The Boy and the Heron review - elegiac swan song by the Japanese anime master

★★★★★ THE BOY AND THE HERON Elegiac swan song by the Japanese anime master

Hayao Miyazaki creates a final visionary celebration of all that animation can achieve

Admirers of Hayao Miyazaki will find much to love in The Boy and the Heron, which he has said will be his final feature before retiring from film-making at the age of 82. It’s a beautifully crafted piece of work with all the tropes that admirers of Studio Ghibli have come to love over the years.  

Sweet Sue review - delightfully hopeless Brits

★★★★ SWEET SUE Losers and plonkers in a comedy of life’s let-downs

Losers and plonkers in a comedy of life’s let-downs

You don’t have to be a casting director to know that Britain has a remarkable reservoir of unstarry middle-aged actors who might, just occasionally, get top spot in a movie – Joanna Scanlon in the wondrous After Love (2020) being an excellent example. Now we have Maggie O’Neill, veteran of TV shows like Shameless, Peak Practice and EastEnders, who takes the lead in this equally likeable effort by writer-director Leo Leigh.

Powell and Pressburger: A Celtic storm brewing

The Archers stepped up their wartime campaign against materialism with the mystical Scottish romance 'I Know Where I'm Going!'

“Nothing is stronger than true love,” a young laird says to a headstrong young woman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), his voice heard above the sounds of wind and waves. She replies, “No, nothing.”

Michael Powell: a happy time with Bartók’s Bluebeard

★★★★ MICHAEL POWELL'S BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE Fine performers and fantastical visuals

Fine performers in perfect balance with fantastical visuals for this profound one-act opera

In his final years Michael Powell mooted the possibility of a Bartók trilogy. He wanted to add to the growing popularity of his work on Bluebeard’s Castle, the deepest of one-act operas, an idea he had previously rejected of filming the lurid "pantomime" The Miraculous Mandarin and, as third instalment, not the earlier ballet The Wooden Prince but a film about the composer’s time in America and his return, after death, to Hungary.

Every Body review - heartfelt American documentary

★★★ EVERY BODY Activists argue for greater awareness and tolerance of intersex conditions

Charismatic activists argue for greater awareness and tolerance of intersex conditions

This fascinating American documentary tackles the societal and medical treatment of the 1.7% of people born with intersex traits that leave them with sex characteristics (chromosome patterns, genitals, gonads) that aren’t obviously male or female. These people are the ‘I’ in the LGBTQI+ acronym.

Anselm review - post-war German reckonings in 3D

Wim Wenders' uniquely insightful immersion in Anselm Kiefer's monumental, mystic art

Water glassily reflects in a bridal train, the sun moves between trees, giving way to metal book-leaves, and inside a warehouse so vast he cycles through it, stored cliffs of Anselm Kiefer’s work loom over him. Wim Wenders’ 3D cameras bring you inside the artist’s monumental, mythic world, which he is uniquely equipped to comprehend.

Please Don't Destroy: Treasure of Foggy Mountain review - Dude, where's our map?

Laughter is the loot in this amiably silly American comedy

Despite an ominous title, there’s always fair weather in the debut comic adventure film featuring Please Don’t Destroy, a NYC sketch comedy trio that’s hit it big with viral videos and on the long-running NBC series Saturday Night Live. (So long running, in fact, that two of the three are second-generation performers.)