Crawl review: alligators attack in an absurdly fun Friday night creature feature

Dir: John Crowley. Cast: Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Aneurin Barnard, Finn Wolfhard, Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson, Jeffrey Wright, Ashleigh Cummings, Willa Fitzgerald, Denis O’Hare, Boyd Gaines. 15 cert, 149 mins How do you solve a problem like The Goldfinch? Published in 2013, Donna Tartt’s nearly-800-page novel won the Pulitzer Prize while starkly dividing readers –…

The new trailer for the final Star Wars film has been publicly released and shows Rey, the heroine of the most recent trilogy of Star Wars films, breaking bad.  Rey, who has been played by Daisy Ridley since the character’s arrival in 2015’s The Force Awakens, can be seen wielding an impressive double-pronged red lightsabre…

Dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda. Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Clémentine Grenier, Manon Clavel, Alain Libolt, Christian Crahay, Roger van Hool. Cert tbc, 106 mins The truth hurts, so they say – and in The Truth it’s like toothache: an ambient nag that waits for the worst possible moment to twinge. The new film from Hirokazu…

Dir: Anthony Maras; Starring: Dev Patel, Armie Hammer, Nazanin Boniadi, Jason Isaacs, Anupam Kher, Tilda Cobham-Hervey. 15 cert, 123 mins When a director decides to re-stage a real-world atrocity in the form of a thriller, they had better be prepared to show their ethical workings in the margin. Much of the time they are –…

Parents of under-10s will be all too familiar with the strains of Let It Go, the fearsome earworm from Frozen that ricocheted around the world for months after the film’s release. When a sequel to Disney’s most successful animation of all time was announced, many wondered if the song could ever be topped – and now…

Dir: Andrea Berloff. Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss, Domhnall Gleeson, Margo Martindale, Common. Cert: 15,  103 mins The story of cinema is in many ways the story of men seizing power and influence while women watch from the margins. This historical injustice is now being corrected – off-screen with the MeToo movement and on it with films…

For Sama review: an acutely personal, soul-shaking view of atrocity

The Landmark Theaters cinema chain will ban costumes and masks for moviegoers during screenings of the film Joker, it said on Thursday, following concerns expressed by families involved in a 2012 mass shooting during a Batman film in Colorado. The Los Angeles-based chain, which runs 52 theaters in 27 markets, said it wanted customers to…

There’s been so much fuss about the extraordinary – and somewhat baffling – de-ageing in The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s first film for Netflix, that it’s almost eclipsed the potential it had for being a very good film. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci have teamed up with the Taxi Driver director for a crime epic based…

A Million Little Pieces, review: this addiction ‘memoir’ may be a pack of lies, but at least they’re stylishly told