Dunkirk

An experience so emersive I actually forgot that I was in a cinema at all. Instead I was cowering inside a beached fishing boat being used for target practice by an unseen enemy. Or I was trapped in the cockpit of a Spitfire ditched in the Channel and rapidly filling with water. Or I was…

Baby Driver

Edgar Wright’s hymn to Ni Rox and I Pods starts with a blistering car chase around the streets of Atlanta which segues effortlessly into an intricately choreographed promenade by Ansel Elgort as the eponymous Baby. There’s more imagination and dexterity on display before the opening credits roll than is to be found in a raft…

The Beguiled

A wisp of black smoke on the horizon and the odd crump of distant artillery are about the only clues that seismic events are unfolding beyond the confines of Miss Farnsworth’s School for young ladies. It’s 1864 and the tide has turned decisively in the American Civil War. But you could be forgiven for thinking…

Alone in Berlin

Vincent Perez gives us an honourable, if rather stilted, account of the civil disobedience campaign launched by Otto and Anna Quangel (played here by Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson), between 1940 and 1943. He explores this brave and doomed act of defiance, which is yet another fascinating incident from the seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of Nazi…

A Man Called Ove

Rolf Lassgard was just about my favourite Wallander and here he brings the same air of crumpled defiance to the role of Ove. He’s a man out of time, out of friends, out of family and, after a brief and hillarious interview with the hated “white shirts”, out of a job. Recently widowed, he derives…

The Last Word

Zymoscope – a tool for testing the fermenting power of yeast – is the last word in my dictionary. But there is little evidence of any active ingredients in this hopelessly stale and predictable tale of intergenerational high jinks. It stars Shirley McClaine as prosperous octogenarian Harriet Lauler. An ex advertising guru, she’s an appalling…

The Forgiveness of Blood

Hard to credit that the biblical ‘eye for an eye’ system of justice known as Kanun flourishes in an otherwise modern European democracy. In Albania this brutal and exclusively masculine tradition co exists with a culture embracing mobile phones, video games and social networking. And it is the weird dissonance set up by these polar…