Review

Struggling to cope with the death of his brother, Jack (Mark Duplass) agrees to spend a week alone at best friend Iris’ (Emily Blunt) island cottage. No TV, no internet, just him. “Do they have forks?” asks Jack. “Because I have to stab myself in the face.” But he arrives …

This brilliantly bonkers French comedy has simple aspirations: it wants to make you laugh. And, with improvised physical comedy taking precedence, it mostly succeeds. Dom (Dominique Abel) has his life turned topsy-turvy when a woman (Fiona Gordon) looks for a room at his hotel and reveals she’s a fairy. Their …

Metal Gear Solid hits the PlayStation Vita in style with the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection. With it, remastered versions of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance and Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (minus the online multiplayer, of course) come to Sony’s handheld. It’s a largely well-adapted port, though some caveats …

Casting Rebecca Hall as bubbly babe Beth, who jumps into professional sports betting in Vegas only to find the personal stakes sky-high, this good-natured but tinny coming-of-age comedy-drama is more of an also-ran than a sure thing. After the lacklustre Chéri and uneven Tamara Drewe , Stephen Frears seems to …

As China Miéville himself discussed when SFX interviewed him recently, there’s a rhythm to his ouevre. Whenever he’s written a novel that’s been “hard won”, he’s followed it up with a book that’s less obviously demanding. So it was that Kraken , a romp of an urban fantasy in so …

Re-dubbed from the original Mexican, this feature-length frolic for Hanna-Barbera’s felonious feline had only a few pesos to rub together judging by its primitive toonery and makeshift 3D. Yet what really raises the hackles are its tatty attempts to update the character to a modern New York filled with mobile …

Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, Alexander Sokurov’s riff on Goethe’s tragedy is a bewildering but blazingly styled fever-dream epic, completing the Russian art titan’s quadrilogy on power. The basic story holds firm, with the ambitious prof (Johannes Zeiler) signing his soul off to Satan, here played as a …

No sniggering at the back – Lisa Aschan’s tale of burgeoning (homo) sexuality among Swedish teens may sound like a pocket-fiddler’s dream, but proves rather sweeter than its synopsis. Mathilda Paradeiser plays a young equestrian gymnast whose life gets turned upside down by her feelings for her new, experienced friend …

You know the world’s in trouble when even people living in utter shitholes fear their blocks getting attacked (see [Rec] 2 , The Horde and Cell 211 ). But none of these tower heists can boast the balls-to-the-wall action of The Raid , a film that more than lives up …

Rapper Plan B becomes director Ben Drew with this wilfully bleak debut, an ambitious and angry diatribe against “David Cameron’s broken Britain”. The plot is fractured into six interconnected segments, following the lives of various druggies, hoodies and prozzies. There are a few ‘first film’ slips; coincidences pile up, some …