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Jan 23, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Guy Lodge |Anton Bitel |Catherine Wheatley
From Tom Hanks’s role in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) to Keanu Reeves’s in The Lake House (2006), ‘architect’ has often been the Hollywood screenwriter’s go-to career for a male romantic lead: a neat mixture of masculine solidity and sensitive artistry, the movie architect dreams things and builds them and gets to stride importantly around construction sites in a sharp suit and hard hat.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel |Guy Lodge |Catherine Wheatley |Jessica Kiang
Leigh Whannell’s werewolf reimagining magnifies the shifting tensions within a young family as Christopher Abbott is cursed with a monstrous inheritance. 16 January 2025“This view never gets old, does it? No matter how many times you see it.” The speaker is Grady Lowell (Sam Jaeger), an ex-Marine survivalist and single father raising his young son Blake (Zac Chandler) with the toughest kind of love on their remote off-grid Oregon property.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Guy Lodge |Catherine Wheatley |Jessica Kiang |Arjun Sajip
“I could spend the rest of my life here,” says Margaret, a teenager played with a garish digital facelift by Robin Wright, as she snuggles up to her high school sweetheart Richard (Tom Hanks, given the same eerie CG botox treatment) early on in Here.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang |Anton Bitel |Guy Lodge |Catherine Wheatley
A notoriously blue movie gets a depressingly grey remake in Audrey Diwan’s dismal Emmanuelle, an ostensibly feminist take on the 1970s softcore phenomenon, that mainly serves the misconception that there is nothing witty or fun or remotely sexy about feminism. Say what you will about the objectionable original, at least you got the impression that the heroine of 1974’s Emmanuelle derived some pleasure from being the pliant plaything of the patriarchy.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Catherine Wheatley |Jessica Kiang |Arjun Sajip |Simran Hans
Fiction is littered with unwanted children. Their lots are rarely happy. From Oliver Twist to Harry Potter, these orphans are, as Dickens has it, pale with anxiety and sadness and the closeness of their prison. Longing for love while looking like death. Opening with a series of deformed, grimacing portraits – faces snarled into rictuses, as if Francis Bacon’s screaming portraits had sprung to terrible life – The Girl with the Needle takes Dickens’s simile horribly literally.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang |Catherine Wheatley |Arjun Sajip |Simran Hans
Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson have blisteringly hot chemistry as a tech CEO and intern who spark up an affair in a film that never punishes its protagonist for her desires. 8 January 2025Sex is literally the beginning and end of Halina Reijn’s sly, slinky Babygirl, which opens and closes with Nicole Kidman’s Type-A tech CEO Romy having intercourse.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang |Catherine Wheatley |Arjun Sajip |Simran Hans
The stars have blistering chemistry as a tech CEO and an intern who spark up an affair, in a witty tale of sexual adventure that avoids the expected moralism. 8 January 2025Sex is literally the beginning and end of Halina Reijn’s sly, slinky Babygirl, which opens and closes with Nicole Kidman’s Type-A tech CEO Romy having intercourse.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Leigh Singer |Catherine Wheatley |Jessica Kiang |Arjun Sajip
As this new biopic of Bob Dylan reaches its climax at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan, clad in a leather jacket, armed with a Fender Stratocaster and backed by a full band, controversially plays “electric” for a crowd for the very first time, infuriating festival organisers, including longtime supporters like his affable mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and an audience of folk purists alike.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David West |Jordan Cronk |Catherine Wheatley
Reviewing Victor Fleming’s now-classic musical upon its original UK release, our critic was full of praise but felt the film skewed towards a grown-up audience. 21 November 2024Spectacular fantasy, adapted from the forty-year-old American best-seller fairy story. Dorothy gets blown away in a cyclone from her home in Kansas where she lives with her uncle and aunt and her pet dog. She finds herself in the land of the midgets, where she is welcomed by Glinda, a beautiful and benevolent witch.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David West |Jordan Cronk |Catherine Wheatley |David WestReviews
A sober exploration of tradition, grief, and mortality The Last Dance is an unexpected change of pace for Anselm Chan Mau-Yin, a director known for the rom coms Ready Or Knot (2021) and Ready Or Rot (2023). Chan’s latest reunites two of the biggest names in Hong Kong comedy with Dayo Wong and Michael Hui working together for the first time since The Magic Touch (1992).
