Exceptional, noteworthy and entertaining new films — and where to watch them. Every week.

Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

The Royal Hotel

“Green and Oscar Redding’s script is an artful Rorschach test. How much terror and tension you find in it may depend on your own social biases and personal experiences — and, frankly, how much thought you give to the threat of male presence in your day-to-day existence.”

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Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

Peeping Tom

“You freeze and hold your breath with the film as it pulls back the curtain on realities nobody really wanted to admit or address in the cinema on a Saturday night; you fear not just for the women on screen, but for your fellow viewers, then and now.”

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Catherine Bray Catherine Bray

Killers of the Flower Moon

“Those teeth! Oh my. Off-white, wonky, stained, with something of the weasel about them, these are the teeth of a grifter, the teeth of a weak man, second-rate teeth, teeth whose owner is incapable of real love.”

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Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

The Eras Tour — featuring concert footage, concert footage, more concert footage and nothing but concert footage — is a massive, somewhat overwhelming testament to Swift’s glistening, unrelenting professionalism as a performer.”

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Catherine Bray Catherine Bray

Saw X

“The new Saw movie is the best one in ages, and if you like that kind of thing, feel free to go get your rocks off with pride, ignoring any boring prudes judging your kinks or shaming your proud torture porn positivity”

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Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

Fair Play

“A tense, icy-hot boardroom psychodrama in which power is sex — or at least, in the increasingly fraught relationship between two Wall Street analysts climbing the ladder at different paces, it begins to determine it rather coldly.”

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Catherine Bray Catherine Bray

R.M.N

“The actors are the fabric of this film, and by the time an explosive town hall meeting rolls around and unfolds in real time, I was completely under their collective spell.”

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Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

Past Lives

Past Lives has stuck these past few months: when I think of it, I’m hit with the same soft, lapping wave of sadness that got me the first time, the same pang of attachment to a life, and a self, that hasn’t deserted me exactly, but now seems distant and strange.”

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Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

Passages

“Ira Sachs’ exquisite Passages feels like the Sunday Bloody Sunday of its era, albeit with the older film’s buttoned-up Englishness replaced with a shimmying Parisian fluidity.”

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Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

You Hurt My Feelings

“Any creative types may find themselves watching this otherwise gentle, ambling film in something close to a cold sweat, as we recall the times we've lied to loved ones and colleagues about their work, or doubted their praise of ours.”

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Catherine Bray Catherine Bray

Talk To Me

“I don’t say this lightly, as I’m a huge fan of the 1999 Devon Sawa slacker horror Idle Hands, but for providing decent jumps and scares within a compelling character-driven context, Talk To Me is a serious new contender for best ever evil-hand-themed horror movie.”

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Catherine Bray Catherine Bray

Oppenheimer

“The other thing that this reminded me of was the Proustian free-association of memory, where one memory can lead directly to the next, but at other times, the associations are looser or deeper or less intuitive, and the effect is of a river of time ebbing and flowing and circling back on itself.”

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Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

The Damned Don’t Cry

“Boulifa worked inventively with the spare, tight tropes of British kitchen-sink realism in his excellent debut, but under warmer Moroccan skies, he permits himself a more sensuous, bejewelled cinematic language.”

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Catherine Bray Catherine Bray

Wham!

“Constructed entirely from archive, some of it previously unseen, and laser-focused on the brief period that the band was active, a good part of its pleasure is to be found simply in lolling around in the early ‘80s, enjoying the hair, the outfits, the music.”

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Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

Small, Slow But Steady

“Shô Miyake’s lovely, bittersweet portrait of a deaf woman boxer is playing its own game, or fighting its own fight, and its rewards aren’t euphoric, but they’re substantial nonetheless.”

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Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

No Hard Feelings

“I appreciate the clash of tones and textures in No Hard Feelings, its smuggling of human sadness into sunny popcorn fodder, and the way it allows its megawatt star to play hot and cold, big and small, high and low, smart and dumb.”

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Catherine Bray Catherine Bray

Stars At Noon

“Chemistry is tricksier and slipperier — it lives in the body as well as the mind, and exists largely in the subjective eye of the beholder. Chemistry will creep up and have its way with you; it is porous and sinuous and extends beyond the performances of the actors in a film, seeping into their surroundings.”

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Guy Lodge Guy Lodge

War Pony

“There’s an unassuming poetry and humility to Riley Keough and Gina Gammell’s film that doesn’t assume intimate knowledge of the lives under scrutiny.”

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Reality

“What ensues isn’t the taut, driving procedural you’d expect from her story, but something more eerie and discursive, its investigative momentum continually disrupted by deceptive conversational banalities — reality, even. ”

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