Cinema
Cheesy feat
Go see Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, which stars Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, and the next day you will wonder: did…
Terminal whimsy
The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but…
Bleak, brutal and bloody
Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is set in the 14th century and is a tale of rivalry and rape told…
Hot mess
These days, James Bond can no longer just be the main character in the Bond films. He’s also had to…
Man and boy
So how exactly did Tony Soprano become a New Jersey mob boss? It’s 1967 and young Anthony is struggling to…
No cojones
It’s a hard heart that doesn’t warm to the musical drama Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I don’t have a hard…
Bricking it
Herself is an intensely powerful film about domestic violence that isn’t Nil By Mouth or The Killer Inside Me or…
Odd and odder
Leos Carax is the director whose films have always been wilfully odd. Ron and Russell Mael (the brothers from the…
Why I love Basic Instinct
Our occasional series on cinema’s most underrated films arrives at what many have considered the peak of misogynistic trash. We’re…
Food for thought
What use does a fallen and corrupted world have for a man of integrity? This was not the question I…
Secrets and spies
The Courier is a Cold War spy thriller and the prospect of a Cold War spy thriller always makes my…
Such tweet sorrow
The distinction between on and offline life blurred long ago. The greatest spats, sexual self-fashionings and mad soliloquies now unfurl…
Growing pains
The biggest challenge in reviewing M. Night Shyamalan’s Old lies in describing its central idea without making the film sound…
Bring on the tissues
Not one, but two British films this week, one that’s only being screened at the cinema (if you’re brave enough)…
Good dogs v. lame jokes
Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer…
By Tove!
Tove is a biopic of the Finnish artist Tove Jansson who, most famously, created the Moomins, that gentle family of…
Men behaving drunkenly
Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round has been heaped with awards: an Oscar, a Bafta, it swept the European Film Awards. And…
Two men and their dog
At the time Supernova went into production one headline read: ‘What did we do to deserve a love story starring…
What a song and dance
In The Heights is an adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit stage musical — the one he wrote before Hamilton —…
Where is my mind?
The Father is an immensely powerful film about dementia starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, who was asleep in his bed in…
Land of milk and money
Kelly Reichardt’s First Cowstars John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, and a Jersey cow listed in the credits as ‘Evie’,…
Rabbit redux
The cinemas finally reopened this week and what better way to celebrate than with Peter Rabbit 2? You’ll probably be…
Life after deaf
The multi-Oscar-nominated Sound of Metalstars Riz Ahmed as a heavy-metal drummer whose life is in freefall after losing his hearing.…
Pandemic panto
This pantomime was filmed by ‘legendary Blue Peter presenter’ Peter Duncan in his back garden over the summer. It was…
This will hurt
County Lines is the kind of social realism that the British do so well, if not too well. In other…
