The Super Mario Galaxy Movie review – bland screensaver of a movie that’s actually worse than AI

At this point, it’s trite to say that a bad film feels as if it’s been AI generated, but this simplistic sequel is next-level – it’s nothing more than an Easter holiday cash grab Here is an inert and uninteresting animated follow-up to The Super Mario Bros Movie , based on the legacy video game about two wacky Italian-Brooklyn plumbers Mario and Luigi, voiced here by Chris Pratt and Charlie Day; this kind of stereotype is evidently the last in mainstream entertainment to be considered offensive. Now they and mushroom-kingdom ruler Princess Peach (voiced by Anya Taylor-Joy) have to rescue Rosalina (Brie Larson), the adoptive mother of the faintly Minion-y creatures called the Lumas. She has been abducted by Bowser Jr (Benny Safdie), the son of wicked turtle Bowser (Jack Black), who did very much the same sort of thing in the previous film. Of course it’s intended for little kids, but it surely didn’t need to be such a visually dull screensaver of a movie, with even more of the cheesy,...

La Syndicaliste review Isabelle Huppert is fascinating in blood-boiling injustice drama

French film about real-life trade union whistleblower and rape survivor Maureen Kearney, accused of inventing her assault

‘My name is Maureen Kearney. I didn’t lie. I didn’t make anything up.” This French drama about a blood-boiling real-life case of injustice is the story of whistleblower and rape survivor Maureen Kearney, who for four years lived with a criminal record: falsely convicted of wasting police time, accused of inventing her rape. It’s a political thriller that tells the story matter-of-factly, and is perhaps a little lacking in the pace department. But Isabelle Huppert carries it along with a performance every bit as gripping as you’d expect. (Kearney is actually Irish, but has lived and worked in France since the mid 1980s; Huppert plays her as French).

Adapted from a book by investigative journalist Caroline Michel-Aguirre, this is a film of two halves, beginning with the whistleblowing. It’s 2011, and Kearney is a powerful trade union official, going into battle for the 50,000 staff at French nuclear engineering giant Areva in her armour of full makeup and blond hair so immaculately blow-dried it could deflect arrows. Kearney has the trade minister’s number in her phone and can summon President Sarkozy to a meeting. (Rumour has it he called her “a hysteric in a skirt”.) She turns whistleblower after being handed documents revealing secret plans to sell off France’s nuclear technology to China.

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