Film
Macbeth at the movies
The world’s greatest playwright ought to be dynamite at the movies. But it’s notoriously hard to turn a profit from…
Who can still make a Sunday joint last a week?
Sunday lunch was always roast beef and, in the traditional way, the Yorkshire pudding was served first with gravy, supposedly…
The Heckler: Why does anyone still rate Vertigo?
Here’s something that may interest you. Or not. (Could go either way.) I was looking over Sight & Sound’s ‘100…
Doggie style
This week I’d like to point you in the direction of the British Film Institute and its free online archive…
Antique dildos
Danny Brocklehurst, the scriptwriter for Sky One’s Brassic, used to work for Shameless in its glory days — although if…
Nerd mentality
How do you tell a great story? According to Craig Mazin, you have to be a sadist. ‘As a writer,…
Deborah Ross
First, the latest digital film release: The Assistant, starring Julia Garner in a slowly, slowly, catchy, catchy tale that won’t…
On the contrary
The Spectator arts and books pages have spent 10,000 issues identifying the dominant cultural phenomena of the day and being difficult about them, says Richard Bratby
View from the back end
From Enoch Powell to Danny La Rue: Hilary Spurling looks back on her time in charge of the arts and books pages in the 1960s
French fancies
The selection of a film for family viewing is a precise and delicate art, particularly with us all now confined…
Captive audience
This film contains flying children, time travel and a sand monster that lives under a beach — yet the most…
Foreign language TV is without the political correctness spoiling English drama
Every cloud has a silver lining. Never again are you likely to have a better opportunity to catch up with…
Georgia on my mind
The film you want to see this week that you mightn’t have seen if you weren’t stuck at home is…
Untruthful
To tell you the truth about The Truth, even though it stars Catherine Deneuve at her most Catherine Deneuve-ish (i.e.…
Difficult women
The director of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, talks to Sarah Ditum about her new biopic of Marie Curie, exile from Iran and her fears for the future of democracy
When perving was the norm
Misbehaviour is a film about the 1970 Miss World contest that was disrupted by ‘bloody women’s libbers’ — that’s what…
What a scorcher
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set on a remote, windswept Brittany island in the late 18th…
Lost in translation
You won’t find much Jane Austen in the myriad adaptations of her novels, says Claire Harman
Space invaders
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Bafta for best foreign film and is up for six Oscars and it is an…
Curdled foreskin
The Lighthouse stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson (and a very nasty seagull) in a gothic thriller set off the…
Let there be light
Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is a romp told at a lick, and while it’s fun and……
One of those films that never seems to end: A Hidden Life reviewed
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a historical drama based on the true story of Franz Jäggerstätter, an Austrian who…
Alfred Dreyfus is being erased all over again
In London to promote a book, I received an invitation to a secret screening of An Officer and a Spy,…
Gripping, immersive and powerful: 1917 reviewed
Sam Mendes’s 1917 is the first world war drama that this week won the Golden Globe for best film and…
I’ve found the perfect family film (eventually)
As a member of Bafta, I get sent about 75 ‘screeners’ during the awards season, which is always a treat…
