Jeremy Allen White gives a committed performance in this awkward biopic, stranded between rock mythology and pop-psych melodrama

This Boss-olatrous film only partly escapes music-movie cliches. This happens when Bruce Springsteen finally leaves his New Jersey heartland, and sees a shrink in shallow LA where he has bought a house. Otherwise, it’s all chunks of expositional dialogue (“I’m just trying to find something real in the noise!” “It’s like he’s channelling something deeply personal!”), black-and-white flashbacks to his tough upbringing, scenes in the recording studio with producers and execs looking on wonderstruck behind the glass while the magic happens. And there’s some very strange stuff about Bruce’s romantic life.

Jeremy Allen White does an intelligent, committed job as Springsteen; Jeremy Strong gives of his considerable best with the thanklessly dull role of Bruce’s manager and friend Jon Landau, and Stephen Graham is Springsteen’s abusive but troubled dad Douglas with whom Springsteen finally comes to terms. In fact White and Graham have the film’s best scene, a scene so weird that it must surely be true. Springsteen’s old dad, waiting humbly and penitently in the Boss’s dressing room after the show, asks Bruce in a voice filled with pathos to sit on his knee and Springsteen has to point out gently that he is a grown man and has in fact never done this before in his life, not even as a kid.

Stiller’s documentary about his parents, comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, is a tender reflection on marriage and what it costs to keep smiling in the entertainment business

Ben Stiller has created a sweet, affectionate, unexpectedly poignant portrait of his parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara – and, perhaps without quite realising it, of himself as well. His mum and dad were two hard-working actor-comedians who had a very successful TV double act in the 60s and 70s and a long marriage. This has been the source of so much material, based on the quarrels and tensions to which Ben and his sister Amy were intimate witnesses.

Both parents’ backgrounds were hard. Anne’s mother had taken her own life; Jerry’s dad was tough and unsupportive. Perhaps they never experienced the full status of stardom that their son has enjoyed, although Jerry had a new lease of late-life TV fame in the 90s with his superb portrayal of George Costanza’s dad in Seinfeld. The film is centred on Ben and Amy clearing out their mum and dad’s New York apartment after Jerry died in 2020; Anne had died in 2015. And Ben Stiller himself emerges as a complex and unresolved personality from this film: he considers the fact that his parents were sometimes not there for him because of the pressures of show business, and that he himself was not around for his own children because of being away on film sets. He and his wife Christine Taylor separated for three years but reunited in 2020.

Bizarre dialogue riffs add flavour to this likable film about two friends on a road trip to track down some super rare records

Here is a goofy road movie comedy with some cheeky borrowings from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity; it’s a bit broad, and the ending doesn’t exactly gel, but it’s likable all the same. Dermot (Brenock O’Connor) and Elvis (Owen Colgan) are a couple of guys from Northern Ireland who run a record shop in Omagh, County Tyrone, dealing in old-school vinyl, but they are terrorised by their mean landlord, Sadie (Tara Lynne O’Neill), who owns the lease. They desperately need cash for rent arrears when Dermot discovers online that a farmer in Cork is offering what appear to be hugely valuable records by the blues legend Robert Johnson for just £30 – not realising their real value.

Our two amigos go on a desperate southward journey to trick the poor guy with a paltry 30 quid – or the equivalent in euros – and then sell the precious discs on for what they figure will be a mouthwatering 40 grand. But does that mean they are selling their souls, the way Robert Johnson is supposed to have done at a remote crossroads?

The Pulitzer prize-winner has worked across the developing world, braved war zones and been taken hostage in Libya, but do we really need a tour of her beautiful home?

The tumultuous life and career of Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario is the subject of this National Geographic film, produced and directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (who made the climbing documentary Free Solo and the biopic Nyad with Annette Bening as the endurance swimmer Diana Nyad). Addario’s work is certainly amazing and courageous. She has captured compelling images in Ukraine, where her picture of civilian fatalities helped mobilise western opinion against Putin; in Libya, where she was terrifyingly held captive for days along with three other colleagues from the New York Times; and across the developing world where her images of maternal death have been a spur to charitable work around the globe.

Addario is a smart, candid interviewee – we also get shots of broadcast-journalism A-listers including Christiane Amanpour and Katie Couric – who is alive to the dangers of adrenalin addiction and a world in which journalists are increasingly considered fair game in war zones. She is alive also, I think, to the dangers of producing images that are too artistically beautiful. Hers is a job for tough people only; one US army officer calls her “as hard as woodpecker lips” and I believe him.

London film festival: Gender, sexuality, status and power are all in flux in Julia Jackman’s playful medieval fairytale, adapted from Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel, also starring Maika Monroe and Charli xcx

Julia Jackman has followed Bonus Track with this queer fantasy-fable that has a streak of earnestness to go with the romantasy energy and gorgeous costumes from designer Susie Coulthard. It’s adapted by Jackman from Isabel Greenberg’s 2016 graphic novel of the same title, and inspired generally by Scheherazade and the One Thousand and One Nights – and also I think by Julie Dash, Peter Greenaway and maybe the theatricality of Agnès Varda’s One Hundred and One Nights. Emma Corrin and Maika Monroe star, with Nicholas Galitzine and Amir El-Masry in support; Charli xcx makes an appearance, and there’s also a tiny intriguing cameo for critic Sophie Monks Kaufman. It adds up to a likable movie, a little fey but unexpectedly subtle – although the meta-level of storytelling sometimes has for me the disconcerting effect of halting and dissipating the all-important narrative energy.

We are in a fairytale medieval world created by the god Birdman (Richard E Grant). Or rather, a world envisioned originally as a gender-coeval utopia by his daughter Kiddo (Safia Oakley-Green), but then spoiled by Birdman in a fit of sexist pique. In this place, women are not allowed to read or write but they are allowed to tell stories, and it is this skill that distinguishes the maidservant Hero (Corrin), who waits upon the shy, melancholy noblewoman Cherry (Monroe), and has become her intimate best friend.

London film festival
Despite the odd laugh, the story of the boxer’s path from Sheffield gyms to global stardom and his break with mentor Brendan Ingle feels dramatically underweight

There’s a really good cast here, in a movie with a real-life story to tell: how Irish boxing trainer Brendan Ingle mentored a cheeky Sheffield kid from migrant Yemeni parents, “Prince” Naseem Hamed, teaching him to stand up to racist bullies and turning him into a media-friendly world champ in the late 90s, nurturing his showboating arrogance and his lethal fists. But, after becoming wealthy, Hamed brattishly turned against Ingle, cutting him out of the action, and turning him into a combination of John Falstaff and Broadway Danny Rose. Pierce Brosnan plays Ingle; Amir El-Masry is Hamed and Toby Stephens is bullish London promoter Frank Warren who saw the goldmine that Ingle had discovered.

But the movie frankly lacks the Prince’s fancy footwork: the boxing sequences run smoothly but the all-important drama between them is repeatedly flat and one-note. There is no nuance or light and shade in the depiction of Hamed himself, and that otherwise outstanding performer El-Masry isn’t given the chance to show any subtlety or much of what might make his character really interesting – although he’s clearly been training and looks very plausible in the ring.

London film festival: Nighy stars as a boozy literary has-been and Staunton his estranged wife in Pablo Trapero’s unconvincing adaptation of David Gilbert’s 2013 novel

No movie with Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy can be entirely without interest – and they’re heading up a mighty cast here under the direction of the great Argentinian film-maker Pablo Trapero, making his English-language debut. He has co-written the screenplay with another A-lister: Canadian actor and director Sarah Polley.

And yet the resulting picture, adapted from the 2013 novel by David Gilbert, feels nebulous and laborious. It is dependent on a giant twist-reveal, which is bafflingly implausible and strangely uncompelling even if taken at face value, and which tends to undermine the emotional reality of the whole film and its big confrontation scenes – though there is one riveting showdown between Staunton and Nighy, two black-belts each at the top of their game.

Nighy is Andrew Dyer, a cantankerous old literary lion revered throughout the world for the brilliant novels of his youth, who has published nothing for years and is now marooned like a bearded, drunken hermit in his huge Oxfordshire mansion, boozing, playing jazz LPs too loud and shouting at the walls. He lives with his longsuffering Czech housekeeper Gerde (Anna Geislerová) and high-schooler Andy (Noah Jupe), the product of an affair that destroyed his marriage to Isabel (Imelda Staunton).

Andy is (possibly) like Smerdyakov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: the non-canonical brother to his other, older siblings, would-be documentary film-maker Jamie (George MacKay) and recovering alcoholic screenwriter Richard (Johnny Flynn). The entire family is imperiously summoned to the mansion by Dyer.

Andy and Richard are furious with the old man for how he treated their mother but self-hatingly aware they are still using him for their various careers. The film shows that their intense dislike of Dyer is not helped by the extraordinary claim he now makes about Andy – is it just a delusional, self-serving excuse for his infidelity and the only imaginative effort of which the raddled old man is now capable? Or could it be true?

Either way, there isn’t much drama to be had from it. The whole situation circles around Dyer’s revelation without satisfactorily fleshing out its claims to the truth, or its implications as fiction. Jupe, MacKay and Flynn transmit their roles strongly enough, though the male cast are perhaps upstaged by Staunton as Dyer’s estranged wife; it is actually Flynn’s character Richard, furiously obsessed with what Dyer owes him, who delivers the film’s second disclosure, which would be quite enough on its own for most stories.

There are memories here of other films about ageing, conceited toxic-male authors: Bjørn Runge’s The Wife (2017) and Alice Troughton’s The Lesson (2023). Although as a movie about a dysfunctional family, it isn’t anywhere near the quality of Trapero’s own tremendous crime-family movie The Clan from 2015.

& Sons doesn’t deliver on the promise of all its film-making talent but Nighy is always amusing, especially when he crisply orders his nephew Emmett (Arthur Conti) to fix him a whisky. In his untutored way, the kid fills the glass almost to the brim and Dyer grinningly congratulates him on an excellent “Scotch-to-air ratio”.

London film festival
Hawke plays with campy brilliance and criminal combover the lyricist Lorenz Hart as he spirals into vinegary jilted despair after his split from Richard Rodgers

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Breaking up with the more prominent partner in a showbiz double act is a hazardous business. Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now this witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in size – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

With supreme entitlement, Sian Clifford’s Lady Isabella shines as ‘aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians’ in this barnstorming comedy

Those of us pining for Sian Clifford since the end of Fleabag, in which she played Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s fierce sister, have been rewarded with an outrageous barnstormer in this bizarre mockumentary comedy, a feature debut for director Samuel Abrahams. Clifford plays haughty but troubled aristocrat Lady Isabella who welcomes a young film-maker into her gorgeous country estate (filmed at Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk) with calamitous results, and the film plays like a scuzzier, shroomier B-side to Saltburn. Maybe it’s a bit reliant on Clifford’s overwhelming firepower of performance, and we have to indulge the way it cheats strict mockumentary rules about how exactly the camera comes to be where it is at every moment. But there are laughs and unexpected tenderness in this very peculiar sentimental education.

Laurie Kynaston plays Sam, a pushy, insecure young director who shows up at the stately home with his crew, excited at the prospect of shooting a candid documentary study, but disconcerted by the distrait behaviour and patrician mannerisms of the chatelaine, Lady Isabella. Describing herself as “aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians”, she hosts and judges the annual talent show Stately Stars for local children. Yearning for her own artistic vocation to be respected, Lady Isabella now wishes to compete against the youngsters herself, with a vast, complex multimedia performance-installation piece which includes poetry, action painting and photographs of her apparently dead body around the grounds. Juliet Cowan is a put-upon housekeeper who is unsure whether to address her employer as “milady”.

Debts, secrets and a cartoonish Tilda Swinton catch up with Farrell’s self-styled ‘Lord Doyle’ as he confronts his own destiny in a chance to win salvation

The vast emptiness of luxury hotels is part of the mystery and spectacle of Edward Berger’s intriguing if static and overwrought psychological drama-thriller; it is about a desperate chancer and gambling addict, faced with the metaphysical crisis of renewing or annulling his existence by staking everything on a single bet. Screenwriter Rowan Joffe adapts the 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne, whose title is ironic. He would not have these problems if he really was a small player. He is a big player and a big loser, although his smallness comes through in other ways.

Colin Farrell plays a professional gambler who styles himself “Lord Doyle”, adrift in the Chinese gambling mecca of Macau, the Asian Vegas; he is a despised “gweilo” or foreign ghost. Farrell shows us a seedy guy with an outrageously spivvy moustache and a flop sweat, running up a massive bill at the kind of five-star establishment which tolerates this sort of thing on the tacit understanding that the guest will bet and lose massively at the hotel casino. Doyle never lets the staff in to clean his room so wakes up hungover every morning in an accumulating chaos.