fri 05/09/2025

Film Reviews

Fish Tank

Sheila Johnston

It is, as the best cinema should be, always all about the image. Andrea Arnold's films are born, she says, with just this: a visual imprint - strong, unsettling, inexplicable. The stories then slowly unfurl in her mind from that starting point. On paper, they sound grim: the director goes for terse, no-nonsense titles, and her working-class world seems at first unforgiving.

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Dorian Gray

Jasper Rees

Oscar Wilde was once bossing a high-society drawing-room with swishes of his rapier wit when someone else had the temerity to mint an aphorism. “I wish I’d said that,” intoned the great man. Back came the devastating retort: “You will, Oscar, you will.”

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Film: Adventureland

Ryan Gilbey

Superbad was a modern-day coming-of-age comedy with inexplicable 1970s trimmings (the title, groovy credits sequence, Richard Pryor references and so on). Now its director, Greg Mottola, has made a period piece proper in the form of Adventureland, set in the mid-1980s in a cheesy, dilapidated Pittsburgh theme park where the rides make you throw up, and the stalls are rigged against any customer hoping to win more than a dying goldfish.

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9

Anne Billson

Another year, another animated film which plonks us down into the ruins of civilisation. After WALL-E , it's the turn of 9, but this time the causes of the apocalypse are not ecological; it's the fault of big bad machines which, like the ones in The Terminator and The Matrix franchises, have turned against us and reduced our cities to rubble.

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Julie & Julia

Josh Spero

If you tried to cross chefs, romantic comedy and cyberspace, you might end up with a YouTube video of Nigella Lawson recreating the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. As much fun as that would be, it would hardly justify two hours of screen time. That’s where Julie & Julia comes in.

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