Film
Spare us the preaching
It doesn’t help the cause of The Railway Children Return that the original 1970 Railway Children film is currently on…
Some like it hot
Mary Wakefield on Katia and Maurice Krafft, who loved volcanoes and each other
Where the wild things aren’t
Where the Crawdads Sing is based on the bestselling book (by Delia Owens) that I picked up from one of…
Brought to book
You may already have read early reviews of Netflix’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion saying it’s ‘the worst adaptation ever’…
One man and his robot
Brian and Charles is a sweetly funny mockumentary about a lonely Welsh inventor who is not that good at inventing.…
P is for pointless
The Princess, a new documentary film, is the first re-framing of the Princess Diana story since it was last re-framed,…
Fever pitch
Elvis is Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of Elvis Presley and it’s cradle to grave but told at such a gallop you’ll…
Shooting star
Tanjil Rashid on the polymathic Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who spearheaded a new school of Indian cinema
Let’s talk about sex
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande stars Emma Thompson as a retired, widowed religious education teacher in her sixties who…
High life
He is a rich English lord with a very large house and his wife is a beautiful American with a…
Friends reunited
All My Friends Hate Me is a film about a university reunion weekend and should you have an upcoming university…
Fantastic beasts
Sam Kriss on the power of paleoart
The timeless mystery of Charlie Chaplin
Eleven years ago, I was summoned to the Manoir de Ban, a huge white house overlooking Lake Geneva, to meet…
The closing of the Chinese mind
I was born in Nanjing five years after the Tiananmen Square protests. By then, records of the demonstrations and the…
For meta or worse
Bergman Island sounds, on first acquaintance, like a theme-park attraction. Roll up, roll up! Let us speed you through the…
Fresh knickers
Last April Fools’ Day, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo wound up their award-winning film review show on BBC Radio 5…
It pierces the heart
Terence Davies’s Benediction is a biopic of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon told with great feeling and tenderness.…
Poetry in motion
Craig Raine on the challenges of translating poets’ lives and work to the screen
Dark side of the rune
In Rus, which we now call Ukraine, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) begins his pursuit of revenge. A sea captain who later…
Slippery slope
Downton Abbey: A New Era is the second film spin-off from the TV series and, like the first, it doesn’t…
Thrills, frills and folderols
A clever, original exhibition at the Wallace Collection has Laura Freeman twirling her way through the West End
You’re Nicked
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent stars Nicolas Cage playing a version of Nicolas Cage, in a parody of Nicolas…
The great deceit
Operation Mincemeat is based on the book by Ben Macintyre, which in turn is based on what Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper…
The man who disappeared
In September 1890 a Frenchman called Louis Le Prince left his brother in Dijon and boarded a train to Paris,…
Strangers on a train
Compartment No. 6 is set aboard a long train journey across Russia, a country we don’t hear much of these…
