Film
Jane Austen on speed
Love & Friendship is based on the little-known Jane Austen epistolary novella, Lady Susan, which was not published until after…
High life
New York Let’s face it, sleaze is to professional party-givers what jail is to a burglar, an occupational hazard. I’ve…
Memories, dreams, reflections
Heart of a Dog is a film by Laurie Anderson and it’s a meditative, free-associating rumination on life, loss, love…
The male gaze
Everybody Wants Some!! is a comedy written and directed by Richard Linklater, which is the good news, but it’s set…
Deluded divas
Were Florence Foster Jenkins and her fellow culprits touchingly heroic, cynically fraudulent or just plain bonkers? Rupert Christiansen reports
Striking the wrong note
Before we turn our attention to Florence Foster Jenkins — but if you can’t wait, it’s so-so — I feel…
Less than Marvellous
Captain America: Civil War is the 897th instalment — or something like it — in the Marvel comic franchise. This…
The future is here
With the release of Oculus Rift – virtual reality you can buy from a shop – cinema will never be the same again, says Peter Hoskin
Slow burn
The big hitter this week is, of course, Batman v Superman, but if you want to learn something new, and…
Building block
High-Rise is Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel, and it is deeply unpleasant, if not deeply, deeply unpleasant. (Ideally,…
The human factor
Anomalisa is an animated film written by Charlie Kaufman, and while the temptation is to label it a midlife crisis…
Ticket to ride
The latest film from the Coen brothers is a comedy set during the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood and in some…
Bottom Gere
The Benefactor is both a bad film and a thoroughly inexplicable one. It’s one of those what-were-they-thinking projects that wastes…
Brothers grim
What is a serious film festival doing opening with Ethan and Joel Coens’ turkey Hail, Caesar!? James Woodall reports from Berlin
Touching the void
Scholarly filmgoers may recall a movement that sprouted from Danish soil called Dogme 95. It worked to a Spartan set…
Fashion faux pas
‘I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good-looking,’ said a pouty Derek Zoolander…
It’s doomed!
The TV sitcom Dad’s Army ran on the BBC from 1968 to 1977 (nine series, 80 episodes) with repeats still…
Doing the wrong thing
Like The Revenant and The Big Short, Spotlight is yet another Oscar contender ‘based on true events’ — although it…
Endurance test
The Revenant is a survival-against-the-odds film that so puts Leonardo DiCaprio through it I bet he was thinking, ‘I wish…
Mad about the boy
This is the week of The Hateful Eight, the latest Quentin Tarantino film, but Tarantino being Tarantino, there were no…
Darth Vader is dirty and it’s not just me that thinks so
Star Wars taught Hollywood how to make children’s films for adults, says Tanya Gold
Why did a Russian ballet dancer throw acid in his boss’s face?
The 16th June 1961 and 17th January 2013 are two indelible dates in the annals of Russian ballet. Two events…
Grandma: a feminist comedy that punches magnificently above its weight
Apologies if you were expecting a review of Star Wars here, but Disney is not allowing critics access prior to…
The still point
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is the best-remembered title of a short career. Born in 1901, he was dead by…
Sins of the fathers
This is a documentary in which three men travel across Europe together, but they’re not pleasurably interrailing, even though there…
