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London Review of Books

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Marty Supreme (2025) Michael Wood One of the strong features of the plot of Marty Supreme is its proximity to parable and the absence of masses of money.
Posted Jan 14, 2026  Edit critic review
Frankenstein (2025) Michael Wood Victor and his father are portrayed by Oscar Isaac and Charles Dance. They play, perfectly, the classic Oedipal parts of brilliant bullied child and impatient, self-admiring father.
Posted Dec 02, 2025  Edit critic review
Souleymane's Story (2024) Michael Wood Lojkine’s delicate play with our expectations is so finely handled that it’s best experienced directly rather than described.
Posted Nov 03, 2025  Edit critic review
Highest 2 Lowest (2025) Michael Wood Lee has made a quite different movie, marked by elegant allusions rather than debt.
Posted Oct 03, 2025  Edit critic review
The Naked Gun (2025) Michael Wood The film doesn’t have much of a plot because it’s too keen on its mishaps, many of them violent. But the bit of plot there is takes us, finally, to an interesting place.
Posted Sep 05, 2025  Edit critic review
28 Years Later (2025) Michael Wood Too academic as well as too sentimental perhaps, but Fiennes’s performance as the eerie doctor, creator of an intense, eccentric heart of resistance when resistance is always too late, helps to carry the day.
Posted Jul 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Riefenstahl (2024) Michael Wood The second part of Veiel’s film is a well-made but very straight biography.
Posted Jun 06, 2025  Edit critic review
La Haine (1995) Michael Wood Great movies can be too steady, too serene, and this film is headed in a different direction.
Posted May 06, 2025  Edit critic review
Mickey 17 (2025) Michael Wood In Mickey 17 the chance of living again is linked to a form of slavery. The film itself ends with marks on a board rather than a photographed human scene, letters and numbers offered as a visual tribute to mortal singularity.
Posted Apr 09, 2025  Edit critic review
I'm Still Here (2024) Michael Wood The carnival effect is definitely excessive, but Salles can hardly not know this or not want it... I'm also inclined to imagine that he is presenting, for all audiences, a symptom more than an escape.
Posted Mar 07, 2025  Edit critic review
The Brutalist (2024) Michael Wood The general effect may create in us a nostalgia for the edgy coherence of the first part. There is, though, a refrain that echoes through the film.
Posted Feb 07, 2025  Edit critic review
Anora (2024) Michael Wood What’s romantic here is a shared feeling of attachment, whatever its basis, and what’s comic is the absence of any sense of what is to come.
Posted Dec 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Megalopolis (2024) Michael Wood Much of the acting in the film stands clearly apart from the dizziness, and we need to credit both the director and the players for this.
Posted Nov 03, 2024  Edit critic review
Only the River Flows (2023) Michael Wood Wei is not going to tell us, but he invites us to think that the answer to our question may lie neither in probable history nor in fantasy but in absurdist philosophy or certain modes of detective fiction.
Posted Oct 07, 2024  Edit critic review
The Dead Don't Hurt (2023) Michael Wood [Mortensen] gives us lots more pictures, but he won’t tell us what time period we’re inhabiting, or even whether we’re looking at the contents of a mind or a notional real world. The method is awkward but has many interesting effects.
Posted Jun 25, 2024  Edit critic review
La Chimera (2023) Michael Wood One more tomb awaits Arthur, and you need to see the movie to learn what happens there. Actually, even when you’ve seen it you won’t be quite sure, because several fascinating interpretations of the events are possible. Judge ye.
Posted May 31, 2024  Edit critic review
The Delinquents (2023) Michael Wood Curiously absorbing and bewildering.
Posted May 02, 2024  Edit critic review
American Fiction (2023) Michael Wood The film keeps threatening to come apart, almost unable to juggle its sorrowful realism with its wild farce. It doesn’t come apart, though, and the survived threat is part of the unshakeable discomfort we feel, even when we are laughing.
Posted Mar 28, 2024  Edit critic review
The Zone of Interest (2023) Michael Wood Jonathan Glazer’s​ Zone of Interest seems stately at first, even stolid, and a bit too restrained to raise real questions. Once it’s over we realise that its discretion is part of a careful, risky plan.
Posted Feb 23, 2024  Edit critic review
Poor Things (2023) Michael Wood The ending has some fine surprises that twist the film’s earlier riddles into even stranger shapes.
Posted Jan 29, 2024  Edit critic review
Napoleon (2023) Michael Wood It’s clear, I think, that in spite of various attempts to make Napoleon work as a biopic, the film doesn’t have a bio. It has a general of genius, something like a sports figure who is alive only in games or tournaments.
Posted Dec 14, 2023  Edit critic review
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) Michael Wood DiCaprio and De Niro carry the film through their impersonations of what they are not, their acting of an act, so to speak: the nice, if rough-edged guy, and the genial businessman, the toast of the town.
Posted Nov 16, 2023  Edit critic review
Past Lives (2023) Michael Wood This all sounds rather cryptic, and the film is mysterious. It is also lucid and precise, intimately devoted to its strange lyrical sorrow. It’s as if we are watching feelings in slow motion.
Posted Oct 19, 2023  Edit critic review
Afire (2023) Michael Wood There are drawbacks to such a view. There are moments when we can’t take any more hovering, and Petzold’s timing and tone can be awkward. But he is faithful to his scheme, and his new film, Afire, has a much lighter touch than any of his previous works.
Posted Sep 15, 2023  Edit critic review
Barbie (2023) Michael Wood The film gets a little lost at times, as if it had too many storylines to play with and won’t let any of them go... But there are many great jokes in the film.
Posted Sep 07, 2023  Edit critic review
Asteroid City (2023) Michael Wood The effect of all this, although I’m still trying to figure out how Anderson could get such a result from these elements, is not trickery or philosophy but a sort of innocence. We are awake and also dreaming.
Posted Jul 27, 2023  Edit critic review
One Fine Morning (2022) Michael Wood I won’t describe the late scenes, partly because it would be a spoiler, and partly because, as Hansen-Løve’s style and interests suggest, any narrative solution is one option among several.
Posted Jun 07, 2023  Edit critic review
Broker (2022) Michael Wood While not wanting to tell us anything explicitly and diligently pretending to look the other way, it wants us to think a lot harder than we usually do about what it means to bear or bring up a child.
Posted Mar 23, 2023  Edit critic review
Fanny and Alexander (1982) Michael Wood There is a real delicacy in [Bergman's] filming of festivities, first Christmas and later a double christening. The fun is effective, even contagious, but there is always worry in the air.
Posted Feb 08, 2023  Edit critic review
Romeo and Juliet (1968) Michael Wood The movie wears well, and is certainly better than I remembered, but time has also made it a different film, in certain ways closer to Shakespeare than it used to be or was probably meant to be.
Posted Feb 08, 2023  Edit critic review
Living (2022) Michael Wood The unlived life is a great modern theme. Not reality’s disappointments, but reality itself as a form of evasion, the wrong road taken... [Living] is a brilliant treatment of this theme, an essay on its mixed familiarity and elusiveness.
Posted Jan 12, 2023  Edit critic review
Decision to Leave (2022) Michael Wood The film lingers over the second murder case a bit too long, as if we needed a complete rerun of the first in order to get all the ironies, but the questions set up on its shifting ground are intriguing.
Posted Nov 12, 2022  Edit critic review
Nope (2022) Michael Wood [Nope] takes this word as its title and offers several other interesting usages. All of them suggest that what we’re thinking or saying is absurdly wrong: a proposition that doesn’t need to be made, or that can’t be responded to in any other way.
Posted Oct 07, 2022  Edit critic review
Bullet Train (2022) Michael Wood Fantasies of crime, especially unruly ones, often have ideas of order and control at their heart, a reach of power we rarely have in ordinary existence.
Posted Sep 23, 2022  Edit critic review
Lost Illusions (2021) Michael Wood It’s notable that this nastiness is really interesting, because in the context that Giannoli is creating, anything that moves is interesting.
Posted Jul 22, 2022  Edit critic review
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) Michael Wood The film has been billed as a science-fiction comedy, but it doesn’t really belong to either genre, despite the abundance of fantasy and the fact that it’s often very funny.
Posted Jun 02, 2022  Edit critic review
The Worst Person in the World (2021) Michael Wood Julie is played by Renate Reinsve with an amiable calm that fails to conceal worry.
Posted May 05, 2022  Edit critic review
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) Michael Wood The tour de force in the film is the last story, 'Once Again', which makes extraordinary play with chance and the imagination.
Posted Mar 25, 2022  Edit critic review
The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) Michael Wood The low-key acting adds a human element to scenes that are often played as formalities.
Posted Jan 20, 2022  Edit critic review
Last Night in Soho (2021) Michael Wood Wright has been accused of ostensibly criticising nostalgia while thoroughly indulging in it. There is something in this, but it would be hard to make a movie about the past without some sort of regret.
Posted Nov 13, 2021  Edit critic review
No Time to Die (2021) Michael Wood [No Time To Die] begins inside a memory and ends with a kind of apocalypse. Sound familiar? Not really. Memory has never been a prominent theme in the series, and the mood of this instalment is different in many ways.
Posted Oct 23, 2021  Edit critic review
Annette (2021) Michael Wood [Carax and the Mael brothers] leave us with plenty of entertaining questions -- and questions about entertainment.
Posted Sep 24, 2021  Edit critic review
The Money Order (1968) Michael Wood The plot makes it seem like a frenetic farce, while the human situation drops into dire neorealist gloom.
Posted Jul 06, 2021  Edit critic review
Nomadland (2020) Michael Wood In McDormand's marvellous incarnation [Fern] is difficult to understand, tight, untalkative, but also helpful to others, and given to smiling occasionally in ways that contradict her dryness.
Posted Jun 04, 2021  Edit critic review
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) Michael Wood The film has the look and sound of a stylish thriller.
Posted Apr 30, 2021  Edit critic review
The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021) Michael Wood Andra Day is a singer who is appearing as an actress for the first time in this movie, and her performance as Holiday is amazing.
Posted Mar 13, 2021  Edit critic review
One Night in Miami (2020) Michael Wood [There are] four sequences that have the feel of allegorical fables, each showing a moment of change in a man's life and preparing the ground for the night of the film's title, when four paths will cross and when key questions come into focus.
Posted Feb 18, 2021  Edit critic review
Mank (2020) Michael Wood It's slow, funny, thoughtful, and asks all its questions in delicately indirect ways.
Posted Feb 03, 2021  Edit critic review
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) Michael Wood Lavish, stylish, sometimes silly, always engaging.
Posted Feb 02, 2021  Edit critic review
Heimat (1984) Carole Angier Edgar Reitz's Heimat is not just a brilliant film about Germany. It is a brilliant film about our time, anywhere -- perhaps about any time anywhere.
Posted Feb 02, 2021  Edit critic review
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