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2/5
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The History of Sound
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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But as film zeroes in on Mescal's Lionel as he embarks on an illustrious, decades-spanning career in search of the happiness he once felt, it never soars emotionally; the epic sweep of the story is mostly at odds with the thinly conceived characters.
Posted Jan 22, 2026
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4/5
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No Other Choice
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...[Park Chan-wook's] proven ability to glide between different modes of storytelling within a single movie makes this a state-of-the nation satire devoid of assaultive polemics and rich in pulpy genre thrills...
Posted Jan 22, 2026
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2/5
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H Is for Hawk
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Though the scenes with Foy and Mabel the goshawk are well done, too much of it is composed of unconvincing, theme-explicating scenes that feel as intrusive as the over-bearing score and the performative smoking Foy’s Macdonald indulges in through out.
Posted Jan 22, 2026
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2/5
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Saipan
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Given Ireland ended up doing pretty well at the 2002 World Cup, the film succeeds only in making it all seem like a meaningless storm in a teacup.
Posted Jan 22, 2026
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4/5
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28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
(2026)
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Alistair Harkness
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As the middle part of a new trilogy, the film certainly embraces its second-act status, expanding the ideas and setting up a concluding chapter with another provocative cliffhanger.
Posted Jan 13, 2026
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4/5
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The Voice of Hind Rajab
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...it’s the film’s immediate and primal ability to connect audiences directly to the atrocity it’s exploring that justifies its existence.
Posted Jan 13, 2026
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2/5
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Rental Family
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...the Japanese practice of hiring actors to pretend to be family members gets a sentimental treatment in Rental Family, a fairly innocuous vehicle for Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser.
Posted Jan 13, 2026
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2/5
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Giant
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...the film coasts by on the standard rise-and-fall structure of the sports movie.
Posted Jan 06, 2026
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2/5
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Hamnet
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Like a glum spin on Shakespeare in Love, Hamnet, in the end, plays too much like primo Oscar bait.
Posted Jan 06, 2026
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2/5
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The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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... while there’s nothing wrong with providing pure cinematic silliness for five, six and seven-year-olds, there’s no joy or craft in the jokes on offer; it’s just a barrage of zaniness.
Posted Dec 18, 2025
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4/5
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Peter Hujar's Day
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...Peter Hujar’s Day offers a fascinating snapshot of the life of an artist in a much mythologised time.
Posted Dec 18, 2025
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3/5
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Song Sung Blue
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...Song Sung Blue’s stranger-than-fiction tale of a Neil Diamond impersonator’s turbulent life comes with the sort wild twists that almost justify the celebrity downsizing.
Posted Dec 18, 2025
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4/5
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The Housemaid
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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The plot twists may be wild but the cast...fully commit to the go-big-or-go-home performance styles required to make it all work.
Posted Dec 16, 2025
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3/5
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Sentimental Value
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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[Sentimental Value] is enjoyable enough thanks to the collective efforts of the cast and a few self-lacerating jokes about the changed state of the film industry.
Posted Dec 16, 2025
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4/5
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Marty Supreme
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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It’s a dizzying piece of filmmaking and Chalamet’s whiplash-inducing performance is one of the best things he’s done.
Posted Dec 16, 2025
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2/5
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Avatar: Fire and Ash
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...as a storyteller [James Cameron is] so in love with the hermetically sealed world he’s created he seems intent on trapping us there beyond what his hokey plot will support.
Posted Dec 16, 2025
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3/5
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Preparation for the Next Life
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Though stretched-thin in places, Behtiyar and Hechinger have plausible chemistry – and Liu’s gorgeous visuals capture the paradoxical allure of a city defined by struggle.
Posted Dec 10, 2025
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4/5
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Lurker
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...debut writer/director Alex Russell is so attuned to the world he’s exploring that what transpires feels sickeningly real and relatable.
Posted Dec 10, 2025
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3/5
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Silent Night, Deadly Night
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Silent Night, Deadly Night re-imagines the murderous Santa from the controversial 1984 slasher movie of the same name as a more creatively rendered psycho for this loose remake.
Posted Dec 10, 2025
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3/5
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Eleanor the Great
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Despite the script’s own clunky insistence that it’s about grief, it’s really about celebrating the importance of all lives, even when those lives are modest and uneventful.
Posted Dec 10, 2025
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2/5
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Sisu: Road to Revenge
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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The ensuing action is outlandishly grizzly, but the plot and character motivation is so rote it’s hard to invest in his titular quest for vengeance.
Posted Dec 02, 2025
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2/5
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The Thing with Feathers
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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As a film about grief it’s a cringey mix of elevated horror movie clichés and the kind of calculated heart-tugging you might find in a John Lewis Christmas ad.
Posted Dec 02, 2025
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2/5
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Wicked: For Good
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Wicked: For Good may thoroughly deconstruct the rich lore of The Wizard of Oz, but like the characters left behind at the end, what it builds in its place is devoid of magic.
Posted Dec 02, 2025
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3/5
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Alpha
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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If Ducournau sometimes struggles to make the drama compelling enough to follow such narrative breadcrumbs, her extraordinary finale helps the film transcend its frustrations.
Posted Nov 13, 2025
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4/5
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The Running Man
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Directing his first all-out blockbuster, Wright puts the film-geek sensibility he honed on the likes of Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver to good use here, skewering the barbaric TV world that serves as a backdrop to the film.
Posted Nov 13, 2025
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4/5
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Die My Love
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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[Jennifer Lawrence strikes] a fearless performance in this way, and a fearless film, bolstered by audacious images, jet black humour and impeccable soundtrack cuts.
Posted Nov 05, 2025
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4/5
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Dragonfly
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Mixing social realism with the enveloping dread of a finely-wrought psychological thriller, it’s a powerful film, unnerving and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Posted Nov 05, 2025
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2/5
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Anemone
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...Anemone is a self-indulgent slog that exploits the caché of the three-time Oscar winner’s return to acting to little real effect.
Posted Nov 05, 2025
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2/5
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The Choral
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Directed by National Theatre veteran Nicholas Hytner, from a script by Alan Bennett, the film fails to stir up much emotion, overstuffed as it is with too many thinly sketched characters.
Posted Nov 05, 2025
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2/5
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Predator: Badlands
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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The jokey, touchy-feely, kid-friendly Predator movie no-one was asking for arrives in the form of Predator: Badlands.
Posted Nov 05, 2025
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2/5
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Shelby Oaks
(2023)
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Alistair Harkness
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Liberally pilfering ideas from genre classics such as The Ring and Rosemary’s Baby with no understanding of what made them great, this fails to be scary at almost every turn.
Posted Oct 28, 2025
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4/5
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Relay
(2024)
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Alistair Harkness
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The resulting film is pleasurably old school in its twists and turns, but in Ahmed’s character it also offers a slyly ironic portrait of the isolation of the digital age: Ash is an analogue guy not because he wants to be, but because he has to be.
Posted Oct 28, 2025
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3/5
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Bugonia
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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The film may look spectacular...but it also feels like Lanthimos plundering his own back-catalogue for ideas, juxtaposing moments of absurdity with moments of bloody violence en route to a nihilistic punchline.
Posted Oct 28, 2025
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4/5
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Kenny Dalglish
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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For Dalglish, people always come first, which is why he’s still revered in his adopted city and why this film transcends its subject’s sport of choice.
Posted Oct 28, 2025
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4/5
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The Mastermind
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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It’s an intriguing proposition, but while Reichardt’s films never give much away about their characters, O’Connor’s JB is almost too much of a blank canvas. Still, the forensic way Reichardt chronicles JB’s ineptitude is pretty funny.
Posted Oct 21, 2025
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5/5
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Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Through it all White’s brooding intensity is just right for this darker side of Springsteen and his singing (augmented at times with the real Springsteen) is as raw as his performance. Like listening to the record, you feel like you’re there with him.
Posted Oct 21, 2025
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2/5
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Frankenstein
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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The end result is all style, very little substance.
Posted Oct 16, 2025
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4/5
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Souleymane's Story
(2024)
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Alistair Harkness
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...it’s a visceral piece of filmmaking, with moments of levity alleviating the daily grind of its protagonist’s existence and its star...imbuing the titular Souleymane with the sort of kindness, compassion and dignity...
Posted Oct 07, 2025
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3/5
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Good Boy
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Indy’s inability to articulate (beyond a bark or a whine) what we can see that he’s sensing keeps the unfolding horror pleasingly ambiguous. Scooby-Doo this ain’t.
Posted Oct 07, 2025
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5/5
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A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...Bigelow’s top-tier cast infuse their economically sketched characters with life beyond the claustrophobic confines of the setting...
Posted Oct 07, 2025
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4/5
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I Swear
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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If the film gets a little broad in places, it’s good at drilling down into the reality of living with Tourette’s without stigmatising it...
Posted Oct 07, 2025
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5/5
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One Battle After Another
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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... a blockbuster with purpose, a crazy epic about where we are right now, how we got here and why despair isn’t the answer. An instant masterpiece.
Posted Oct 03, 2025
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2/5
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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
(2024)
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Alistair Harkness
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...its ambitious attempt to present a child’s eye view of the resulting horrors proves too much for this film to pull off consistently.
Posted Sep 30, 2025
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1/5
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HIM
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Directed by debut filmmaker Justin Tipping, the heavily stylised film comes off like an exhausting mashup of Any Given Sunday and The Devil’s Advocate.
Posted Sep 30, 2025
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3/5
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The Smashing Machine
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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On the plus side, Safdie’s determination to avoid sports drama clichés is admirable. But making Mark Kerr a household name doesn’t seem like a good enough justification for a biopic.
Posted Sep 30, 2025
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2/5
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Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...it picks at some pretty low hanging fruit, with The Thick of It’s Chris Addison on board for a going-nowhere, if unintentionally apt, turn as a music-hating, revenue-obsessed suit drafted in to squeeze every last quid out of Spinal Tap’s last hurrah.
Posted Sep 29, 2025
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3/5
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Steve
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...[Steve is] also a film that wants some of the hope and uplift associated with the cornier version of this story, and so camouflages this intent with social realist tropes of its own...so we don’t notice how conventional it really is.
Posted Sep 27, 2025
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2/5
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The Strangers: Chapter 2
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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... this new film comes loaded with backstories and flashbacks in a concept-negating attempt to explain its killers’ origins. Directed by former action A-lister Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2), it’s pretty pointless.
Posted Sep 23, 2025
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3/5
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Dead of Winter
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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Sentimental flashbacks stop this being the lean, mean, propulsive thriller it could have been, but Thompson — accent in full Fargo mode — keeps it compelling.
Posted Sep 23, 2025
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4/5
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Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough
(2025)
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Alistair Harkness
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...Welsh himself is an entertaining tour guide through his own life, measured about his experiences in a way that resists sensationalism.
Posted Sep 23, 2025
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