Film

At the start of Canto XXI of the ‘Inferno’, Dante and Virgil look down on the pit of Malebolge, the Eighth Circle of Hell, in which sinners guilty of simony, hypocrisy and graft are punished. The last of those spend eternity immersed in a river of bubbling pitch. This sinister black liquid, the poet noted, looks much like the tar that Venetians boil up in their arsenal to smear over the hulls of their ships. Those lines came to mind more than once as I walked around the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, not least because a large section is installed in the ancient buildings of that very Arsenale.

Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he had lasted so long. His bulk was so immense, his productivity so prodigious in so many areas, his temperament so exorbitant, that he seemed to have been part of the landscape for ever. Never was ruined greatness so visible. The other great auteurs maudits of this century, Abel Gance and D.W. Griffith, disappeared into silence and oblivion. Eisenstein simply died young. Not Welles. Every time he trundled insincerely through some commercial for cheap liquor (he, the great bon viveur; he, for whom the very word commercial was an insult when

Firstly, a message to all Marvel fanboys: there is nothing for you here. Nothing. No CGI, no endless battles, no superheroines with their boobs on show, no deafening soundtrack and no Andy Serkis popping up for reasons I still can’t fathom, and don’t care to fathom anyhow. So go away and heckle someone else, unless you want to stick around, in which case, be warned: this is a proper film with proper acting and it even comes with a proper story that makes proper sense. Some films are like this, you know. This adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel is directed by Thomas Vinterberg, scripted by David Nicholls, and stars Carey

If you’re unsure about the man (or woman) you’re dating, go and see this film. It’ll cause rifts in a weak relationship, and yield powerful debate – or perhaps agreement on the central themes – in a strong one. It asks men to defend or disown the role of hero, and begs us to consider whether motherhood naturally graces its host with more altruistic instincts than fatherhood. Who’s braver: men or women? Or, let’s cut to the chase, you or me? At the core of this slick and sometimes hilarious Swedish film by Ruben Östlund is the non-rhetorical question: when push comes to shove, what would you do? I’ve always

For the past year Russell Brand – who is worth an estimated £10 million – has been making a film about inequality. You may already know this. The comedian’s antics filming across the capital have regularly made the news. His attempt to storm RBS resulted in a temp angrily blogging that the palaver had caused his paella to go cold. Meanwhile, his visit to confront the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere about his non-dom tax status came to no avail as he wasn’t home. Not that such a small technicality has stopped the scene from being included in the final cut. Russell instead interrogates a woman over the telecom – a woman who I can only

If the Fast & Furious team made Casablanca 2 (‘Morocco Drift’) it would be a more artistically credible, better acted, and more entertaining movie than Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Vin Diesel’s Victor Laszlo may have gained an impressive set of guns fighting for the Czech resistance since we last saw him – shame, too, about the hair loss – but at least he wouldn’t spend even one second of the film talking about ‘midi-chlorians’. In his decision to revisit the Star Wars universe and create a trilogy of prequels, George Lucas looked upon the epic vista of his cinematic triumph and decided to open-cast strip mine

It was called Frankly Speaking and by golly it was. The great screen actress Bette Davis was being interviewed by not one but two men: George Coulouris, with whom she co-starred in Hollywood, and a BBC producer. ‘It’s a little sad for some of us who adore your work that a lot of your best performances have been in fairly trivial films,’ said the producer, Peter Duval-Smith, as if to tempt Davis into dishing the dirt on the directors who made her what she became. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Davis replied, not a woman to be tricked into anything. ‘Who do you think made you a star?’

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was a box-office triumph in Italy in 1960. It made $1.5 million at the box office in three months — more than Gone With the Wind had. ‘It was the making of me,’ said Fellini. It was also the making of Marcello Mastroianni as the screen idol with a curiously impotent sex appeal. No other film captured so memorably the flashbulb glitz of Italy’s postwar ‘economic miracle’ and its consumer boom of Fiat 500s and Gaggia espresso machines. Unsurprisingly, the Vatican objected to the scene where Mastroianni makes love to the Swedish diva Anita Ekberg (who died earlier this year at the age of 83)

Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella is a Disney film based on a Disney film, so is double Disney, if you like. It is a live-action adaptation of the 1950 animated version, and an entirely faithful retelling. As such, it comes with no irony, no modern winks aimed at a modern audience and no smarty-pants updating of the smarty-pants kind. It is lush, with dazzling costumes by Sandy Powell, but without any reinvention whatsoever this is a film that, at some point, should have asked itself, ‘OK, I’m all dressed up, but do I actually have anywhere to go?’ It stars Lily James (from Downton, apparently) as our heroine, Ella. Ella had a

The Voices is ‘a dark comedy about a serial killer’, which is not an overcrowded genre, and I think we can now plainly see for why. I was up for it, initially. The buzz around the film had been good. ‘Unexpectedly pleasurable’, GQ. ‘Wild and hilarious’, Hollywood Reporter. Which just goes to show: never, ever trust reviews. This is a hateful and repellent and empty film. This is not pleasurable, unexpectedly, expectedly, or otherwise and it is neither wild nor hilarious. I bitterly resent each of the 104 minutes I gave to it, and I say that as someone who never has anything better to do. It may even be

Suite Française is being billed as a second world war romance about ‘forbidden love’ and, in this regard, it is handsome, solid, well played and probably fine, if you haven’t read Irène Némirovsky’s novel, but if you have? Then you may have been hoping and praying for something deeper, something more special. As you know — because I have been nothing if not repetitive down the years — I desperately try not to compare films with their source material. Let a film live or die by its own merits. But this book nags like nothing else on earth. What? Really? No! And where did that Jew in the attic come

In 1977 a journeyman actor called Brian Kelly optioned a science-fiction novel called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The book’s author, Philip K. Dick, had been writing science fiction since the early 1950s. He was 49 years old, with 30 novels behind him. He had a cult reputation, but he barely scraped a living. Kelly only paid him $2,500, but Dick was happy with this windfall. He’d written this book for half as much, back in 1968. After five more years, and many rewrites, Dick’s book finally became a film. Directed by Ridley Scott and renamed Blade Runner, it’s now commonly — and quite rightly — regarded as one