Film

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the astonishing film CV of Max von Sydow. In the summer of 1959 Max von Sydow was attending the Cannes Film Festival. Two years earlier The Seventh Seal, his first high-profile starring role and arguably the best of his collaborations with director Ingmar Bergman, had picked up the Cannes jury’s Special Prize […]

Had enough of lockdown winter and are longing for the spring? RICHARD LUCK selects 10 films that reflect the optimism of the changing seasons. Movies – is there anything they can’t do? I mean, most of us have already had a gutful of winter and yet, with the season not officially over until the end […]

Jackie Chan is too often dismissed as a mere action star and overlooked for his largely forgettable Hollywood films. But a re-release of one of his finest early works gives an opportunity to appreciate his amazing artistry.  You don’t hear too much about Jackie Chan these days. Indeed, it’s possible that name will mean nothing to […]

New French film Slalom creates a creepy atmosphere amid the beauty of the Alps and hothouse atmosphere of its resorts. JASON SOLOMONS talks to its director, and comes up with his favourite movies set in the mountains. Snow falls outside, settling softly on the cars and on the muddy green of a little park. It’s an […]

NATHAN O’HAGAN on a cinematic near-miss that would have resulted in one of Hollywood’s weirdest productions. At this point in 2020, it sometimes feels like every other film released over the past decade is an adaptation of a comic book superhero. The all-conquering Marvel Cinematic Universe films have so far grossed over $22 billion worldwide, […]

Director’s cuts often seem overindulgent and overlong. But as Francis Ford Coppola takes a fresh whack at The Godfather Part III, Richard Luck celebrates 10 occasions where the reprise outdid the original. Truth be told, The Godfather Part III was a pretty decent movie from the outset. Admittedly it had a hard time living up to episodes […]

The hunting of truffles in the foothills of northern Italy remains one of the world’s most clandestine activities. JASON SOLOMONS reports on a charming new film which attempts to lift the lid on the secret society responsible for bringing this most expensive ingredient of all to the dinner table. This time of year, film critics are […]

You may have to watch them via streaming, rather than in your local cinema, but the first half of 2021 offers some intriguing new films. Richard Luck selects 10 to get you through to summer. Despite the best efforts of cinemas everywhere and my local movie house – Campus West, Welwyn Garden City – in particular, […]

Few years produced as many great films as 1946, the first year after the end of the Second World War, says BONNIE GREER. Might 2021 produce a similar post-pandemic glut of classics? 1946 is a year when most of us humans were not even alive. And of those who were, the majority experienced it as children. So our idea […]

Shane MacGowan is a challenging subject for a new documentary film. JASON SOLOMONS talks to its director about a hard to love character and staying the right side of romanticism With his rotten-looking mouth, pallid grey skin and slurred speech, Shane MacGowan is the alternative face of Christmas. The Pogues singer and drunken Anglo-Irish poet […]

JAMES OLIVER suggests 12 festive movies – a combination of the familiar and the less so – that best reflect the complexities of the season. Just don’t call his list a ‘best of…’ It was always unlikely, in this year like no other, that we’d have anything like a normal Christmas and so it has […]

Jean-Pierre Melville’s recent work oozes sophistication and turns 50, JAMES OLIVER offers a retrospective. There were those who said Jean-Pierre Melville’s films were all style over substance. Astonishingly, they seemed to mean it as criticism. Few directors have ever controlled the presentation of their films so carefully, erasing the extraneous and obsessively refining what remained […]

Jason Solomons finds actor Viggo Mortensen in characteristically ebullient mood in their over-running Zoom catch-up. Although still best-known to audiences as heroic Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings films, actor Viggo Mortensen has a reputation in the business as cinema’s Renaissance Man. He acts, writes poetry, composes music, sings, paints, runs a publishing imprint, […]

Overshadowed by her music, modelling and private life, Richard Luck says Jane Birkin’s career in film deserves a reappraisal – even if not all of her movies themselves do. She has many stories to tell, Jane Birkin. Little wonder her recent book – Munkey Diaries, published for the first time in English this summer – concentrates […]

A century after his first appearance, and with a new film out next month, which incarnation of the Belgian detective has been the finest? Benjamin Ivry exercises his little grey cells to assess the candidates. It is a classic puzzler worthy of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction… why some actors who have excelled in […]

British actors have been told not to audition for the role of a young Duke of Cambridge in a forthcoming film about Diana, Princess of Wales, due to new rules faced by the country post-Brexit. A casting invitation posted online calls for boys aged between nine and 12 to apply for the role of the […]

RICHARD LUCK counts down his 20 favourite movies about politics of all time. Which one gets your vote? 20) The Ides of March (2011)George Clooney not only adapted, produced and directed The Ides of March, he also plays the anchor role of governor Mike Morris, a presidential candidate who’s almost too good to be true. […]

A new film about three giants of football, who not only revolutionised their clubs, but galvanised communities, defined cities and shaped modern Britain. Footballing dynasties feel like a thing of the past. Certainly these days, when football itself plays out in empty stadia around most of Europe, vast bowls echoing to the sound of bellowing […]

The two films – and a TV show – that helped make conspiracy theories mainstream. So let’s recap. This virus that you’re all so scared of isn’t actually real, just a flammed-up cold that’s been exaggerated to enslave the easily-led. But if it is real, then it was cooked up in a government laboratory either […]

As cinema enters dark times, the 60th anniversary of À bout de souffle offers a much-needed reminder of film’s ability to revive itself, says JAMES OLIVER. The irony is almost too bitter. This is the 60th anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless, as it was translated, as it shall be hereafter), one […]

In the age of the coronavirus, it’s perhaps as well not to dwell too much on six degrees of separation, the idea that all people on average are six – or fewer – social connections away from each other. Still, I was struck by how true this was just over a decade ago when I […]

Spike Lee’s Bamboozled was a box office bomb on its release, Richard Luck says this is definitely the right moment for a reappraisal. In the wake of his long-overdue Oscar win for the BlacKkKlansman screenplay and the success of his recent Netflix outing Da 5 Bloods, it’s easy to forget that Spike Lee hasn’t always […]

Nathan O’Hagan asks whether the film is toxic in 2020. When it was published in 1996, Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club wasn’t a huge commercial success, despite a largely enthusiastic critical response, but it instantly developed a strong cult following, resonating particularly with disaffected young men who, up until that point, didn’t see their experience […]

I miss the days when I’d think nothing of looking at my diary and seeing I had a lunch with someone like Eartha Kitt. The reputation of the West End stage meant that the greatest performers from all over the world were continually converging upon it. I realise now how I took that for granted, […]

Boris Johnson’s spinmeisters have been going on a lot just lately about how “Churchillian” his rhetoric has been. Ian Blackford, the SNP politician, was probably closer to the mark when he characterised what Johnson had been saying – and his delivery – as “yapping, bumbling, mumbling”. I’ve no doubt, too, that if Robert Hardy were […]

Hounds chase foxes not out of any personal antipathy, but because it’s what their lords and masters train them to do. It was once a bit like this between Hugh Grant and me. The stand the actor has taken on media intrusion into people’s lives – including his own – meant he was considered to […]

Thirty years on, RICHARD LUCK looks back at a Downing Street summit to revive British cinema, and the curious films that followed. It’s one of those nights everyone remembers – that summer’s evening when Noel Gallagher, Kevin Spacey, Eddie Izzard and Ross Kemp rocked up at Number 10 for drinks and nibbles with Tony and […]

JASON SOLOMONS reports from the Venice Film Festival on an event that is critical to the industry’s recovery from the pandemic, and details the new release that will lead the fightback. Director Luca Guadagnino Dana Thomas and Roberto Cicutto at the Venice screening of Salvatore Ferragamo: Shoemaker of Dreams. Photo: Andrea Avezz – Credit: Archant […]

JASON SOLOMONS talks to the director of Radioactive, a powerful film not only about the pioneering scientist but her research that changed the world Marie Sklodowka Curie (1867 – 1934) in her laboratory. She shared a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre for their work in radioactivity. In 1911 she became […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY remembers the life of the first director to receive an Academy Award outside of Hollywood, who shaped views of Britain. Think of Henry VIII and the chances are you’ll think of a larger-than-life cross between Falstaff and the Goodyear blimp sitting at a banqueting table, tearing at a chicken leg with his teeth […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the remarkable Czech backstory of cinema great Herbert Lom. In the early months of the Second World War Herbert Lom answered a knock at the door of his London home to find a burly policeman standing on the doorstep eyeing him warily. “Care to explain this, sir?” the officer said, holding out […]

Without even showing up, Roman Polanski managed to dominate the 76th Venice Film Festival. Of course, if he had appeared, the 86-year-old film-maker and fugitive rapist might have been extradited to the US to face the charge he fled in 1977. That would have been some drama. Louis Garrell as Alfred Dreyfuss and Jean Dujardin […]