Film reviews: movies to watch in 2024

Stars reflect the overall quality of reviews and our own independent assessment (5 stars=don’t miss; 1 star=don’t bother).

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One Life

Drama ****

“You’d need a heart of stone not to be touched” by “One Life”, which tells the extraordinary story of Nicholas Winton, the “British Schindler” who helped evacuate 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. After the war, Winton virtually never mentioned his rescue effort, even to his family. It only came to public attention in 1988, when he appeared in an episode of “That’s Life!”, in which Esther Rantzen asked members of the audience to stand up if they owed him their life – and dozens of people sitting around him silently rose to their feet. This “quietly affecting drama”, made with “simplicity and heartfelt directness” by director James Hawes, does justice to that “overwhelmingly moving event”. 

Winton is played in the 1980s by Anthony Hopkins and in the 1930s by Johnny Flynn, both of whom turn in performances that are worthy of “a remarkable and almost comically modest man”, said Ed Potton in The Times. The film also has a “secret weapon” in Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Winton’s German émigrée mother, Babette. She is “formidable with a capital F, storming into the London visa office in her fur coat and putting obstructive civil servants firmly in their place (‘Sit down young man, I have something to tell you’)”. With its “syrupy strings and somewhat grey palette”, “One Life” does have “more than a hint of BBC TV drama about it”, said Hamish MacBain in the Evening Standard. But Hopkins is “superb”, imbuing every frame with “warmth and wit and sadness and charming British eccentricity”. Anyone who doesn’t “blub their way through” the last half-hour “should be checked for a pulse on the way out”.

Priscilla

Drama *** 

“Priscilla”, Sofia Coppola’s film about Elvis Presley’s courtship of his future wife, Priscilla Beaulieu, which started when he was 24 and she was 14, “will make for uncomfortable viewing for fans of the King”, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. The film presents Elvis (Jacob Elordi) “as an insecure narcissist” who started to fixate on Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) when they met at a party during his military service in Germany, and who was unwilling to give her “any independence” once they’d married. Adapted from Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me”, the film is a “downbeat and dour affair, with little of the exuberance” of Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic “Elvis” – though Spaeny gives a “compelling and moving performance” as a bright young woman “whose spirit is slowly crushed”. 

“With the exception of the totally brilliant ‘Lost in Translation’, I’ve never really got on with the films of Sofia Coppola, and this modest antipathy continues with Priscilla,” said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. “The drama feels flat and episodic”; and Elordi and Spaeny’s performances left me cold. It’s “lushly styled”, said Adrian Horton in The Guardian, but provides “little sense” of who its heroine was, and what she thought of the things that happened to her. “The real Priscilla was, by all accounts, no wallflower.” But in “this absorbing yet frustrating film”, you could easily mistake her for one. I found “Priscilla” a “little dull”, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman. “Neither a scathing post-#MeToo take-down of ‘the King’ nor a particularly deep character study of a teenager groomed from the age of 14 to become his doll-like wife, it is, instead, another of Coppola’s dramatically inert explorations of life in a gilded cage.” 

Ferrari

Biopic ***

Back in “Italian biopic mode”, Adam Driver has “dusted off his Dolmio Man accent” from “House of Gucci” to play Enzo Ferrari in this handsome “but ultimately quite empty drama from the veteran filmmaker Michael Mann”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. We first meet our “racing-obsessed hero” in 1957. He has run his eponymous car business into the ground, and in order to attract new investors, he desperately needs one of his drivers to win the “epic and lethal road race, the Mille Miglia”. The race itself is powerfully depicted, but alas the film is altogether too preoccupied with the impact of the death of Enzo’s son, Alfredo, from muscular dystrophy in 1956. Enzo is defined “solely in terms of parental grief. In short, he starts the film suffering from parental grief, he negotiates his relationships in the shadow of parental grief, then he ends the film, after the Mille Miglia, with slightly less parental grief.” Driver, for all his talents, proves “unable to bring anything unexpected or challenging to this template”. 

“As in a racing-car engine, there are lots of components in this film, and they all need to work in perfect sync, which occasionally they don’t,” said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. Still, it’s “tremendously stylish”, and for the most part Mann does a “fine job”: one crash scene is so devastating, it caused a sharp “intake of breath” at the showing I went to. Elsewhere, the film can be “ponderous”, said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. But its third act is “thrilling”, and Penélope Cruz delivers a “standout” performance as “the impassioned Signora Ferrari”.

Tchaikovsky’s Wife

Drama ***

“The unhappy union between the composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Odin Biron) and his wife, Antonina Miliukova (Alyona Mikhailova), is the jumping-off point” for this “feverish” period piece from the Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. The film, which has only “a passing acquaintance” with the facts of Tchaikovsky’s “turbulent life”, begins with his death, before rewinding to the start of his and Antonina’s romance. It is a “punishing watch at times”, but its ambition is “admirable”. Serebrennikov is an “extravagantly talented director whose opposition to Kremlin ideology led to a two-year house arrest”, said Jonathan Romney in the FT. “But even while laying siege to a national monument of male genius, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” has the leaden institutional feel of a prestige superproduction.” There is “a crazed magnificence” to its lavish evocation of the period; yet there is “little real drama here, just flamboyant gesticulations at it”. 

I found the movie a “chore”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. “Watching it feels like competing in a sort of arthouse cinema Krypton Factor, with a barrage of interpretative dance interludes, unflinching full-frontal male nudity, pulverisingly bleak mise en scène, and writhing mental collapse.” One scene actually manages to combine all of the above. The film has an “expansive, 140-minute running-time”, and there are points when it is hard to work out exactly what’s going on in it, said Trevor Johnston in Time Out. “But with its intensely felt performances, haunting winter lighting, and seemingly inescapable claustrophobia, it leaves a mark.”