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Riz Ahmed is rightly being praised for his performance in this study of a man stripped of a sensation that’s central to his art—and is central to all of us. Ahmed plays Ruben, a heavy metal drummer in a band with his girlfriend Lou ( Olivia Cook ). During the tour he realises that his hearing is deteriorating—and fast. It isn’t just his performance that’s remarkable about this film, but the way it becomes so much about what you hear. The sound design moves from a ‘third person’ account of what’s heard to hearing what Ruben hears: what he hears when he’s tearing up the drums in concert; what he hears outside the venue and what he hears when he goes to seek initial advice in a pharmacy. The damage to his hearing—which may be because of previous drug abuse or it may not—will cost a lot to try and remedy. Ruben is accepted into a church-run retreat run by Veteran Joe ( Paul Raci ), and the environment is completely different for Ruben. He doesn’t know American Sign Language and if the aud...

This charming and scabrously funny romantic comedy has a time-loop plot that puts it in the same galaxy as Groundhog Day. It remains to be seen whether “Yeah he’s in Palm Springs…” will become synonymous with a boy meets girl scenario that goes in an endlessly repeating day. Nyles ( Andy Samberg ) wakes up on the day of a wedding. At this wedding he protects a drunk bridesmaid Sarah ( Cristin Miloti ) from having to make an impromptu speech, but shortly thereafter he flees the scene, having been shot with a crossbow by Roy ( JK Simmons ). Sarah follows him and ends up in a strange cave, wherein she becomes part of the repeating cycle of that single day. This is only somewhat like that other time loop movie though. There’s an immediate desire for Sarah to escape even though she likes Nyles, and he is kind of resigned to it—he has made quite a lot of having the same day again and again with no consequences. So we have an entertaining protagonist and a funny and pretty counterpart with Ag...

This is a family drama about a Korean immigrant family in the 1980s in Arkansas. It is mostly in Korean, and its mix of that language and American helps demonstrate the isolation of the immigrant experience. Jacob ( Steven Yeun ) takes his wife Monica ( Yeri Han ) and his two children from California to a patch of land which he plans to farm to supply the market for Korean ingredients. The film is Academy Award nominated for Best Picture in a year of Streaming movies, and it only seems a few years ago that the Oscars were not at all diverse and criticised heavily for it. Minari (the word is a Korean herb) is a small drama which places the viewer right in a family—and the outside world, the wider State and America itself seem completely beyond any interest. There’s hardly any reference at all to the era: it’s all in the substandard accommodation that’s the last thing Monica wanted for herself or her children. The younger boy has a heart problem, and when the Grandmother (Monica’s mother...

The idea of having a day set aside to say “yes” to whatever your children request sounds like a disaster in the making, but this genuine parenting advice book has been adapted into a film on Netflix. Jennifer Garner , who came to fame via the espionage drama Alias is Alison Torres, the mother of three who looks back on her younger adulthood with wistfulness as she no longer does the things she could do. And she has a teenage daughter who wants to be fully adult, a middle child who’s into science and wants to create explosions, and a sassy younger daughter who is unexpectedly hilarious. Edgar Ramírez plays her workaholic husband. The opening montage contrasts the couple’s earlier life when “yes” was the default word to everything but they are saying “no” to their kids all the time. In the end they decide to give the special day a try, and the stake is that the elder daughter Katie can go with her friend to a concert if, as she suspects, her mother is unable to keep up the “Yes”. So i...

The TV show Spooks burst on to our screens in 2002, a constant and sometimes extremely brutal reminder that the world is no longer safe, but the secret service are always on hand to take the edge of the terrorist threat with a mixture of high-tech snooping and low tech shooting. The real Secret Service don’t normally kick the doors down or your face in, but Spooks was never an attempt to do anything more than entertain and maybe stop you sleeping a little bit. And now it’s been made into a film. Spooks: The Greater Good might be a two part episode pushed together. It’s got nothing that the series lacked except maybe a few instances of harsh language that would never be acceptable, even after the watershed. It begins with an operation to extradite a high-profile terrorist, but the operation is jeopardised and Qasim ( Elys Gabel ) gets away because Harry Pearce ( Peter Firth ) doesn’t want to risk civilian casualties. A couple of young agents go after the fleeing Qasim: one of them is ...