Film
‘Shocking is too easy’
No one does transgression like the filmmaker John Waters. Jasper Rees talks to him about political correctness, post-ops and pubes
Chorus of disapproval
If heartwarming, against-the-odds, triumph-over-adversity, wrong-side-of-the-tracks films float your boat and you are in no way demanding then The Choir is…
Eyes wide shut
Asif Kapadia’s documentary about Amy Winehouse, whom Tony Bennett describes as ‘one of the truest jazz singers that ever lived’,…
Maestro maker
The writer and director Peter Bogdanovich has made three of my favourite films of all time (The Last Picture Show,…
Censoring Jews
The attempt to ban Jewish men from seeing ‘The Gift of Fire’ sets a very dangerous precedent
Sharks are awesome!
If naturalists accept they’re terrifying, we’ll have a better chance of saving them
A sting in the tail
Mr Holmes stars Ian McKellen as the great detective in his old age and while it could have proved a…
Walking with cadence
I often regret that I’m writing in the past tense here, but never more than about milonga. It is such…
Dead behind the eyes
With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done,…
Boring Boorman
Queen & County is John Boorman’s follow-up to his 1987 semi-autobiographical film Hope & Glory, although why a sequel now,…
Stolen goods
Man Up is a British rom-com starring Simon Pegg as Jack and Lake Bell as Nancy. Nancy’s problem, at the…
Sexed-up pacifism
Big-screen documentaries never change the world. Blackfish has not shortened the queues to see maltreated killer whales leap through hoops…
More Marx than Dante
Martin Gayford finds a few nice paintings amid the dead trees, old clothes and agitprop of the Venice Biennale
To the maddest max
No one goes slack-jawed in wonder at the movies any more. In our cyber-enabled times, kid designers can mega-pixelate any…
Messy genius
Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he…
Rock bottom
The oeuvre of Chris Rock may not be fully known in this parish. He was the African-American stand-up who made…
Crowd pleaser
Firstly, a message to all Marvel fanboys: there is nothing for you here. Nothing. No CGI, no endless battles, no…
Superheroic failure
Avengers: Age of Ultron is the second film in the Avengers franchise, as written and directed by Joss Whedon, and…
Fighting fear with fear
‘Do it with scissors’ was Alfred Hitchcock’s advice for prospective murderers, though a glance at these two biographies reminds us…
Cold frames
A Little Chaos is a period drama directed by Alan Rickman and starring Kate Winslet as a woman charged to…
I, Bette Davis
It was called Frankly Speaking and by golly it was. The great screen actress Bette Davis was being interviewed by…
The dreamer
Ian Thomson on the creative limbo that spawned Fellini’s modernist masterpiece, 8½
All that glitters is not gold
Woman in Gold feels rather like a Jewish version of Philomena as this too is about an older woman seeking…
Independents’ day
Sometimes a guy feels abstracted from the world. He visits Europe’s finest galleries, but the paintings seem to hang like…
Knuckle-headed
Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella is a Disney film based on a Disney film, so is double Disney, if you like. It…
