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If you ever wanted to get up close and personal with The King in his heyday, here is your chance to do so in retrospect.   As a follow up to his 2022 biographical film Elvis, Baz Luhrmann has crafted a compelling documentary in which Presley is front and centre, larger than life.   Most of the time, Elvis is shot in close up, appearing just in front of your face, making the great music for which he was renowned, forever gyrating.   What extraordinary stage presence! The visua

Sexually charged, Pillion is a dramatic comedy that opens the door on relationships between gay men with a dominatrix mentality.   Written and directed by Harry Lighton, it is based on the 2020 book Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, which was set in the pre-AIDS era.   Colin (Harry Melling) is an introverted, naïve homosexual parking officer who lives with his kind-hearted parents in London.  Pete (Douglas Hodge) and his wife Peggy (Lesley Sharp), who is dying, but is not backward

He is a 40-year-old high school teacher and she is a furniture restorer, aged 35.   He has an ex-wife and a young daughter.   She has just extricated herself from a relationship with a married man who promised to leave his wife … or has she?   It is their first date.  She has invited him over for a home-made dinner with her signature dish. He has brought wine … and condoms.   Each has with them – in their heads – a Greek chorus (four male mates for him and four female friends

It is 1952 and a struggling 23-year-old New York City hustler aspires to be the world table tennis champion.   Marty Mauser (Timothy Chalamet) is working selling shoes in his uncle’s Lower East Side store.   Marty is good at his job (he could sell snow to the Eskimos), but isn’t even remotely interested in it, even though his uncle offers him the role of manager. Marty has bigger plans.   At a time when ping pong is hardly recognised as significant in the US, Mauser aspires t

A creature feature with bite, Primate is about a pet chimp in Hawaii that contracts rabies and “goes ape”.   The film starts with a brutal attack on a veterinarian.   Then we cut to 36 hours earlier.   That is when college student Lucy boards a plane to return to her native Hawaii, which is where her younger sister, Erin and father, Adam live. It is a beautiful, open plan home, embedded into a cliff, and includes an underground swimming pool.   Joining Lucy are her long-time

Most creative, Hamnet is the work of director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), who also co-wrote the screenplay with Maggie O’Farrell.   It is based on O’Farrell’s acclaimed eighth novel of the same name, which won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and the UK Women’s Prize for Fiction.   It was cited by the New York Times Book Review as one of 2020’s five best works of fiction. O’Farrell discovered little-discussed details of William Shakespeare’s family life, specifically the

Christy Martin had to fight more than her opponents to reach the pinnacle of her sport – boxing.   A gay basketballer, the daughter of a miner, she was plucked from winning $300 in a Toughwoman bout she contested purely for the money to go on to fight for Don King.   In short, she put women’s boxing on the map in the USA.  This is her warts and all story.   The film starts in West Virginia, which is where she was born Christine Renea Salters into a family with traditional val

A beautiful, sensitive portrait of love and loss in the early 20 th century, The History of Sound features bravura showings from its two leads.   Lionel (played as an adult by Paul Mascal) has what his father says is a gift from God, namely he can see music – the shape, colour and taste of it.   It never occurred to Lionel that music was only about the sound.   Growing up on a small farm in Kentucky, he won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory in Boston.   That is w

Set against the dreadful pall of The Great Wa r* , the Choral Society, in the fictional town of Ramsden, in Yorkshire, presses on.   The Society is funded by its chairman and local mill owner Alderman Bernard Duxbury (Roger Allam), who employs a large swathe of the town’s population.   It is 1916 and time to audition for the next production. The Society is keen to recruit local young males to help swell their ranks.   Given the times, this is a community all too familiar wit

This gritty British drama, which marks a strong feature debut for writer and director Harris Dickinson, follows a young, homeless addict whose life continues to spiral.   Mike (Frank Dillane) lives a hard, meaningless existence on the streets of London.   He wanders about aimlessly in search of money and can’t get his act together, sleeping wherever he can.  That could be crumpled on a busy street corner or on cardboard boxes atop a building.   He is betrayed by another homel

Fraught familial relationships rise to the surface as a father steps back into the life of his two adult daughters.   Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard) was a renowned filmmaker who hasn’t made a feature in 15 years. A cinematic retrospective showcases just how insightful he is.   Notwithstanding his professional success, he walked away from his family, divorcing his wife and leaving his children metaphorically hanging.   All these years later, that devastation is still apparent

Song Sung Blue is a warts and all American biographical musical drama based around a couple of divorced tribute artists.   When Mike Sardinia (Hugh Jackson) meets Claire Stengl (Kate Hudson) in 1987, she is singing Patsy Cline numbers.   She gives him the idea of performing as Neil Diamond. Although there is a decade age difference between them, the pair is instantly drawn to one another.   He wants them to play together, so coins the name Lightning and Thunder, with Claire a

Extreme. Far-fetched. Silly. Hell, yeah. After all, you are talking about a Jack Black movie. But Anaconda is also funny and surprisingly involving.   It draws inspiration from the 1997 film of the same name involving a quest to capture the world’s largest and deadliest snake.   Among the stars of that one were Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voigt and Eric Stoltz.   In Anaconda 2025, Doug McCallister (Jack Black), who dreamt of a movie making career and loves horror films, is

There is acting and then there is ACTING.   Phillip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser) is an American actor who has lived in Japan for the past seven years.   Thus far, his big claim to fame is playing a superhero in a toothpaste commercial.   In other words, he is still looking for a meaty role and his funds are drying up. And then he gets an unexpected break through a decidedly different talent agency.   Rental Family, owned and operated by Shinji (Takehiro Hira), provides actor

1          The Brutalist – The trials, tribulations and brutality of a lauded Hungarian architect who emigrates to the USA after surviving the Holocaust. Starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce 2          Emilia Perez – A striking musical drama about a brutal Mexican cartel leader who has a sex change operation. Starring: Zoe Saldana and Karla Sofia Gascon   3          One Battle After Another – With political intrigue and emotional resonance, it looks at the ri

The effects are spectacular, but I fail to see why this film needed to be three hours 17 minutes in length.   The attempt by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his Na’vi warrior wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) to keep their family safe continues as their real and “adopted” children spread their wings.   They are still living with the Metkayina Clan in the picturesque reefs of Pandora.  At the end of the previous film, Avatar: The Way of Water, the Sullys’ eldest son Neteyam (Jamie F

A twisted, narcissistic tale, The Housemaid is a tense psychological thriller, one of the better examples of the genre in a domestic setting.   Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney) is down, but not yet out.   She has just been released from jail and is living rough in a very old car that has seen far better days.   Having constructed an attractive back story, she is mighty surprised when she is offered a job as a housemaid at a beautiful home by Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried).

An assured, world-renowned classical conductor learns the bitter truth in the most unfortunate of circumstances and it changes his life.   The latter is also true for a cook at a school cafeteria, who plays the trombone in a community brass band and struggles with self-doubt.   Circumstances conspire to bring the two together.   Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) is at the peak of his powers when he learns that he has leukaemia and needs a bone marrow transplant, otherwise he will d

You’re an intense, high achiever with a bright future, but a checkered back story.   With your big break comes the fallout of a bad decision.   That, in short, is the contention behind James L. Brooks’ (As Good As It Gets) dramatic comedy Ella McCay.  It is 2008, in the middle of a recession.   Thirty-four-year-old Ella McCay (Emma Mackey) is the third youngest woman to hold the position of Lieutenant Governor of an unnamed state.   When her boss, the governor (Albert Brooks)

Imagine a Santa that shoots, knifes, takes an axe to and decapitates his victims and you have the starting point for Silent Night, Deadly Night.   Young Billy Chapman (Logan Sawyer) was only eight when he witnessed the not so jolly fat man butcher his parents.   Then we cut (notice the pun) to an adult Billy (Rohan Campbell) orchestrating a murder spree of his own, just before Christmas.  He has caught a bus to a small US town and is in a diner when he spots an attractive wom