★★★½ - STUFF  - Juliette Binoche shines in treat for French farce lovers -  For more than two decades, Alsace’s prestigious Van der Beck’s School of Housekeeping and Good Manners has been training teenage girls to become perfect housewives. However, lately the numbers enrolling have been falling,…

★★★★ - EMPIRE  A.R.G.U.S. director Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) is persisting with her suicide squad, a band of super-powered convicts chosen to fulfil secret government missions, or die trying. She assembles a ragtag bunch to find an evil scientist (Peter Capaldi) and prevent the release of a…

★★★★ - SYDNEY MORNING HERALD  - The Rock and Emily Blunt’s new film is good fun, and full of wit -  Jungle Cruise is actually a jungle cocktail. The African Queen, the Indiana Jones movies, Romancing the Stone and Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft have all been tossed into the mix but the main…

★★★★½ - STUFF  - An angry, funny and deeply loveable gem of a movie -  Bunny is a survivor. But even the hardiest people occasionally need a break – and life isn't handing any of those to Bunny right now. We learn early in The Justice of Bunny King that Bunny doesn't have custody of her two…

★★★★ - STUFF  - France's cinematic answer to Breaking Bad is a real hoot -  Isabelle Huppert once again proves why she’s one of the most compelling actors on the planet with a magnificent turn in this intriguing crime caper. The seemingly always sensational sexagenarian plays Patience Portefeux,…

★★★★½ - STUFF  - Amazing love letter to the best band you've never heard of -  They’re the duo Jonathan Ross once described as looking like “people who had been let out for the day”. Britain’s Top of the Pops even once refused to let them play after producers discovered they were actually…

★★★½ - STUFF  - A magical, charming love-letter to the movies -  Once in a while, at a bar or a barbecue, some excitable young person will find out what I do for a job and launch into their impassioned theory about how going to the movies is actually an evocation of an ancient time, when humans…

★★★★ - NEWSHUB  - Black Widow delivers with butt-kickery and plentiful twists -  Natasha Romanoff is an MCU OG. Debuting way way back in Iron Man 2, Black Widow has been a faithful avenging wing-woman ever since. She should have headlined her own standalone years ago but here we have it, finally.…

★★★★½ - STUFF  - Why fans of French comedies would be crazy to miss this movie -  Suze Trappet (Virginie Efira) is dying. Aerosols have ruined the 43-year-old’s lungs and ovaries, the result of continued exposure during her hairdressing career. While facing up to her own mortality, Suze is…

★★★★ - STUFF  - A deceptively insightful sex and relationships comedy -  In 1878, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, trying to clear his head of a love affair with an American married woman, set out on a 12-day walk through a ravishingly lovely chunk of the French countryside. Stevenson…

★★★★★ - STUFF  - Lin-Manuel Miranda delivers a stunning musical and bravura film -  Regular readers of these rantings – Hi Mum! - will know that I am no great fan of musicals. Or, more exactly, I guess I just don't get the charm of musicals adapted for screen. I've sat through dozens of filmed…

★★★★★ - THE TELEGRAPH (UK)  - the all-singing, all-dancing, feelgood film -  Jon M Chu and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about bustling American life is a sparkling treat. See it in your local cinema as soon as you can.  It often feels these days that major studio films have been made with an…