Cinema

Damien Chazelle produces his most wildly ambitious film to date

Betting against a ‘visual masterpiece’

He has given the art of cinema more than virtually any other filmmaker

Billy Eichner is repellant

His life and work were more than Marvel movies

Non-Fiction reviewed

‘We can say Merry Christmas again’ — and again, and again

Once more, with feeling

What might an evening at the flicks with the 45th President look like?

‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017. ‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened. Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and … Read more

You Were Never Really Here is a fourth feature from Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and the first thing to say is that it is exceptionally violent. I don’t say this disapprovingly but if your threshold for violence is as low as mine — I incurred a paper cut … Read more

Films about the Winter Olympics don’t grow on conifers. Twenty-five years ago there was Cool Runnings about the Jamaican bobsleigh team. It took many years for Eddie the Eagle to reach the screen. Both were cockle-warming comedies about implausible Olympians who embody the ideal that participation is all. Only last week Elise Christie, the British … Read more

Lady Bird is a semi-autobiographical film written and directed by Greta Gerwig with a plot synopsis that need not detain us as it is basically only this: girl has a mum. (Or: girl has a mum, and sometimes they row and sometimes they don’t.) But thus far it has won near universal critical praise, two … Read more

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a lush psychosexual drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a pampered, tyrannical, pernickety 1950s couturier whose life is disrupted when he falls for a waitress who, in the most unexpected way, proves his match. It is a wonderfully fixating film in every respect, and wholly non-formulaic. And it miraculously transforms … Read more

Downsizing is a film with the most brilliant premise. What if, to save the planet, we were all made tiny? What if we only took up a tiny amount of space and flew in tiny planes and produced tiny amounts of rubbish? And what if we could live in the sort of mansions that would … Read more

Steven Spielberg’s The Post, which dramatizes the Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, doesn’t exactly push at the frontiers of storytelling. It’s told straight and in a familiar way. Here are the journalists furtively working through top-secret government papers in a smoke-choked room for the public good. (There were no empty pizza … Read more

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri does, indeed, feature three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. They have been placed at the roadside on the outskirts of town by Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), a middle-aged woman whose teenage daughter had been raped and murdered seven months earlier. The billboards read: ‘Raped While Dying’; ‘And Still No Arrests’; ‘How … Read more

Brad’s Status is a midlife crisis film starring Ben Stiller as a nearly 50-year-old man whose status anxiety is through the roof, poor thing. My heart bleeds and all that. I’ll tell you what Brad’s status should be: face well and truly slapped. The film is written and directed by Mike White (Beatriz at Dinner; … Read more

Molly’s Game marks the directorial debut of Hollywood’s most celebrated screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, and is based on his adaptation of the memoir by Molly Bloom. Nope, me neither, but she’s the one-time Olympic skier who, at the age of 26, started a high-stakes poker game for ‘the richest, the most powerful men in the world’ … Read more