Film
The kids are not alright
Raya and the Last Dragon has everything you might want nowadays from a major Disney film — feisty kick-ass heroine,…
Nothing personal
Pelé is a two-hour documentary about the great Brazilian footballer — the greatest footballer ever, some would say — who…
Deliciously dark
I Care a Lot is a deliciously dark comic thriller that You’ll Enjoy a Lot. It’s heartless. It’s vicious. It’s…
Looking for a new England
Dan Hitchens on our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons
From screen to stage
It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage…
Trigger happy
In this line of business you receive many emails from PRs ‘reaching out’ about their particular film, which I really…
Cinema as car ad
It’s a premise with plenty of previous. Children whose parents were murdered by Indians on the frontier of the American…
Lowering the baa
Rams is an average film with a better film trying to get out, and you may already have seen that…
What lies beneath
Just before the outbreak of the second world war a discovery was made in a riverside field at Sutton Hoo…
The rise of opera film
I’m still waiting for the Royal Opera to step up. Nearly a year into the Covid crisis and what do…
Think twice
The White Tiger is adapted from the Booker-prize winning novel (2008) by Aravind Adiga. It is directed by Ramin Bahrani…
They wouldn’t let it lie
The comedy Blithe Spiritwas written by Noël Coward in 1941. It is, essentially, about a séance going wrong and a…
The trying game
Rosie Millard dispels the myth that persistence is always rewarded
The secret history
Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! is based on a true event and set in 1962 in the Russian city of Novocherkassk…
Supernatural power
The triumph of Korean cinema
A fine romance
Sylvie’s Love is an exquisitely styled, swooning, old-school, period Hollywood romance and while it has been described as ‘glib’ in…
Pandemic panto
This pantomime was filmed by ‘legendary Blue Peter presenter’ Peter Duncan in his back garden over the summer. It was…
Poetry in motion
How did the universe begin? Did the great god Bumba vomit us up, as the Kuba believe? Or did we…
This will hurt
County Lines is the kind of social realism that the British do so well, if not too well. In other…
It’ll blow you away
When I recommend this documentary to people, telling them it follows the journalistic investigation into a fire that broke out…
Whiplash
Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story.…
The outsiders
Tanya Gold on the journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood
Blue notes
This documentary about Billie Holiday is transfixing. Not just because it’s about Billie Holiday — I am not into jazz…
A star is reborn
The Life Ahead stars Sophia Loren, and if there is one reason to see The Life Ahead it is this:…
Riveting twosome
This week, two electrifying performances in two excellent films rather than two mediocre performances in the one mediocre film —…
