Film

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Fascinating: EPiC – Elvis Presley in Concert reviewed

EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert is a concert documentary that grew out of the 65 boxes of unseen Las Vegas performances discovered by Baz Luhrmann while researching his 2022 biopic Elvis. As I have little interest in ‘the King’ I approached with a heavy heart. But now? I’m abundantly interested. In fact, I’ve shifted from indifference to thinking that if I could see one musical artist live at their peak it would have to be him. He’s that electrifying. A warning, however: it’s a 12A. ‘Elvis picks up a bra thrown on to the stage during a concert performance and puts it on his head,’ notes the BBFC. I wish

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Doesn’t put a foot wrong: The Secret Agent reviewed

Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent, which is about an academic on the run during Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship, won two Golden Globes, and has been nominated for four Oscars, and it’s truly special even if it is languorous and sprawling. It is one of those long films (two hours and 40 minutes) populated by so many characters you may well find yourself praying: ‘Please let me keep track of who’s who.’ Do hang on in there. It will all come right and be so worth it. The house is run by Dona Sebastiana, who may now be my favourite film character ever The film is set in 1977 which,

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Gripping: Melania reviewed

The documentary Melania, which follows the first lady in the 20 days leading up to her husband’s 2025 presidential inauguration, has already been savaged by critics. It is ‘shallow’ and ‘a shameless infomercial’ and ‘designer taxidermy’, and according to Variety, ‘if they showed this on a plane people would still walk out’. It is, it’s true, a film that could have been authored by Hello! magazine, but isn’t there some value in seeing how someone wants to be seen? There’s also no shame in being in it for the rich lifestyle porn – on that count it delivers handsomely. I was hanging on to every detail, from what will be

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Wuthering Heights’ race row is the height of nonsense

Most of us associate Wuthering Heights with high school English classes or Kate Bush caterwauling over the moors while exhibiting some remarkable interpretative dance moves. The news then that the Emerald Fennell-directed film of what she calls “my favourite book in the world” has become the subject of a race-based controversy may come as a shock. This has been seized upon by the book’s most stalwart admirers to mean that Heathcliff must be played by a black or mixed-race actor Yet the latest interpretation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, which is being released, appropriately, on Valentine’s Day, has already been met with contempt and derision by many before anyone even

Monday

Zak Asgard

The streaming model is broken

‘Do you want to stream something?’ my girlfriend asked me. It was 5 p.m. on a Saturday and I’d had a horrendous week. I’d caught one of those mutant viruses that you learn about in nursery rhymes or at the London Dungeon. The cough was the worst part. It was the sort of cough that evacuates a Tube carriage. It was the sort of cough you hear in a western before the protagonist says: ‘Old Billy Boy got consumption. There ain’t a darn thing we can do ’bout it. Doc says he got weeks. Poor bastard. He ain’t never gon’ make it to Montana.’ In short, I was feeling out

Alexander Larman

Do the British appreciate Ralph Fiennes enough?

If you had been fortunate enough to see the first night of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin at the Opéra National de Paris last week, then it might have been with a slight jolt of surprise that you saw a familiar face take to the stage as the cast took their bows.  Ralph Fiennes, the award-winning actor, was not appearing in the opera – although he took on the role of Onegin in a 1999 film that his sister Martha directed – but instead he made his operatic directorial debut with the production. The reviews so far have been mixed rather than laudatory. The Times suggested that ‘the lingering feeling you’re left with… is that all

Sunday

Alec Marsh

Inside the world of Wes Anderson

If you make your way to the Design Museum, which occupies the horned modernist structure that was once home to the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, you are in for a surprise. And not just because it’s one of those buildings that is far more inspiring on the inside than its rather Stalinist exterior would have you imagine. No, the biggest surprise is that our national temple to design has decided to dedicate its ground floor to Wes Anderson, the American filmmaker (‘auteur’ is the word film types like to whisper) behind such idiosyncratic gems as The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) or, probably his biggest hit, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), which

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Beautiful if hagiographic portrait of Godard

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague dramatises the (chaotic) making of Breathless (1960), Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic. It’s a film about a film, told mostly in the manner of that film, with the same kind of liveliness. Godard is as impossible to comprehend by the end as he was at the beginning  It isn’t necessary to watch Breathless first by the way, although why not? It’s widely available on streaming platforms and, while it remains one of the most influential movies of all time, it’s just 90 minutes long. Christopher Nolan take note. You too, James Cameron. (His latest Avatar is three hours and 20 minutes, for heaven’s sake.) Linklater

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

The cruelty of H is for Hawk

H is for Hawk is an adaptation of the bestselling memoir by Helen Macdonald who, following the sudden death of her beloved father, channels her grief through the training of a goshawk, Mabel. The film stars Claire Foy, who is superb, as is the nature photography, but is it right, keeping a wild animal captive, and depriving it of its natural behaviours because it helps you in some way? What’s in it for this gorgeous bird, I kept wondering. The cruelty is never addressed. This is solely about human need. We’re not even told who plays Mabel, so I can’t say what she has been in before or whether she

Arthur I. Miller

What drama gets right and wrong about science

A few days after Tom Stoppard’s death last month, Michael Baum, a distinguished surgeon, wrote a letter to the Times. He explained how Stoppard’s discussion of chaos theory in Arcadia had inspired him to discover a new and far more effective chemotherapy to treat breast cancer. ‘Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia,’ wrote Baum. I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between science and drama. I knew Tom Stoppard and when I was professor of history and philosophy of science at UCL, we had several illuminating conversations about art, science and theatre, which he recalled in a 1994 article entitled ‘Playing with Science’ for the

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Take a trip to the bone temple

28 Years Later, Danny Boyle’s ace return to the 28 Days later series, was one of last year’s most pleasant cinematic surprises. Combining serious thrills with creeping suspense and a light dusting of social commentary, it also ended with one hell of a cliffhanger, as its protagonist, Alfie Williams’s young Spike, found himself in the hands of a gang of psychotic Jimmy Savile-styled desperadoes, led by Jack O’Connell’s sinister Lord Jimmy Crystal. Audiences were keen to see how Candyman and Hedda director Nia DaCosta could pick up the pieces in the next installment, The Bone Temple – once again scripted by Alex Garland – and how the narrative threads sewn

Deborah Ross

Brendan Fraser is the king of the everyman: Rental Family reviewed

Rental Family stars Brendan Fraser as an out-of-work American actor living in Tokyo. He accepts employment with an agency that gets performers to play roles in real people’s lives. You may need a friend, for example, or a mourner should you fear your funeral will be sparse. (Tell me about it.) Fraser won an Oscar for a dark performance in The Whale but in this he’s back as a lovable, good-hearted everyman. (Is there anyone who does that better, aside from Tom Hanks?) Fraser plays Phillip, who arrived in Tokyo seven years before to star in a toothpaste commercial and has never left. Presumably, there is nothing, and no one,

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Ruthlessly manipulative: Hamnet reviewed

Hamnet is an imagined account of William Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, their unspeakable grief at the death of their son (the titular Hamnet) and how this may have inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet. It stars Paul Mescal and an extraordinary Jessie Buckley, who will likely win every award going, yet be warned: it does do everything it can to make you cry. You can hold out and hold out and refuse to be emotionally manipulated, as you’re better than that, but when Max Richter’s ‘On The Nature of Daylight’ kicks in at the end you will give up the fight. Take a hanky if you do not wish

Tuesday

Rob Crossan

‘Doomer jazz’ and the strange afterlife of Taxi Driver

Bernard Herrmann died 50 years ago this month. He only just lived long enough to complete the suite of instrumental jazz that’s now regarded as not only his finest work across many decades as a movie composer, but one of the greatest celluloid soundtracks of all time. There are very few movies which you can honestly state simply wouldn’t have got out of the traps were it not for the soundtrack. Taxi Driver is one of them. There’s more than enough available film critic geekery about Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s finest hour to plough through already. But the curious afterlife of the Taxi Driver soundtrack was something I

Sunday

Alec Marsh

The overlooked brilliance of Wonder Boys

Deep in the backwaters of BBC iPlayer there lurks an American film with an all-star cast that time forgot. In its day I think it was all but forgotten, too – garnering some critical acclaim but bombing at the box office, presumably because it was too clever or just didn’t appeal enough to teenagers (I can’t see why). Fortunately, 25 years on, Wonder Boys, the campus-novel film starring Michael Douglas as a creative writing professor with writer’s block and an unravelling marriage, truly stands the test of time. You could even go so far as to say that it’s a modern classic. Directed by the late Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential,

Monday

Deborah Ross

Sublime: Song Sung Blue reviewed

Song Sung Blue is a musical biopic of the real-life Milwaukee couple who formed a Neil Diamond tribute act and never hit the big time, or anywhere near. At its heart is a love story – one that is beautifully told. It stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, who is so sublime that we may even opt to forgive her for How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days and similar. The only real downside is that it will leave you with an earworm of ‘Sweet Caroline’ (‘bom, bom, bom’) for the rest of your born days. A Hollywood biopic wouldn’t normally give such a couple the time of day

Thursday

Elliot Keck

‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ is far from merry

Here is a great festive pub quiz question for you. Which film was the song ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ written for? It’s likely, particularly if you’re below a certain age, that your first reaction will be surprise that it was written for a film in the first place. That’s a reflection not so much of the failure of the film in question – Meet Me in St Louis, which was the second highest-grossing film of 1944 – but of the enduring popularity of the song itself. In 2023, it was the 11th most played holiday song, according to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. But just

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Noah Baumbach needs to try harder: Jay Kelly reviewed

Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly stars George Clooney as a handsome movie star playing a handsome movie star who has an identity crisis and is forced to reflect on his life. It’s being sold as a Hollywood satire, but it’s far too affectionate to be biting, and contains moments where it drowns in schmaltz. For a director of Baumbach’s calibre (Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha), it all feels like very low-hanging fruit. That said, it’s not such an ordeal to spend a couple of hours in the company of Clooney as the golden Tuscan sunshine beats down (it’s mostly filmed in Italy). I found I could cope.

Monday

Alec Marsh

A Room with a View is the greatest period drama ever made

It may come as surprise to discover that A Room with a View, the celebrated Merchant-Ivory adaption of the E.M. Forster novel, is 40 this month. Yes, as hard as it is to believe, the film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Maggie Smith had its premiere in December 1985 and went on general release in April 1986. Step back, if you will, from the baffling realisation that somehow A Room with a View is therefore exactly equidistant between the present time and the death of Adolf Hitler in 1945, and instead focus on a rather more cheerful point altogether. Because A Room with a View, the low-budget tale of mismatched

Thursday

Deborah Ross

An adorable Taiwanese debut: Left-Handed Girl reviewed

Left-Handed Girl is a Taiwanese drama about a single mother who moves back to Taipei with her two daughters to run a noodle stand in the night market. It’s one of those films where the stakes don’t appear that high – will the mother make the rent this month?; will the littlest daughter settle at her new school?; what’s grandma’s game? – yet we become so attached to this family and their survival it will all matter a great deal. It also features an adorable pet meerkat, GooGoo, and I doubt you’ll see a better film starring an adorable pet meerkat called GooGoo this year. I’d bet my life on