Film
Man and boy
So how exactly did Tony Soprano become a New Jersey mob boss? It’s 1967 and young Anthony is struggling to…
Giving the devil his due
The Sopranos – the greatest television show in history – far outshines its progenitors, says Tanya Gold
No cojones
It’s a hard heart that doesn’t warm to the musical drama Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I don’t have a hard…
Bricking it
Herself is an intensely powerful film about domestic violence that isn’t Nil By Mouth or The Killer Inside Me or…
High life
Gstaad Good manners aside, what I miss nowadays is a new, intelligent, finely acted movie. Never have I seen…
Odd and odder
Leos Carax is the director whose films have always been wilfully odd. Ron and Russell Mael (the brothers from the…
Why I love Basic Instinct
Our occasional series on cinema’s most underrated films arrives at what many have considered the peak of misogynistic trash. We’re…
Food for thought
What use does a fallen and corrupted world have for a man of integrity? This was not the question I…
Secrets and spies
The Courier is a Cold War spy thriller and the prospect of a Cold War spy thriller always makes my…
Such tweet sorrow
The distinction between on and offline life blurred long ago. The greatest spats, sexual self-fashionings and mad soliloquies now unfurl…
The ghost in the corner of the room
Strange, really, that the scheduled output of traditional broadcasters became known as ‘terrestrial’ television, given that TV is an etheric…
Growing pains
The biggest challenge in reviewing M. Night Shyamalan’s Old lies in describing its central idea without making the film sound…
Bring on the tissues
Not one, but two British films this week, one that’s only being screened at the cinema (if you’re brave enough)…
Good dogs v. lame jokes
Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer…
Shawn again
Pity the aesthete, the flâneur and the opera-goer. Those who find the contents of their own heads so dull and…
By Tove!
Tove is a biopic of the Finnish artist Tove Jansson who, most famously, created the Moomins, that gentle family of…
Men behaving drunkenly
Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round has been heaped with awards: an Oscar, a Bafta, it swept the European Film Awards. And…
Hogwarts and all
Harry Potter is a fictional orphan locked in a cupboard by his aunt and uncle, after which he discovers a…
Two men and their dog
At the time Supernova went into production one headline read: ‘What did we do to deserve a love story starring…
What a song and dance
In The Heights is an adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit stage musical — the one he wrote before Hamilton —…
Kitsch tomfoolery
The latest movie to turn into a musical is Amélie, from 2001, about a Parisian do-gooder or ‘godmother of the…
Where is my mind?
The Father is an immensely powerful film about dementia starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, who was asleep in his bed in…
Two sides of the Storey
Jasper Rees remembers David Storey, giant of postwar English culture and wry teller of tales, whose newly published memoir is perhaps his most remarkable work
Rabbit redux
The cinemas finally reopened this week and what better way to celebrate than with Peter Rabbit 2? You’ll probably be…
Utopia or Pleasantville?
Some Kind of Heaven is a documentary set in The Villages, Florida, which is often described as a ‘Disneyland for…
