As Kong continues to terrorise us in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, we rate some great apes

Despite the English title, there’s only one “ape” in this cheesy slice of Mexploitation, once labelled a video nasty. A mad doctor transplants the heart of a gorilla into his dying son; the youth turns into a homicidal simian creep who sexually assaults women. Also features a lady luchador.

Continue reading...

Nezouh, a dreamlike story of a family under siege in Damascus, seeks to portray the difficult decision of to stay or go, and leave the country they love

When Soudade Kaadan embarked on the journey to make a film about her war-torn home city of Damascus, she was burdened by “certain expectations as to how a Syrian film should look”.

“They want us to simplify the complexity of the Syrian war for western audiences,” she says. “I refuse to do that. They want films from Syria to be explanatory and informative and not a film with storytelling, with a personal point of view.

Continue reading...

Gosling does the dirty work in this entertaining action film, which has moments of tenderness with Blunt among the crashes, leaps and fireballs

You might need to get your indulgent smile firmly in place for this colossal action comedy – not unlike the adorable smirks on the faces of its male and female leads, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, who play the daredevil movie stuntman and the stern director with whom he is in love. It’s a goofy summer crowd-pleaser (and you can never have too many of those) that is very far from the edgier and more satirical mien of Richard Rush’s 1980 movie The Stunt Man , in which a Vietnam draft evader hides out on a movie location, doing dangerous stunts in return for anonymity. Actually, this one is loosely inspired by a 1980s TV show, also called The Fall Guy , about a stuntman with a parallel career as a bounty hunter – starring Lee Majors, a legend who puts in a tongue-in-cheek cameo here along with his co-star, Heather Thomas.

Gosling plays seasoned stunt maestro Colt Seavers, utterly unafraid of any physical challenges, self-effacingly doubling for insufferably conceited star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who outrageously claims to do all his own stunts. Colt is having a passionate affair with beautiful, talented camera operator Jody Moreno (Blunt), but when he is involved in a catastrophic and career-ending failed stunt, he is overwhelmed with macho shame, thinking the accident was his fault because his infatuation with Jody made him take his eye off the ball.

Continue reading...

Lucy Illingworth wowed audiences on the TV talent show, but her journey started as a toddler with dedicated tutor Daniel Bath. Now, a documentary shows how they did it – and the shocking moment a royal disaster almost stopped them

Lucy Illingworth is the breakout star of the ivory-tinkling TV talent show The Piano . When the teenager, who is blind and neurodivergent, sat down at Leeds railway station, then 13, her rendition of Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat minor brought rush-hour crowds to a standstill and reduced bystanders to tears. Clips of the performance have clocked up millions of views online and it has been nominated for Bafta’s Memorable Moment of 2024 .

In the season one finale at the Royal Festival Hall in London, Lucy was crowned the unofficial winner of the Channel 4 show. She was duly invited to play at the king’s coronation concert last May. But as a new documentary reveals, the biggest gig of Lucy’s life was almost derailed when her lifelong piano teacher fell foul of royal security.

Continue reading...

Violent story of extreme sport, forbidden love and a lot of murder could be a new grindhouse classic, but Stewart’s fierce subtlety pushes it up a level

British film-maker Rose Glass lets rip with some pure roid-rage cinema in this uproarious, horribly violent and lethally smart noir thriller sited in the Venn diagram overlap between bodybuilding, murder and sex. The bodycount climbs so alarmingly that the characters are in danger of running out of rugs to roll the corpses up in.

Glass has assembled a great cast – but first among equals has to be Kristen Stewart who gives an excellent performance as gym manager and twitchy nicotine addict Lou, embroiled in an amour fou. Why aren’t we talking more, or in fact all the time, about what a great actress Stewart is? Her snapping: “No!” in a tense situation and thereby refusing to let herself have a cigarette from a stray pack, is one of the laugh lines of the year.

Continue reading...

In the new documentary The Contestant, a Japanese man is put through an astonishing TV experience for more than a year

When Tomoaki Hamatsu, an aspiring comedian from the Japanese province of Fukushima, auditioned for the reality show Susunu! Denpa Shōnen in January 1998, he arrived with zero expectations and a dream for some fame. Reality television was still in its Wild West infancy – no contracts, no protections, still just a handful of home-grown personalities. The new frontier of reality celebrity was just opening up, and Hamatsu, who went by the childhood nickname Nasubi – the Japanese word for eggplant, owing to his long face – saw an opportunity. His only boundary was a request from his mother: “Don’t get naked.”

As captured by the show’s producers and now reassembled in the remarkable new Hulu documentary The Contestant, a young Nasubi – short hair, wide and near-blinding smile – “won” the audition with the right lottery ticket. His prize? A stranger-than-fiction 15-month ordeal and groundbreaking national celebrity. Not that Nasubi was aware of it, at the time; he was escorted straight from the audition, blindfolded, to a studio apartment in Tokyo furnished with nothing but a camera, a table, a radio, a phone, a cushion, and a full magazine rack. Ordered to strip naked, Nasubi tentatively undressed, still hamming for the camera. His assignment was to obtain everything he needed (clothes, food, entertainment) via magazine sweepstakes contests, until he won the equivalent of one million yen ($8,000).

Continue reading...

Simon Chambers’ documentary is unsparing in capturing his theatrical relation’s endearing, sometimes desperate and often infuriating decline

Films about film-makers and their kith and kin sometimes get dismissed as self-serving, self-indulgent or even – everyone’s favourite smear word these days – narcissistic. Director Simon Chambers’s wrenching film about his relationship with his aged uncle David is none of those things; I can think of few documentaries that are more honest, self-scrutinising and revelatory about ageing, familial love and its limits, and the whole tragicomic process of dying. It’s the sort of thing you might call “raw” – in the sense that wounds are raw – but the craftsmanship is never raw, despite the obvious lack of budget.

Chambers, mostly a voice narrating the story, and occasionally a presence on screen, explains how he was effectively summoned back to London from Delhi where he was making a film about cars. (The clips we see look promising and hopefully someday he’ll finish it.) He had to come home because his David, a former actor and schoolteacher, was struggling to cope with life alone. Practically housebound with a serious hoarding habit, David was not quite mentally or physically disabled enough to qualify for state intervention, but not really capable of taking care of himself either.

Continue reading...

The disarmingly candid film follows Vincent and his loved ones as they try to find ways to deal with a devastating prognosis

When he was 24, film-maker Kit Vincent was diagnosed with a brain tumour; doctors said that he could expect to live four to eight years. This emotional, raw and quietly powerful documentary started out as a study of how his dad Lawrence came to terms with his son getting ill. The title is a giveaway that the finished article is not that film.

At times, it feels like family therapy. Vincent hangs out with his parents, who divorced when he was a teenager. Time is running out, and the camera is switched on – two facts that force everyone into the kind of deep, soul searching conversations that most of us spend a lifetime avoiding having with family. Lawrence (tense and distant-looking in old family photos, mellowed with age) was in the hospital room when Vincent got his diagnosis and promptly had a heart attack. The guilt is still with him: “Just when you needed me the most I flaked out on you.”

Continue reading...

The star makes for a charming lead playing a mother falling for a younger pop star in a passable adaptation of Robinne Lee’s bestselling pulp

There are lithe, low-level pleasures to be had in the glossy pop romance The Idea of You, Amazon’s latest attempt to turn a fanfic fave into a broadly alluring date movie. It follows last year’s Red, White and Royal Blue , a smartphone screen adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s what-if gay romp. In that film, it was the fantasy of a president’s son and an English prince. Here it’s a 40-year-old mum and a Harry Styles-level pop star, a blogpost daydream of love and lust, played out with both jostling for space.

It’s a far sleeker and far more satisfying package than the former, illuminated by the genuine movie star power of Anne Hathaway and made with a higher level of craft, from the sturdy studio-level direction of Michael Showalter to a mostly smooth-going script. The romcom genre has allegedly been “back” for a while now but that’s mostly translated to quantity over quality and while last year’s sleeper smash Anyone But You might have looked the part, it was cursed with junky dialogue, hapless plotting and a disastrously ill-fitting leading lady. With Hathaway at its centre, The Idea of You is on far surer footing, in small moments almost threatening to be something far greater but settling into being perfectly acceptable instead, a plane movie par excellence.

Continue reading...