Film
Saint Joan and the treacherous phone
My time with Joan Collins was wonderful – except for one mortifying moment
Stealing a march
Selma, the civil rights film that stars David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, undoubtedly contains the best and most powerful…
Japanomania
Peter Hoskin on the island nation that has taken over popular culture
Cruel to be kind
Trash is the sort of film one desperately wishes to be kind about — heart supremely, if not burstingly, in…
Shopping and viewing
Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan)…
Great coat
A Most Violent Year is a riveting drama even though I can’t tell you what it’s about, or even what…
Great Brittain
Jasper Rees talks to Shirley Williams about the forthcoming screen portrayal of her mother
Puke the line
Wild is yet another film based on a true story, as currently seems to be in vogue for some reason.…
The physics widow
What’s missing from Stephen Hawking’s hagiographic new biopic
Marx men
Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers
Slowly, slowly, catchy, catchy
Foxcatcher is a crime drama (of sorts) that has already been dubbed ‘Oscarcatcher!’ as it barely puts a foot wrong.…
Birdbrained
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, which stars Michael Keaton as a one-time superhero movie star (just like Keaton himself), is audacious…
Barometer
Marking a century Some things which celebrate their 100th birthday in 2015: 3-D films The first was shown at the…
Saints and sinners
Is Bill Murray fit for sainthood? Certainly his fans have him figure as some sort of lesser divinity, maybe one…
Death of a screenwriter
Cinema is tough right now for writers. Thomas W. Hodgkinson reports from the front line at the Austin Film Festival
Bear necessity
‘Please look after this bear,’ reads the famous label hanging round Paddington’s neck, and this film does that, admirably, handsomely,…
On the Wayne
The Homesman, which stars Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones and is set in the Nebraska territory in the 1850s,…
In the closet
The Imitation Game is a biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who broke the German’s Enigma…
Dumb and dumber
Christopher Nolan’s futuristic epic Interstellar isn’t a clever film, or even a dumb film with a clever film trying to…
Art of grunting
Mr Turner may be the gruntiest film of the year, possibly the gruntiest film ever. ‘Grunt, grunt, grunt,’ goes Mr…
Signifying nothing
Fury is a second world war drama that plays with us viscerally and unsparingly — I think I saw a…
Leigh’s late flowering
Hermione Eyre talks to filmmaker Mike Leigh about Mr Turner, Hollywood, and making films his own way
See it and sleep
Take tissues to The Best of Me, I’d read, as it’s such a weepie, so I took tissues, being a…
Live long and prosper
Without sci-fi, there would be no cinema, writes Peter Hoskin
Effie off
Effie Gray, which has been written by Emma Thompson and recounts the doomed marriage of Victorian art critic John Ruskin…
