Film
Dual control
Legend is a biopic of the Kray twins starring Tom Hardy as Reggie and Tom Hardy as Ronnie, so it’s…
All from nothing
Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a long married couple whose relationship is disturbed by…
Male order
Gemma Bovery is a modern-day refashioning of Gustave Flaubert’s literary masterpiece Madame Bovary, and while such refashionings can work well…
I reshot Andy Warhol
Stephen Smith finally sees the point of Empire, one of the dullest films in cinema history
Great expectations
Trainwreck is a romcom as written and directed by Amy Schumer, the American comedy prodigy whose Comedy Central sketch show…
The Trump doctrine
Were you ever not very nice at school? A bit of a tosspot to others, perhaps. Ever so slightly a…
Dedicated follower of fashion
Iris is a documentary portrait of Iris Apfel, the nonagenarian New York fashion icon. Nope, me neither, but that’s irrelevant,…
Sweeney Plod
The Legend of Barney Thomson is the directorial debut of actor Robert Carlyle, and it’s one of those black comedies…
‘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…
