- The Cats of Gokogu Shrine is a quiet gem, about people as well as moggies - Anyone who's been owned by a cat will find something to love about The Cats of Gokogu Shrine. I never thought of myself as a cat person, until a wee ball of fluff named Koha arrived in my life in 2010. My friend Sharon…

★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN - Queer review – Daniel Craig is needy, horny and mesmeric in Guadagnino’s erotic drama - Queer is a story of lost love and last love and mad-about-the-boy obsession, featuring an excellent performance from Daniel Craig – needy, horny, moody, like his Knives Out detective…

★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN - The exiled director’s story of officialdom’s misogyny and theocracy in his home country may be flawed, but its importance is beyond doubt - Mohammad Rasoulof is a fugitive Iranian director and dissident wanted by the police in his own country, where he has received a long…

★★★★ - THE POST - Pamela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis shine in The Last Showgirl - We are in Las Vegas in the present day. Shelly Gardner is a veteran of the city who has been dancing in the once-legendary Le Razzle Dazzle review for 30 years. But with audiences falling away and change blowing…

★★★★ - THE POST - Lithgow hits such heights of camp villainy you'll be flashing on Jack Nicholson in The Shining - Judge Stefan Mortensen has suffered a stroke. One side of his body has died on the vine and Mortensen can no longer look after himself. After a lifetime on a judge's salary and with,…

★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN - Geoffrey Rush’s retired judge is terrorised by Lithgow’s therapy puppet-wielding fellow resident in this claustrophobic tale of elder-on-elder abuse - Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand…

★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN - Marianne Jean-Baptiste is exceptional as a woman in the terrifying endgame of depression in this deeply sober and compassionate drama, not without flashes of fun - Those two stark monosyllables in the title are a callback to Leigh’s debut from 1971, Bleak Moments: they lay…

★★★★ - EMPIRE - Desperate to leave Earth, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) enlists as an “expendable”: a crew-member on a colony ship given the most dangerous missions, and killed multiple times. - No-one is better than director Bong Joon Ho at using the rules of genre filmmaking against his…

★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN - A squadron of dog catchers, sent into the Gobi desert to round up a bevy of hounds, adds stark absurdism to this commentary on Chinese society - This isn’t the first film to serve up redemption through a furry emissary – and it won’t be the last. Guan Hu’s Chinese…

★★★★★ - STUFF - Miki Magasiva's haunting, heart-warming debut simply stunning - Mareta Percival (Anapela Polataivao) has always put her kids’ first. Not necessarily her own flesh and blood – teenage daughter Lanita (Tiare Lily Savea) is more than capable of looking after herself – but rather the…

★★★★ - TIME OUT - An older, (slightly) wiser Bridget Jones is back in the best romcom in absolutely ages - ‘Fourquels’ are usually where film franchises start to flirt with rock bottom. From Matrix Resurrections to Die Hard 4.0 to Batman & Robin and – shudder – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the…