Film
Unhappy days
Scriptwriters love to feast on the lives of children’s authors. The themes tend not to vary: they may have brought…
No balls
Borg vs McEnroe is a dramatised account of one of the greatest tennis rivalries of all time — between Bjorn…
Nut job
The film-maker Darren Aronofsky says he wrote Mother! in five days as if in a ‘fever dream’ and, as a…
Art of darkness
Stephen King, 69, has sold more than 350 million books, and tries not to apologise for being working-class, or imaginative,…
Male order
The starting point for Taylor Sheridan’s crime-thriller Wind River is explicitly stated at the end when the following words come…
Silent films
On 15 September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was intrigued to read an account of an up-to-date artist’s house in the…
Moral maze
Una is a psychological drama about a woman who was abused by a man when she was 12, and who…
Moor and more
In 1824 an ambitious teenage actor fled to England from his native New York where he had been beaten up…
Losing the plot
Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky is a heist caper that, to be fair, does what it says on the can. There…
In praise of Netflix
All this week I have been trying, with considerable success, to avoid being bludgeoned by TV programmes telling me in…
Tricky, and slightly sicky
The Big Sick is a rom-com that’s smarter than most rom-coms, which isn’t saying much, admittedly. It stars a Muslim…
Ivory towers
Great novels rarely make great movies, but for half a century one director has been showing all the others how…
Visual, visceral, confusing
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk has already been described as ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘a glorious, breathtakingly vivid triumph’, but we need to…
Do not be afraid
It Comes at Night is a horror film and I can’t say horror is my favourite genre. In fact, as…
Match made in heaven
Tennis is best played with a wooden racket on a shady lawn somewhere close to Dorking. There is no need…
Spellbound
A blushing James Woodall is riveted by Isabelle Huppert’s performance in Phaedra(s)
Punchlines and punches
Regular filmgoers must be losing count of the Rabelaisian revelries they’ve been invited to of late. You may recognise the…
Junk Bond
After six decades, it’s time we were done with 007
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…
