rhythm of rituals and chants as the smoke sauna is heated and bathers whisk their bodies with plants, before witnessing intimate discussions between a group of women. Speaking individually, they talk openly and honestly about body image, the expectations of their parents, sexuality, dreams, trauma.  While a traditional doc might pull back and show the big picture – both literally and figuratively – this one zooms in on its subjects, showing fragments of bodies dripping in steam and sweat. Often they are intermingled, but this is about sisterhood, not sex. This is a tender portrayal of women in a safe space where they can let it all hang out without fear of the judgement that so frequently comes up in conversation. Some describe painful comments about their bodies that marked them as they grew up. One talks about coming out, and the cruel reaction of the woman she confessed her love for. There is a devastating account of a rape.  This is a tender portrayal of women in a safe space where they can let it all hang out Most of the women’s faces are tactfully obscured as they speak, but their words – even in subtitles – are riveting, whether they are disturbing, inspiring or funny. Yes, there is laughter here as well as tears: many watching will giggle along, recognising the release of sharing embarrassing stories, and the bonding

Sounding for all the world like a Thom Yorke solo album, Typist Pirate Artist King is actually a fanciful biopic of neglected artist Audrey Amiss (the title comes from her listed occupation in her passport), played with maximum vim and vigour by the ever-brilliant Monica Dolan (W1A, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa). For the uninitiated, Amiss is a Sunderland born painter who studied at the Royal Academy during the 1950s, suffered a breakdown and was in and out of institutions for the rest of her life. Taking a job as a typist, she continued to produce a constant flow of unseen sketches detailing her everyday life and compiled a stream-of-conscious journal, augmented by found objects (Frosties packets, Maltesers wrappers). Writer-director Carol Morley (Dreams of a Life, The Falling) discovered the treasure trove of Amiss’ work at the Wellcome Collection archive and used it as a jumping off point for a sensitive, enjoyable, slightly aimless but perfectly performed portrait of a cantankerous woman on fire. Morley has reimagined Amiss’s life as a road trip after the artist cajoles her long-suffering psychiatric care worker Sandra (Kelly Macdonald) to drive her to a local gallery to see if it will exhibit her work. What the canny Audrey doesn’t initially reveal is that the gallery is local to her hometown of Sunderland, drawing Sandra into a London to Tyne and Wear trek in her yellow hatchback (named Sunshine), Audrey dubbing her driver Sandra Panza to her Don Quixote, another itineran

D-Day’s 70th anniversary commemorations were attended by a host of the great and good: Barack Obama, Queen Elizabeth, François Hollande. You name it, if they were powerful they were probably there, in 2014, to remember the fallen of the Normandy invasion.    But all that thunder ended up stolen by an 89-year-old bloke from Sussex. Bernard Jordan, a Royal Navy veteran of D-Day, ‘escaped’ from his retirement home, made his way to Normandy with a few bits in a plastic bag and found himself on the front pages of newspapers around the world. A folk hero and war hero all in one, slightly cranky package.Even played by a wonderful Michael Caine with weary grit and loads of heart, Bernard’s journey might have made for the kind of soapy dramatisation of which British cinema is overfond. But The Great Escaper transcends the headline-friendly fairy tale to paint a genuinely moving portrait of an enduring love affair between Bernard and his wife, Irene (Glenda Jackson), that also touches on mortality, memory, trauma, and unexpectedly, Bernard’s enjoyably visceral hatred of cyclists.  With Jackson and Caine on this form, it’s a total heartbreaker Made in Dagenham screenwriter William Ivory’s script offers regular glimpses of the pair in their wartime years (played by Will Fletcher and Laura Marcus), young lovers torn apart when he’s whisked away to serve on a landing craft for the D-Day landings. The flashbacks are never overdone, working nicely to show how much life Bernard and Irene hav

It speaks volumes for the savagery of Russia’s foreign policy that there’s an entire, fast-swelling subgenre of documentaries featuring its bombing of civilian hospitals. To 2019’s heartrending For Sama, which recorded the destruction of the Syrian city of Aleppo by Russian bombers through the prism of a female filmmaker and her young family, comes an equally gnarly snapshot of the 2022 siege of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. Ukrainian videographer Mstyslav Chernov was on the ground to record what happened when Mariupol, a port city only 35 miles from the Russian border, was cut off by Putin’s invasion in February 2022. The footage he supplied to the world’s news outlets as an Associated Press reporter appeared on our TV news bulletins at the time. Here, it’s stitched together into an almost overwhelming document of a city, and its people, dying over three brutal weeks. In the manner of all good war reporters, Chernov resists making any of it about himself. His camera, often pointing downwards as he evades the crack of bullets and explosions a few streets away, tells the story with minimal editorialising and context. Frequently cut off from communication with the outside world, he’s in emergency rooms, observing mass graves and riding in improvised ambulances, bearing witness to the unfolding horrors. ‘Show how these motherfuckers are killing children,’ barks a doctor to camera as another child lies dead in surgery. His camera often points downwards as he evades the cr

The Creator explores a future where A.I. detonates a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles killing a million people – a bit like in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 nightmare. A decade later, in 2065, undercover soldier Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) lives with pregnant wife Maya (Gemma Chan) in an unnamed country in ‘New Asia’ and a raid ends with her being killed by NOMAD – America’s satellite weapon that tours the globe, raining down death from high in the earth’s atmosphere. Chaos and mass destruction rarely thrills so often or looks so good. Five years later, Colonel Jean Howell (Allison Janney) offers Taylor – now a broken ex-soldier earning a living in a scrapyard – a return to Asia to help defeat the AI-loving East, who apparently have a weapon that could destroy NOMAD. It’s a somewhat hackneyed enticement plot device seen in many war and crime films but Janney sells it well. All facial scars and harsh chat, her gung-ho character is a treat. Last time Janney was quite so tough on screen she got an Oscar for her role in I, Tonya. When Howell leads a crew way behind enemy lines, Taylor discovers the weapon is actually a child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Director Gareth Edwards created the story and co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Weitz. His last two features – Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the latter also co-written with Weitz – married booming, boisterous thrills within a pre-existing franchise world. The Creator is his best film to date, delivering on the pr