Film

Christmas may ostensibly be a time of goodwill to all men, but war rarely takes a break for the festive season – as events in Ukraine sadly demonstrate. Here are ten films set during Yuletide where the front line is front and centre: Castle Keep (1968) – Amazon Rent/Buy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uALKeb0C6U&t=1s Sydney Pollack’s (Three Days of the Condor) Castle Keep is set during the Germans’ failed Ardennes offensive of December 1944 and stars Burt Lancaster as one-eyed US Major Abraham Falconer. But if from that description you expect a meat-and-potatoes world war two actioner, think again. The picture is an elliptical, surreal mediation on art, war, mortality and time, with Falconer’s battered

The faded splendour of 1980s Margate is the backdrop for Sam Mendes’s new film Empire of Light, starring Olivia Colman and Colin Firth. Coming to UK cinemas on 9 January, it’s about a romance in the north Kent seaside town and the revival of a striking 1930s cinema with a distinctive brick ‘fin’ tower. Renamed briefly as the Empire Cinema during filming in the spring, Margate’s Grade II-listed Dreamland Cinema takes a starring role. In reality it’s part of the Dreamland amusement park complex that’s had 102 years of rollercoaster fortunes. The park underwent a £25 million makeover in 2017, and its relaunch contributed to the reinvention of Margate into

This week, in homes across the land, there is one guarantee: somewhere, someone will be watching one of the Indiana Jones films, and it’ll likely be the first or the third in the series. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are little less than perfect seasonal comfort food: witty, exciting, stuffed full of indelible characters and unforgettable set-piece action scenes. These films stand as those rare pictures that, however many times you watch them, continue to be fabulously entertaining. The others in the franchise – Temple of Doom and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – are less effective, and the latter has become a byword for mediocrity. Yet all are, at their

It is 122 years this week since Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde died – in exile, poverty and disgrace – at Paris’s shabby St Germain Hôtel d’Alsace. His last words were said to be: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us must go.’ Despite Wilde’s precipitous fall from grace and the ignominy heaped upon him (his children had to change their surname to Holland), within a relatively brief time his plays were revived and books reissued to renewed popular acclaim. And more than a century later, that appeal hasn’t faded: this year in England alone, The Importance of Being Earnest toured the north

‘I know,’ I said to my friend recently. ‘Let’s see a film!’ We booked the Everyman Kings Cross, the only cinema that happened to be showing what we wanted to watch at a convenient time and location. You might already be familiar with the Everyman concept. According to the chain, it’s ‘redefining cinema’ with an ‘innovative lifestyle approach to our venues, where you swap your soft drink for a nice glass of red wine and a slice of freshly made pizza served to your seat’. And apparently it’s popular – an Everyman opened in September in Egham, Surrey, bringing the total to 38, and another one is announced for Durham

George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito some time in early March 1923. The bite became infected. By April he was running a high fever, had pneumonia in both lungs and his heart and respiratory systems were failing. He died in a Cairo hospital on 5 April. His death came less than six months after Howard Carter, the Egyptologist whose excavations Carnarvon was funding, first discovered evidence that there was an undisturbed tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Thebes. That was on 4 November 1922 – 100 years ago this month. A few days later, Carter, Carnarvon and his

Andrew Dominik’s film Blonde, a story of Marilyn Monroe’s life based on an adaptation of a Joyce Carol Oates novel, has been the subject of much divisive discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Caren Spruch of Planned Parenthood told the Hollywood Reporter that she sees the film as ‘anti-abortion propaganda’. A tweet that went viral said filmmaker ‘Andrew Dominik didn’t even try to conceal his anti-choice views and hatred for Marilyn’. She is more profitable as a maiden than she is as a mother, and so she is robbed of that transformation by countless men – those who lust for her and those who earn from her While the divisiveness of the

In a month that has seen more than its fair share of chaos, I had hoped the release of the first-ever Emily Brontë biopic would at last offer some cause for celebration. But Emily, which arrived in cinemas this week, has provided quite the opposite.  Frances O’Connor’s directorial debut focuses on a fling between Emily (played by Emma Mackey) and her father Patrick’s dishy assistant curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), suggesting that their racy romance inspired Wuthering Heights.  Not only is there no evidence that this relationship took place, but there are clues that it was actually the youngest of the sisters, Anne, who caught Weightman’s eye. Charlotte wrote that Weightman ‘sits opposite

After 9/11, American comedians found themselves in a tricky situation. Make fun of any of the usual standbys of their trade – politicians, authority figures, Rudy Giuliani, anyone who wore a badge for a living – and they were liable to be shouted down in an angry chorus of: ‘Too soon!’ Yet if all the jokes they could tell were sanitised and tame, their reputations would decline in an instant. It was a bold comic who tried to argue that telling jokes was a natural human response to disaster; many audiences simply refused to find things funny. Will Smith now finds himself in a similar position. The one-time Fresh Prince

It’s the area that unites James Bond, Rick Wakeman and both Queen Elizabeths. In the first of our series looking at the quirky history and fascinating trivia of London’s postcode areas, we explore the delights to be found in W (West) – everything from fake houses to shaky newsreaders to dukes who are women… The BBC News TV studios are mounted on enormous steel springs to prevent the damage that would otherwise be caused by the Bakerloo line, which runs underneath Portland Place, right down the side of New Broadcasting House. Can’t have vibrations from the Tube trains sending Huw Edwards all wobbly, can we? The same problem was faced

Don’t Worry Darling, the highly anticipated psychological thriller directed by Olivia Wilde, has arrived in cinemas after months of online gossip and speculation about its production. The controversies include: an alleged affair between the director and main actor, Harry Styles, who also happens to be one of the most famous pop stars on Earth; the firing – no, sorry, ‘replacing’ – of the originally cast main character (Shia LaBeouf was switched for Styles); a reported fall-out between lead actress Florence Pugh and Wilde, which led to Pugh not doing any publicity for the film; and a bizarre TikTok theory that Kiki Layne and Ari’el Stachel were hired to meet the

Men do not come to see James Bond movies for the sensitive brooding of an ageing spy. They come for the car, the bikini and the volcano. This is apparently lost on some people in Hollywood – the same people who occupy the unfortunate position of actually making James Bond movies. The Daily Telegraph reports: ‘The next James Bond films will have bigger roles for women and a more sensitive 007, according to the producers.’ Variety quotes producer Barbara Broccoli saying ‘Bond is evolving just as men are evolving’, adding: ‘I don’t know who’s evolving at a faster pace.’ I have a difficult time believing that any fan of James Bond ever expressed a desire

‘What did the rampant chimp have to do with any of it?’ I squawked in bewildered disappointment to a friend at the end of Nope, the long-awaited third film from Oscar-winning writer-director Jordan Peele. I had hastened in great excitement to see Nope on the first day of its cinema release, hoping for a work that would rival Peele’s sparkling debut Get Out in its idiosyncratic mash-up of razor-sharp social commentary and horror. Instead, I paid £14.20 to sit through 130 minutes of barely explained peril that were resolved in a manner that was even less clear. Peele, I concluded sadly, had crossed over to the dark side of artists