This year has been packed with sequels, remakes and fresh new reels, from “Superman” and “28 Years Later” to an impressionistic Latvian animation about a cat.
One Battle After Another
The title of Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest movie is “no word of a lie”, said Alex Godfrey in Empire. “One Battle After Another” starts with an attack and “then barely lets up at all”. DiCaprio plays Bob, a dishevelled revolutionary “lost in a weed fug amid kidnappings and breakouts and car chases and a sensei played by Benicio Del Toro”. Dressed in a bathrobe, Bob races around trying to rescue his kidnapped teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti).
Director Paul Thomas Anderson “has a lot to say – but never with a sledgehammer, never on a soapbox, and never to the detriment of entertainment”. He has “cooked up his own take on the Great American Novel, a sweeping yet intimate epic filtered through a charged contemporary lens”. The father-daughter relationship is the “heart of the film” and, in her first ever movie, Infiniti “is a titan, squaring up to DiCaprio like she’s been acting forever”.
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Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier’s family drama doesn’t come out in the UK until next month but it is already generating Oscar buzz. “Sentimental Value” follows actor Nora (Renate Reinsve) as her estranged filmmaker father (Stellan Skarsgård) comes back into her life, and “truly cements” Trier’s “status as one of the working masters”, said Brian Tallerico on RogerEbert.com. He “builds subtle emotional momentum” with no melodrama. “The wounds that led to the estrangement aren’t fully defined”, but they run deep for Nora, which “makes it all the more startling when her director dad says he’s written a movie for her to lead”.
In some ways, it is a “spiritual sequel” to Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World”, said Radhika Seth in Vogue: “poignant, poetic, frequently surprising and quietly devastating”. It is “one of the meatiest parts” Skarsgård has played in years but this is really “Reinsve’s film”. Nora’s “heartbreak, uncertainty, dissatisfaction, need for affirmation, and the depression she slowly dips into – every single beat is so perfectly calibrated that it feels utterly natural”.
Superman
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s another Superman reboot. Clark Kent’s cape-wearing superhero returned this year in a “charming take”, written and directed by James Gunn, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. A “sincere” but “goofy” film with a few “twists on the mythology”, it captivated this “superhero-weary critic”. David Corenswet has “muscular shoulders, a dimple in his cheek and a curl in the middle of his forehead” – and most importantly, “when he says he just loves people” he’s entirely believable.
“All of this, of course, is corny. Hokey. Cheesy. Achingly sincere. Cringe, even,” said Glen Weldon on NPR. But this is partly what makes the movie work so well. After Gunn compared his film to an immigrant’s story, Fox News labelled it “Superwoke”. But this iteration of the character arrives as “bedrock American principles like justice for all, defending the defenceless, helping those in need feel out of reach” and it’s “inspiring to be reminded what those ideals look like”.
28 Years Later
It’s more than 20 years since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland “stunned the world” with their dystopian “masterpiece” “28 Days Later” (2002), said George Simpson in the Daily Express. A follow-up in 2007 did not set the world alight but this first in a new trilogy of sequels was “easily the best” film of the first half of the year. As the title says, it is 28 years since the Rage virus spread through the UK, turning its inhabitants into bloodthirsty monsters.
Our hero is 12-year-old Spike, who is taken by his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on an “ultra-violent rite-of-passage” trip to learn how to destroy infected humans, said Phil de Semlyen in Time Out. The scenes in which father and son hunt and are hunted are visceral and “thrilling” but the film takes a more contemplative turn when Ralph Fiennes appears as a former doctor, with – perhaps – the ability to cure Spike’s ailing mother (Jodie Comer).
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story
It would be difficult to make a boring documentary about Edna O’Brien, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. The Irish writer, who died last year aged 93, scarcely said or did “anything uninteresting in her life”. She “fearlessly and thrillingly” told the truth about the female experience in her novels and was “incapable of recounting a duff anecdote”. And this “beautifully constructed” portrait certainly does not sell her short. Using previously unseen diary entries, and featuring an interview with O’Brien herself, which she gave shortly before her death, it is a “tender and gripping” tribute to a woman who “carved her own path despite many attempts to bring her into line”.
O’Brien is “a gift from the documentary filmmaking gods”, said Hilary White in The Irish Independent. Her recollections, which are interspersed with archive footage and contributions from talking heads, are “brittle” and often shocking.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Adapted from Alexandra Fuller’s 2001 memoir, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” is set in 1980 in rural Zimbabwe Rhodesia (as it was then), said Kevin Maher in The Times, where a community of “bigoted and heavily armed white farmers” are drinking themselves “into seedy oblivion” as they await Robert Mugabe’s inevitable victory in the country’s first free elections, and the end of white rule. Forget the “colonial exoticism” of films such as “White Mischief”: this is “a place of infectious moral decay that is bleak, corrupt and grimy”.
Events unfold from the perspective of Bobo Fuller (Lexi Venter), a semi-feral seven-year-old whose white parents are on edge, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Her father is a member of a militia. Her mother (“played like a taut violin string” by Embeth Davidtz, who also directs) is a depressed alcoholic. Bobo is largely oblivious to the tension as she scampers around parroting her parents’ prejudices. Davidtz’s skill is in allowing her to bob on the surface, while we feel the “dark undertow”.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
“For nearly three decades, Tom Cruise has been running, soaring, slugging and white-knuckling it through the Mission: Impossible series,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Small wonder, then, that he looks a bit “beaten up” on the poster for “The Final Reckoning”, the franchise’s eighth instalment, and perhaps its last. But even if time is catching up with the 62-year-old actor, he is still pushing himself to “lunatic extremes”. In this “enjoyably unhinged” follow-up to 2023’s “Dead Reckoning Part One”, he plunges into deep waters and hangs off airborne planes – “insistently defying the odds as well as his own mortality”.
The story picks up where that last film left off, with an AI program called “the Entity” threatening to eradicate mankind, having first taken over the internet and now trying to seize the global nuclear arsenal. Of course it falls to secret agent extraordinaire Ethan Hunt, and his usual sidekicks, to do the impossible and save the human race.
The Brutalist
Brady Corbet’s Oscar-winning film follows Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones). Together, they flee post-war Europe and travel to the United States to begin rebuilding their lives. This is “not a film to devour, but to be devoured by”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. Pierced with the “fierce cynicism” found in Corbet’s earlier works, “The Brutalist” could have been a “traditional historic epic”, but is transformed into an “existentially disturbing monster movie. The monster in question is, of course, America.”
“Bold, confrontational and oversized in every way imaginable”, the sprawling three-hour film is an “uncompromising cinematic statement”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Shot almost entirely on VistaVision (a format last used in Hollywood in the 1960s), it’s a “visually arresting” movie, and Brody is “impressive” as the “gaunt, haunted” László. In all, it’s a “remarkable achievement”, and the kind of colossal “passion project” that is usually reserved for a tiny handful of “celebrated auteurs”. With “The Brutalist”, Corbet gains entry to this exclusive club.
Flow
The “closest thing to a big surprise” at this year’s Oscars came when this impressionistic Latvian film, created on open-source animation software for just $3.7m – and containing no dialogue – beat off the big studios to take home the Academy Award for best animated feature, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times.
With a smidgen of “The Wind in the Willows” and a dollop of “The Incredible Journey”, this “charming” film is about an unnamed slate-coloured cat making its way through the vestiges of a ruined civilisation in the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe. When the land around it begins to flood, the cat’s only chance is to leap onto a sailing boat, which it shares with a “lolloping” labrador, a “superior” bird, a “sedate” capybara, and, eventually, a lemur. Together, they float towards what we pray is safer ground; what they themselves expect from it, we can only guess. “You could see the film as a piece of outsider art”, but children will watch it “until the pixels wear out”.
Sinners
In this “sexy southern-gothic horror”, Michael B. Jordan takes the dual role of Smoke and Stack, “gangster twins” who have returned to their hometown in Mississippi in 1932, flush from Al Capone’s Chicago, said Ide in The Observer. They are now intent on opening “a black-owned juke-joint under the noses of the Ku Klux Klan” with their cousin, a talented young blues guitarist (newcomer Miles Caton), but it turns out that an “evil” even greater than the KKK awaits them.
Coogler takes his time to conjure a vivid picture of the black Deep South and its culture, said Angelica Jade Bastién in New York magazine. We see “bracing” shots “of cotton fields plumbed by sharecroppers, endless skies and dusty roads, the verdant expanse of a land that has witnessed so much sorrow”; the characters are cleverly drawn, and brilliantly acted.
A Complete Unknown
“In 1960, John, Paul, George – but not yet Ringo – became The Beatles,” said Matthew Bond in The Irish Mail on Sunday. “In 1962, the Rolling Stones were born. But in the year in between, 1961, another key moment in modern musical history took place – the then 19-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in New York” with his acoustic guitar. “A Complete Unknown”, the title of which comes from his track “Like a Rolling Stone”, is the story of what happened over the next few years, culminating in his divisive switch to electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Directed by James Mangold (“Walk the Line”), the film “grips, moves and does an excellent job of reminding everyone, even Dylan agnostics”, of the importance of his music, thanks not least to its star Timothée Chalamet, “who never stops looking like Timothée Chalamet”, yet somehow convinces us that “he might just be the young Bob”.
Nickel Boys
Every now and then, a film comes along “that understands the potential of cinema so deeply that it changes the medium for everyone”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. The 2015 Holocaust drama “Son of Saul” was one of those films, as was “2001: A Space Odyssey”. “To that list we now have to add ‘Nickel Boys’, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that is told completely, and audaciously, through point-of-view shots of its two protagonists, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson).” Opening in Jim Crow-era Florida, the film introduces us first to Elwood, whose blissful home life is turned on its head when he is sent to the “brutal Nickel Academy, a so-called reform school based on the real-life and equally infamous Dozier School for Boys”.
“The first-person use of the camera may not be a new filmmaking technique,” said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman but, in “Nickel Boys”, director RaMell Ross “takes it to another level”, immersing viewers in the boys’ world in a way that is “quite extraordinary”. This is a film that is “unlike anything else out there”.
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