The Prom (12A) Verdict: Exuberant fun Rating: The Midnight Sky (12A) Verdict: Ponderous sci-fi drama Rating: While I wouldn’t want to overload you with positive news in the week in which the first Covid-19 vaccines were administered, The Prom offers another way out of our vale of tiers, if only in the form of two … Read more
Mank (12A) Verdict: Cherishably intelligent Rating: Psycho, Mary Poppins and Citizen Kane are the unlikeliest of cinematic bedfellows, but they now have one striking thing in common — they have all inspired some terrific filmmakers to hold up a mirror to their own industry, with beguiling results. In the excellent 2012 film Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins … Read more
Billie (15) Verdict: Hits all the right notes Rating: The Three Kings (PG) Verdict: A real crowd-pleaser Rating: Lennox: The Untold Story (15) Verdict: Not a knockout Rating: Of a trio of new documentaries, the pick is Billie, a truly riveting film about the great blues artist Billie Holiday, whose teenage ambition, growing up in … Read more
The Witches (VOD, including Amazon, Prime Video and Sky Cinema, from Monday, PG) Verdict: Enchantingly gruesome Rating: The Secret Garden (cinemas, PG) Verdict: Mildly disappointing Rating: Once Upon A Snowman (Disney+) Verdict: Not too abominable Rating: The imagination of Roald Dahl and the ingenuity of director Robert Zemeckis make an enchantingly heady brew in The … Read more
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Rating: Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani is not the only person entitled to watch Borat 2 through his fingers. For the rest of us, too, that is at times the only proper response to a comedy that doesn’t so much push at the boundaries of taste as bulldoze them over the … Read more
Rebecca (Cinemas, 12A) Verdict: Revisiting a classic Rating: Daphne du Maurier did not write her haunting 1938 novel Rebecca expecting it to be adapted for the screen — but it wasn’t long, as she put it herself, before film people were ‘sniffing around’. The sniffing has never really stopped. Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated movie was released … Read more
Saint Maud (Cinemas, 15) Verdict: Gripping and disturbing Rating: Kajillionaire (Cinemas, 12A) Verdict: Might steal your heart Rating: I Am Woman (Cinemas, 15) Verdict: Tin-eared biopic Rating: Religious fervour in the movies is a hell of a thing. We’ve only just seen Harry Melling as a murderous preacher with a messiah complex in the Netflix film … Read more
The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix, 15) Verdict: The jury’s out Rating: On The Rocks (Cinemas, 12A) Verdict: Flimsily appealing Rating: With the U.S. at another convulsive moment in its history, with accusations of racism and police brutality flying from one side and of Left-wing agitators stirring up trouble from the other, Aaron … Read more
David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet Verdict: Powerful and important Rating: About 25 years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sir David Attenborough. He was already regarded as a kind of wise, benign uncle to the nation. Now he’s 94, maybe we should think of him as a great-great uncle. Sitting alone with … Read more
Bill And Ted Face The Music (cinemas, PG) Rating: Verdict: Uninspiring rehash The Devil All The Time (Netflix, 18) Rating: Verdict: Dark but gripping The Christopher Nolan blockbuster Tenet has not, it seems, quite achieved what the cinema industry hoped by tempting multitudes back to the multiplexes. But since it needs two or three viewings … Read more