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From 1973-94, That’s Life! was a BBC TV magazine show that bizarrely toggled between consumer affairs and a so-called ‘sideways’ look at life (basically vegetables that resembled genitals). Perhaps it’s only worthwhile, deeply poignant moment – one that does the rounds on social media roughly every 4 months – features an elderly man, Nicholas Winton, who is gobsmacked to discover he is sitting in the studio audience surrounded by some of the now grown-up children he rescued from war-torn Czechoslovakia some 50 years earlier. James Hawes’s One Life – the title is drawn from the Hebrew scripture: ‘He who saves one life saves the world entire’ – dramatises Winton’s story with a restraint that is at once admirable but perhaps hamstrings its effectiveness as a drama. Winton is often called ‘the British Oskar Schindler’. Held back by a more conservative aesthetic and emotional approach, One Life comes nowhere near the power and veracity of Steven Spielberg’s film. But it does have an ace in the hole in Anthony Hopkins, whose performance delivers a subtle but profound gut-punch. The screenplay by Lucinda Coxon (The Danish Girl) and co-writer Nick Drake flits between 1938, just after the annexation of the Sudetenland, and the sedate surrounds of 1980s Berkshire. In the pre-war sections, ‘Nicky’ (played with gusto by Johnny Flynn) is a London bank worker – dogged and good with paperwork – who is drawn into the refugee crisis in Prague and forms the British Committee for Refugees to ev

Proper recognition came too late for Tyneside-born photographer Tish Murtha, who died at 56 in 2013. As she was dying after suffering a brain aneurysm, her adult daughter Ella was on the phone to a UK government agency trying to persuade them not to sanction her mother for failing to show for a job centre appointment. It’s unmistakeable I, Daniel Blake territory, made even worse by the thought that an exceptional talent was being stifled by poverty and an unforgiving state. But that tragic note is only the postscript of this warm, conversational doc. Ella takes a tour of her late mother’s siblings and friends to discuss Murtha’s life and remarkable social-realist photo work – the latter of which takes centre stage on screen for us to discover or rediscover, like many have since Murtha’s death. It’s a remarkable and just posthumous revival of the artist’s work Work and life blurred for Murtha: she documented subjects close to her own experience, starting off photographing tough street kids like her brothers, two of whom appear as talking heads in the film. Murtha’s obvious talent led her to study photography in Wales and intermittent projects and commissions followed, especially during an especially fruitful period in the early and mid-1980s that coincided with the worst of Thatcher-era unemployment and discontent. But Murtha rarely made money from her work, and she spent her later years back in the North East, struggling to find support to continue working as a photographer.

German filmmaker Wim Wenders is one of the most creatively curious artists working today. His portrait of the German artist Anselm Kiefer is one of two new films (the other being Tokyo-set drama, Perfect Days) he premiered at Cannes this year. Wenders’ documentary work is fascinated with the creative process – his award-winning odes to Cuban musicianship in Buena Vista Social Club and late choreographer Pina Bausch in 2011’s Pina are standouts. Anselm is Wenders’ first 3D film since the aforementioned Pina. And much like that film, it’s a reminder that true artists use technology to deepen the story, rather than making technology into the story. Wenders deploys 3D like a painter using a certain colour.  There’s a whole subgenre of ‘process’ docs, which are a treat for anyone (like me) who loves to see how the creative sausage is made. Wenders, however, is striving for something bigger, more elemental. Anselm is a vivid portrait of Kiefer, an artist whose work and worldview weave in time, philosophy, history, memory, and myth. Wenders is uninterested in giving viewers a blow-by-blow of Kiefer’s biography or success stories or controversies. His camera watches Kiefer at work, painting, burning, directing and thinking. Reveries and readings, memories and influences, blend together as Kiefer, in his boyish, young man and older forms, guides us through his process. It is art ASMR of the highest order.  It’s art ASMR of the highest order Anselm disposes of linearity to follow the t

Like a Michelin-starred meal that someone forgot to season, Ridley Scott’s beefy account of Napoleon’s rise to power looks great, is served with some panache, but crucially lacks flavour. The legendary Brit – who kicked off his career with a more bite-sized but much saltier Napoleonic tale in The Duellists – is already promising a four-hour director’s cut. This might be one of those rare occasions where another 80 minutes makes all the difference. Napoleon has too much history and not enough story. In a performance that lacks dynamism, Joaquin Phoenix gets 32 years of Napoleon Bonaparte’s life to embody, from witnessing Marie Antoinette’s execution to dying in exile in the South Atlantic. But by prioritising a conveyor belt of battles, coups and revolutions over a more forensic investigation of its subject, the film too often leaves him feeling more like a passenger than instigator. Aristocratic beauty Josephine de Beauharnais is Napoleon’s – man and movie – main preoccupation. Played with a feline purr by Vanessa Kirby, her poise and elegance reduces the great man to gawkiness, then boyish jealousy, and finally frustration at her inability to provide him with a son. Napoleon has great fun with Boney’s frisky bedchamber antics – he signals his desire like a pig hunting for truffles – but doesn’t give Josephine much inner life as a reward for putting up with all the amateurish thrusting. There are lots of enjoyable historical details here – some of which may have happened; oth

For every limitation that exists IRL, there’s an equal realm of wild possibilities that can be found in our dreams: from trippy unicorns, to poker tables people by card-dealing aliens, to, well, Nicolas Cage. That’s the premise of Kristoffer Borgli’s (Sick of Myself) offbeat, dark comedy that has Cage haunting the dreams of the entire planet.  Cage plays Paul Matthews, an unremarkable college professor with unrealised ambitions of publishing a paper on evolutionary biology. He’s no inspiring, Robin-Williams-in-Good-Will-Hunting type; his awkward demeanour, receding hairline and ill-fitting Parka hardly capture the attention of his class of yawning Z-ers. But much as he’d hate to admit it, Paul yearns for notoriety. There’s a testy exchange with a former colleague who won’t give him a co-credit in her research paper, despite his desperate whimpering and valid arguments. Then, suddenly, it happens: everyone seems to know who Paul is. Old acquaintances and new admirers begin crawling out of the woodwork, all with the same opening line: ‘I saw you in my dream.’ Dream Scenario ushers into those gonzo dream sequence in a flurry of mad visuals involving alligators and earthquakes that invite comparisons with fellow A24 production Everything, Everywhere All At Once. And while not as inherently funny as some of Cage’s more out-there characters, there’s still ample scope for him to flex his comedic muscles, including a runaway contender for cringeworthy sex scene of the year. As a show

Sort of a sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel, this is very much an MCU movie ‘for the fans’. If you’ve devoured every film and TV series Marvel has pumped out, you may well have a great time with this series mash-up. If you’re a casual Marvel viewer who doesn’t know your Kree from your Skrull, you might struggle to keep up with a film that aims to be a zippy comic adventure but is weighed down by unclear plot. To put it as briefly as possible, Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) is floating around in space feeling very bad about the Kree/Skrull civil war she accidentally caused and doing jobs for Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson). One of those jobs involves investigating a strange hole in the universe, which is also being inspected by Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), a superpowered astronaut and associate of Nick Fury/Danvers’ estranged niece. In Jersey City, far from all of this, is Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), aka Ms Marvel, a teenage superhero who idolises Captain Marvel.  When Danvers and Rambeau touch the space hole, it somehow causes Danvers, Rambeau and Khan to switch places. From then on, any time they use their powers, they switch, often at inopportune moments. All this is somehow connected to Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), a Kree warrior who has secured a powerful artifact and is bent on revenge against Captain Marvel for causing the war that destroyed her planet. The confusing nature of this set-up is something the film never manages to get past. The place-switching is the

Is the best way to survive the arena to work together or go it alone? We get both methods in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a propulsive, if somewhat formulaic, Hunger Games prequel. Directed by franchise veteran Francis Lawrence, it’s the first film in the series to go without Jennifer Lawrence, and the absence of its powerhouse star is keenly felt. Instead, Ballad appears designed as a showcase for Lawrence’s replacement, Rachel Zegler (West Side Story). To their credit, her co-stars make room for her outsized performance without ever feeling small themselves. The film is set decades before the birth of Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, after a war has left the capitol of Panem nearly as ravaged as the districts it controls. Among those scrambling to survive is Everdeen’s future nemesis: 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow (English actor Tom Blyth), who will grow up to look like a patrician Donald Sutherland and act like a more sartorial Darth Vader. But he’s still in Anakin mode here, as a naive, secretly impoverished student at the elite Capitol Academy. President Gaul (Viola Davis) and Snow’s academy dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) want to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Hunger Games – in which teen tributes are thrown into a stadium to battle for their lives – with a special twist. As host ‘Lucky’ Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman) announces to the audience, each tribute will get a mentor from Snow’s class. Snow is assigned to District 12’s feisty Lucy Gray (Zegler).

Loneliness, Vietnam-era alienation and a sourpuss Paul Giamatti aren’t, on paper, the things of which cockle-warming yuletide classics are typically made – any more than teams of hi-tech thieves sticking up Japanese corporations. But like Die Hard, Alexander Payne’s wintry story of human connection is an unexpected Christmas gem. It even plays a tiny bit like a 1970-set version of ‘A Christmas Carol’, with Giamatti’s cranky ancient history teacher learning uncomfortable truths about himself on the path to a redemption gives the film a genuine glow.  Payne’s old Sideways star is, as ever, a curmudgeonly delight as Paul Hunham, a universally unpopular member of the teaching staff at New England’s Barton Academy. In fact, his outsider status at the prep school is such that he’s given up trying to charm his students or colleagues, instead embracing his own pain-in-the-arse misanthropy, self-parody (he’s always ready with an Aeneas reference) and self-limiting horizons. ‘You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?’ chides a colleague.  So when someone is needed to babysit a handful of ‘holdovers’ over the holidays, pupils whose parents have more or less abandoned them during Christmas, it’s Paul who is stuck with the job. Spending the festive period with the gawky, sharp-tongued and inwardly raging Tully (Dominic Sessa), a young man abandoned by his mum and grieving his dad, immediately feels like hell for all concerned. What follows is a coming-of-age story for Tully and Paul, a

Hitler is dead. Germany has surrendered. But while the war in Europe may be over, for Heinrich Zwygart (Michael Neuenschwander), the Swiss ambassador to Berlin since 1937, peacetime presents a new set of challenges. Switzerland’s famously declared neutrality will not, he knows, hold up to post-war scrutiny; his countrymen made fortunes backing the Nazi war effort, and turned away refugees with Jewish in their passports. ‘Do you know what they say in Berlin?’ he asks, as he contemplates his compromised past and uncertain future. ‘Six days a week, the Swiss work for Hitler, and on the seventh, they pray for Allied victory.’ Either way, he notes wryly, Switzerland was determined to end the war on the winning side. Zwygart is particularly haunted by the real-life fate of Maurice Bavaud, the Swiss student who was executed for attempting to kill Hitler in 1938, and on whose behalf the ambassador, acting on orders from his government, refused to use his diplomatic powers to intervene. Zwygart burned the evidence of this shameful episode before leaving Berlin, but his future son-in-law (Yann Philipona) is digging into the story, and other examples of Swiss collaboration with the Nazis, drawing Zwygart’s family into the mess. Meanwhile, his elderly father, a former soldier, has swallowed the party line that it was the Swiss Army’s deterrent value, not bank loans and arms deals, that kept Switzerland safe. Inspired by Thomas Hürlimann’s 1991 play ‘Der Gesandte’ (‘The Envoy’), itself dr

Welcome to Brideshead Uninhibited. An orgy of rich people throwing big parties, lazing in the sun and doing unexpected things with bodily fluids, Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to her revenge thriller Promising Young Woman does an elegant yet enjoyably rowdy line in blue-blooded chaos. A caviar-black comedy, it borrows from Evelyn Waugh, LP Hartley and Patricia Highsmith – with a twist of Ealing Comedy chutzpah – and makes an intoxicating modern cocktail from them.  As with her Oscar-winning debut, Fennell has a kind of revenge in mind here – although on a grander scale and perhaps on behalf of a country rapidly tiring of Bullingdon types. Her fizzy, sharp-witted script, set in Oxford and at the titular Lincolnshire pile circa 2007, does for the English aristocracy what Succession did for the offspring of capitalist tycoons, lampooning them as being cosseted by their wealth to the point of becoming a bit bovine. And as an Oxford grad who has presumably been to a few of these parties herself, she knows this milieu better than most.The movie’s centrifugal force is Barry Keoghan’s Oxford Uni fresher-turned-social climber Oliver Quick. A Liverpudlian with a tragic backstory, he’s gauche enough to have done his prep reading ahead of term – ‘What, all of it?’ enquires his baffled tutor – but it soon dawns on him that it’s who and not what you know that counts in this stratified world. Quickly, he’s shaking off his intense fellow outsider Michael (House of the Dragon’s Ewan Mitchell) a