J. Paul Getty had a fortune. Everyone else paid the price. It was a knuckle-biting race against time worthy of a movie itself. With only seven weeks to go before…
Jason Best
Daddy’s Home 2 | Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell’s comic chemistry still raises a smile
More Daddies. More Problems. The 2015 comedy Daddy’s Home concocted good-natured fun out of the clash of a very wimpy Will Ferrell with a macho Mark Wahlberg, spinning chucklesome slapstick…
Modern Life Is Rubbish | Josh Whitehouse and Freya Mavor star in a Hornby-esque rom-com
Copying its title from Blur’s second album, London-set romantic comedy drama Modern Life Is Rubbish features a protagonist right out of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity: the nerdy music-obsessed male who…
The Oddsockeaters | Winsome Czech animated film reveals the secret of the missing socks
Unravelling a secret. At last! The mystery of the missing socks is solved to the relief of all. The culprits are the oddsockeaters, small fluffy creatures who snaffle the hosiery…
Hatred (Wolyn) | Harrowing Polish drama disinters World War Two atrocities in western Ukraine
About love in inhuman times. Little known in the West, the massacre of tens of thousands of ethnic Poles in the Volhnyia region of western Ukraine during World War Two…
Final Score | Dave Bautista gives this football-stadium set action thriller his best shot
35,000 lives. 90 minutes. No extra time. Ever since Bruce Willis’s John McClane first donned that grubby vest, filmmakers have worked up a sweat trying to come up with fresh…
Lost in Paris | Burlesque beanpoles Abel & Gordon go to town with whimsical slapstick
A touch of Tati. Eccentric comic duo Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, aka Abel & Gordon, go to town with their elaborately choreographed slapstick for the typically whimsical movie Lost…
The Bachelors | JK Simmons and Josh Wiggins star in moving comedy-drama about loss and recovery
A journey from grief. Devastated by the early death of his wife, maths teacher Bill Palet (JK Simmons) moves across country to start a new life with his teenage son…
Waiting for You | Atmospheric mystery drama starring Fanny Ardant and Colin Morgan
Buried secrets. A grief-stricken young Englishman encounters an enigmatic older woman in the south of France and disinters some long-buried family secrets in atmospheric mystery drama Waiting for You, the…
Patti Cake$ | Danielle Macdonald’s hip-hop wannabe spits bars with the best
Big girl with a big mouth. Hip-hop wannabe Patti doesn’t look like a rap star. She’s white, for a start, and a tubby ginger to boot. (Not that this held…
The Resistance | Drama-documentary chronicles a remarkable tale of World War Two survival
Hiding in plain sight. Among the many films about the Holocaust, there are very few that tell the stories of the Jews who managed to survive the war by hiding…
Canaries | A feather in his cap: Peter Stray’s low-budget Welsh horror flick
Offbeat alien invasion horror. Small-town Wales is probably the last spot you would pick for an alien invasion. Which in itself gives a nice comic edge to writer-director Peter…
Quackerz | Bizarre Russian-American-Chinese animated adventure fails to fly
They’ll quack you up. Feathers fly when a skein of mallards mistakenly invades a remote Chinese island of Mandarin ducks. But two young members of the rival flocks manage to…
Couples Vacation | Glamping proves far from cosy for David Arquette and Amy Acker
Love the one yurt with. Washed-up author Jack (David Arquette) heads off to an eco-friendly glamping retreat in rural Texas with his long-suffering wife Amanda (Amy Acker) in a bid…
Demon | A restless spirit crashes a rural wedding in hauntingly absurd Polish horror film
Slow-burn supernatural drama. A lavish wedding reception in rural Poland descends into chaos after the bridegroom starts behaving very strangely. It appears the tormented wandering spirit of a dead girl,…
Ali and Nino | Epic romance has a touch of Doctor Zhivago – and a whiff of Europudding
Star-crossed love. In early 20th-century Azerbaijan, a star-crossed young couple – Adam Bakri’s Ali is an Azerbaijani Muslim; Maria Valverde’s Nino is an aristocratic Georgian Christian – find their passionate…
Isle of Dogs | Wes Anderson’s quirky canine stop-motion animated adventure
If you’ve a taste for quirky movies then you will certainly lap up this truly bizarre stop-motion animated adventure from Wes Anderson, maker of 2009’s similarly offbeat Roald Dahl adaptation…
Ready Player One | Ready to enjoy Steven Spielberg’s giddy thrill ride at home
Ready Player One An adventure tale whose plot revolves around the pleasures of losing yourself in fantasy worlds, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is an exuberantly entertaining thrill ride, a…
Journey to Oz | Animated Russian children’s adventure is far from wizard
We’re not in Kansas anymore. Based on one of a series of Soviet-era tales adapted (or ripped off, if you prefer) from L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,…
The Delinquent Season | Bittersweet marital drama starring Cillian Murphy and Catherine Walker
‘Our happiness is fragile.’ Think of films about middle-class couples caught in adulterous tangles and you probably imagine the setting as Paris or Hampstead. Bittersweet Irish drama The Delinquent Season…