Peter Bradshaw
TheGuardian
Most Divergent Takes
- TRON: Ares (2025)2.0 vs TRM 5.4-3.4
- Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)10.0 vs TRM 6.8+3.2
- All We Imagine as Light (2024)10.0 vs TRM 7.1+2.9
- The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026)2.0 vs TRM 4.5-2.5
- The Bride! (2026)8.0 vs TRM 5.6+2.4
Frankenstein
2025 · TheGuardian
Del Toro has written and directed a bombastic but watchable new version of Mary Shelley's great novel and makes of it a stately melodrama... pictures whose luxurious beauty underscores the film's reverence for the source material and for itself, but which for me impedes the energy of horror.
The Substance
2024 · TheGuardian
This is a cheerfully silly and outrageously indulgent piece of gonzo body-horror comedy, lacking in subtlety, body-positivity or positivity of any sort. It's flawed and overlong but there's a genius bit of casting in Demi Moore who is a very good sport about the whole thing. And as confrontational satire it strikes me as at least as good, or better, than two actual Palme d'Or winners.
All We Imagine as Light
2024 · TheGuardian
There is a freshness and emotional clarity in Payal Kapadia's Cannes competition selection, an enriching humanity and gentleness which coexist with fervent, languorous eroticism and finally something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments. This is a glorious film.
The End of Oak Street
2026 · TheGuardian · Aug 2026
It is initially amusing but oddly inert; contrived, derivative, commercially driven and weirdly inconsequential, a Spielbergian mashup about dinosaurs running amok in suburbia that doesn't feel like homage so much as a pastiche produced by an AI Spielbergbot. The End of Oak Street is fun at first, but it feels like Mitchell doesn't really believe in any of it.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
2026 · TheGuardian · Jul 2026
Zendaya saves this film. She rescues it from silliness and the generic deja vu overfamiliarity that is always threatening to sink it. Something in MJ's civilian status, her non-superhero identity, brings Zendaya's grownup acting presence to the fore in ways denied to everyone else on screen, including Holland.
The Invite
2026 · TheGuardian · Jun 2026
The Invite is funny … and Rogen is on top of his game. It is intriguing, amusing and, finally, somehow bizarrely moving, with Rogen's levity keeping the outrageous plot points in check.
Toy Story 5
2026 · TheGuardian · Jun 2026
At heart, it has gone dead. For all the intensive, high-energy creative work that has clearly gone into this film's every frame, the jeopardy, the novelty, the ideas and the passion are lacking; the crucial Toy Story theme of mortality feels underpowered. But now it is played out and IP exhaustion has set in.
Disclosure Day
2026 · TheGuardian · Jun 2026
Disclosure Day is never anything other than entertaining and grade-A fun; rare enough in the movies or anywhere else, rocketing along with barnstorming set-pieces, exhilarating chases, funny lines and a career-topper of a performance from Blunt who may yet be morphing into a female version of Tom Hanks.
Backrooms
2026 · TheGuardian · May 2026
YouTuber Kane Parsons makes his feature directing debut with this icily brilliant and genuinely disturbing conceptual horror film based on his web series... Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve give barnstormingly good performances as Clark and Mary... Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares.
The Sheep Detectives
2026 · TheGuardian · Apr 2026
It makes for a sweet-natured family comedy, and a spiky and amusing cameo from Emma Thompson certainly doesn't hurt. The great feelgood trick pulled off by this film is that the murder doesn't get swamped with sadness and shock. It's an entertaining tale of ovine law enforcement.
Michael
2026 · TheGuardian · Apr 2026
Rammed with every music-movie cliche, an almost mute supporting cast and a Michael who only produces endless smiley blandness, this is a frustratingly shallow film. But this is a frustratingly shallow, inert picture, a kind of cruise-ship entertainment, which can't quite bring itself to show that Michael was an abuse victim, brutalised by his father and robbed of his childhood.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
2026 · TheGuardian · Mar 2026
This inert and uninteresting animated follow-up is nothing more than a bland screensaver of a movie, with a paucity of funny lines and an uninspired variation of the first film's storyline.
Project Hail Mary
2026 · TheGuardian · Mar 2026
Gosling is an effortlessly charming screen player, and he keeps it watchable, though the film itself has moments of dullness and a sort of puppyish silliness. This is a Hail Mary pass that Gosling just about manages to catch.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
2026 · TheGuardian · Mar 2026
Nevertheless, it is a resoundingly confident drama. The war and the Nazis are a big theme for a big-screen treatment and screenwriter Knight and director Tom Harper put it across with some gusto as a kind of homefront war film, helped by their effortlessly watchable lead.
The Bride!
2026 · TheGuardian · Mar 2026
Buckley gives it such outrageous craziness and she is a great pairing with the stolid Bale, especially when they go into an uncontrolled jerking and twitching choreography with the other revellers at a classy white-tie event. Without Buckley, this would have been lacking; with her, it's a very bizarre and enjoyable spectacle of married bliss.
“Wuthering Heights”
2026 · TheGuardian · Feb 2026
Wuthering Heights doesn't have the live-ammo impact of Fennell's earlier films Saltburn and Promising Young Woman or, indeed, Andrea Arnold's flawed, brilliant, primitivist take on Brontë's novel from 2011, which really did believe in the passionate truth of Cathy and Heathcliff's love. For Fennell, it looks like a luxurious pose of unserious abandon. It's quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion.
Avatar: Fire and Ash
2025 · TheGuardian · Dec 2025
Avatar is as gigantically uninteresting and colossally impervious to criticism as ever: a vast, blank edifice that placidly repels objection. The third Avatar chapter erupts with volcanic world-building and thunderous action yet remains a vast, dazzling spectacle in search of an emotional arc.
Marty Supreme
2025 · TheGuardian · Dec 2025
The pure craziness is a marvel. Chalamet hilariously enacts an unstoppable live-wire twitch, powered by indignation and self-pity, and Paltrow gives us a clever and wittily conceived counterweight to Marty's thrumming narcissism.
Nuremberg
2025 · TheGuardian · Nov 2025
Russell Crowe is rather wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall Göring; it's the best he's been for a long time, a sly and cunning manipulator playing psychological cat-and-mouse with the Americans. But there is a deeply silly performance from Rami Malek as Kelley: an eye-rolling, enigmatic-smiling, scenery-nibbling hamfest which makes it look as if Malek is auditioning for the role of Hitler in The Producers.
The Running Man
2025 · TheGuardian · Nov 2025
The resulting film is never anything but likable and fun – though never actually disturbing in the way that it's surely supposed to be and the ending is fudged and anticlimactic. Yet there's plenty of enjoyment to be had. Wright accelerates to a sprint for some full-tilt chase sequences; there's a nice punk aesthetic with protest 'zines being produced by underground rebels; and Wright always delivers those sugar-rush pop slams on the soundtrack.
Predator: Badlands
2025 · TheGuardian · Nov 2025
Predator: Badlands is just about kept from flatlining by Elle Fanning's effortless charm, though it shows what happens when the Predator in question must be humanised and made sympathetic – at which point it ceases to be the Predator. The sheer pointlessness of everything that happens subtracts the oxygen and even Fanning's imperishable star quality can't save it.
I Swear
2025 · TheGuardian · Oct 2025
Kirk Jones's terrifically warm, generous film is about real-life activist John Davidson, who has Tourette syndrome, and it raises relevant questions about overdiagnosis while offering compassion and catharsis. This is an absorbing, compassionate film that pierces the carapace of sentimentality while surreally commenting on the form and the demure niceties of polite society.
TRON: Ares
2025 · TheGuardian · Oct 2025
The matrix of pointlessness is reloaded in this mind-bendingly dull sci-fi, more a screensaver than an actual film. Jared Leto is unremittingly, unrelentingly awful here, and there is no drama or jeopardy or human interest anywhere. This franchise now looks about as urgently contemporary as an in-car CD player.
One Battle After Another
2025 · TheGuardian · Sep 2025
One Battle After Another is at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen – an acquired taste, yes, but addictive. These ideas are very unfashionable in the US right now, which only makes this film more interesting: it is about dissent and discontent, and the lonely heroism of not fitting in.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
2025 · TheGuardian · Sep 2025
There is a reckless, ruthless kind of provocative brilliance in what Ben Hania is doing. It is a fierce, vehement piece of work.
Superman
2025 · TheGuardian · Jul 2025
Here is a film occupying the heartsinking Venn diagram overlap between franchise exhaustion and AI soullessness: a film fatally unconvinced of the reason for its own existence. The Man of Steel – played with square-faced soullessness by David Corenswet – has an uninteresting crisis of confidence in Gunn's cluttered, pointless franchise restartery. What is the point of a film so stymied in its digitally encoded and generically prescribed world that it can't even go through the motions, as that would imply some level of activity and signs of life?
Jurassic World Rebirth
2025 · TheGuardian · Jun 2025
What a comeback. The Jurassic World film series had looked to be pretty much extinct after some increasingly dire dollops of franchise content, but now, against all odds, these dinosaurs have had a brand refresh: a brighter, breezier, funnier, incomparably better acted and better written film. It feels relaxed and sure-footed in its Spielberg pastiche, its big dino-jeopardy moments and its deployment of thrills and laughs.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
2025 · TheGuardian · May 2025
It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon. What a rush!
Sinners
2025 · TheGuardian · Apr 2025
For many, the movie could as well do without the supernatural element, and I admit I'm one of them; I'd prefer to see a real story with real jeopardy work itself out. But there is energy and comic-book brashness – and a notable real-world cameo in the post-credits sting.
Snow White
2025 · TheGuardian · Mar 2025
With tiresome pseudo-progressive additions that tie the whole thing in knots, this is a waste of estimable entertainers like Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot. This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you'll want to put your head in your hands.
Kraven the Hunter
2024 · TheGuardian · Dec 2024
Only the robust presence of Russell Crowe – and what might conceivably be a sly visual joke about exiled Russian plutocrat Mikhail Khodorkovsky – make this generic slice of superhero action worth watching. Kraven is a so-so character in a so-so film and the superhero revival is as far away as ever.
Wicked
2024 · TheGuardian · Nov 2024
It's a sugar-rush fantasy with the overpowering star presence of Cynthia Erivo; it basically dunks you face-down in a hyperreal ball pit of M&Ms for two and three-quarter hours. She is the film's Rushmore: charismatic, haughty and vulnerable. But this is the joke, and this is the story, and what an enjoyable spectacle it is.
Deadpool & Wolverine
2024 · TheGuardian · Jul 2024
It's amusing and exhausting. Reynolds is often funny, sometimes very funny, periodically entirely unbearable, often a weird and interesting mix of the three.
Inside Out 2
2024 · TheGuardian · Jun 2024
There are some laughs, but it sees the teen transition in terms of a moral crisis, of abandoning and then reclaiming the niceness of childhood innocence; it's a little bit convoluted and repetitive and, in its sanitised, Disneyfied way, this film can't quite bring itself to mention the most important new teen emotion of all.