tue 21/01/2025

Film reviews, news & interviews

William Tell review - stirring action adventure with silly dialogue

Justine Elias

Despite Rossini’s banger of an overture and a Looney Tunes cartoon starring Daffy Duck as William Tell, I’ll wager that few non-German-speakers can recite the precise details of the Swiss folk hero’s legend. Beyond, that is, describing him as a Robin Hood of the Alps whose crossbow arrow pierced the apple perched on his son’s head. However, in a stirring new action-adventure movie Tell turns out to be a surprising protagonist. 

Blu-ray: Mikey and Nicky

John Carvill

The blurb that accompanies this Criterion Blu-ray calls Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which co-stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as scuzzy, low-ranking gangsters on the run from their bosses, “an unsung masterpiece of American cinema”. For once, that doesn’t feel like hyperbole.

David Lynch: In Dreams (1946-2025)

Nick Hasted

David Lynch’s final two features mapped a haunted Hollywood of curdled innocence and back-alley eeriness. Mulholland Drive (2001) seemed the ultimate...

A Complete Unknown review - how does it feel?

Adam Sweeting

Being unknowable has been almost as much of a preoccupation for the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman as writing songs. Previously on film he has played the...

Vermiglio review - a simple tale, simply but...

Helen Hawkins

Another new release opens with the sounds of people in bed playing over the credits, but these are not Babygirl’s sighs of a woman faking sex but the...

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The Second Act review - absurdist meta comedy about stardom

Sebastian Scotney

French A-listers puncture their profession in a hall of mirrors

Maria review - Pablo Larraín's haunting portrait of an opera legend

Adam Sweeting

Angelina Jolie puts body and soul into her portrayal of Maria Callas

Babygirl review - would-be steamy drama that only flirts with transgression

Helen Hawkins

Nicole Kidman gets hot and bothered about a sexy intern’s power plays

It's Raining Men review - frothy French comedy avoids dating-app reality

Markie Robson-Scott

Laure Calamy shines as a dentist whose marriage is in trouble

A Real Pain review - Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin take a Holocaust tour of Poland

Adam Sweeting

It's part comedy, part road movie and part psychotherapy session

Blu-ray: The Hop-Pickers

Graham Rickson

Ground-breaking and colourful Czech musical

Nickel Boys review - a soulful experiment

Nick Hasted

Pulitzer-winner becomes an immersive elegy to black teenage crime and punishment

Best of 2024: Film

Theartsdesk

theartsdesk's movie critics pick their favourites from the last 12 months

Best of 2024: Blu-ray

Graham Rickson

The pick of the year's releases: films spanning decades, continents and genres

Nosferatu review - Lily-Rose Depp stands out in uneven horror remake

Harry Thorfinn-George

Robert Eggers leaves his mark on adaptation of classic, but it’s not always for the best

Blu-ray: Hitchcock - The Beginning

Graham Fuller

A box set shows how Alfred Hitchcock embraced the sound revolution – pathologies intact

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl review - an old foe returns

Graham Rickson

Stop-motion animation on an epic scale

Blu-ray: Three Wishes for Cinderella

Graham Rickson

Witty, engaging Czech fairy tale with an appealingly feisty heroine

Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes review - a Hollywood legend, warts and all

John Carvill

A documentary portrait of Bogie toes the official line but still does him justice

Sujo review - cartels through another lens

James Saynor

A surprisingly subtle narco pic from Mexico

Queer review - Daniel Craig meets William Burroughs

Adam Sweeting

Luca Guadagnino's film is crazy but it just might work

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review - a middling return to Middle-earth

James Saynor

JRR Tolkien gets the anime treatment

The Commander review - the good Italian

Nick Hasted

Chivalrous valour at sea from a real World War Two hero

Nocturnes review - the sounds of the rainforest transport you a remote region of the Himalayas

Sarah Kent

Mansi spends her nights counting moths in North East India

theartsdesk Q&A: filmmakers Guy Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson on 'Rumours'

Nick Hasted

Archetype-bending auteur Maddin and co. discuss their new film's starry, absurd G7, autobiography and artifice

Merchant Ivory review - fascinating documentary about the director and producer's long partnership

Markie Robson-Scott

Stephen Soucy examines Ismael Merchant and James Ivory's complicated relationship with input from many stars

Grand Theft Hamlet review - intriguing documentary about Shakespeare as multi-player shooter game

Helen Hawkins

How two jobless actors created a novel Hamlet inside the game Grand Theft Auto

Nightbitch review - Mother's life as a dog

Adam Sweeting

Amy Adams hits it out of the park in Marielle Heller's film

theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Payal Kapadia on 'All We Imagine as Light'

Pamela Jahn

An in-depth conversation with the director of the instant Indian arthouse classic

Footnote: a brief history of British film

England was movie-mad long before the US. Contrary to appearances in a Hollywood-dominated world, the celluloid film process was patented in London in 1890 and by 1905 minute-long films of news and horse-racing were being made and shown widely in purpose-built cinemas, with added sound. The race to set up a film industry, though, was swiftly won by the entrepreneurial Americans, attracting eager new UK talents like Charlie Chaplin. However, it was a British film that in 1925 was the world's first in-flight movie, and soon the arrival of young suspense genius Alfred Hitchcock and a new legal requirement for a "quota" of British film in cinemas assisted a golden age for UK film. Under the leadership of Alexander Korda's London Films, Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929) is considered the first true sound movie, documentary techniques developed and the first Technicolor movies were made.

Brief_EncounterWhen war intervened, British filmmakers turned effectively to lean, effective propaganda documentaries and heroic, studio-based war-films. After Hitchcock too left for Hollywood, David Lean launched into an epic career with Brief Encounter (pictured), Powell and Pressburger took up the fantasy mantle with The Red Shoes, while Carol Reed created Anglo films noirs such as The Third Man. Fifties tastes were more domestic, with Ealing comedies succeeded by Hammer horror and Carry-Ons; and more challenging in the Sixties, with New Wave films about sex and class by Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey and Tony Richardson. But it was Sixties British escapism which finally went global: the Bond films, Lean's Dr Zhivago, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music made Sean Connery, Julie Christie and Julie Andrews Hollywood's top stars.

In the 1970s, recession and the TV boom undermined cinema-going and censorship changes brought controversy: a British porn boom and scandals over The Devils, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange. While Hollywood fielded Spielberg, Coppola and Scorsese epics, Britain riposted with The Killing Fields, Chariots of Fire and Gandhi, but 1980s recession dealt a sharp blow to British cinema, and the Rank Organisation closed, after more than half a century. However more recently social comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Full Monty, and royal dramas such as The Queen and The King's Speech have enhanced British reputation for wit, social observation and character acting.

As more films are globally co-produced, the success of British individual talents has come to outweigh the modest showing of the industry itself. Every week The Arts Desk reviews latest releases as well as leading international film festivals, and features in-depth career interviews with leading stars. Its writers include Jasper Rees, Graham Fuller, Anne Billson, Nick Hasted, Alexandra Coghlan, Veronica Lee, Emma Simmonds, Adam Sweeting and Matt Wolf

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David Lynch: In Dreams (1946-2025)

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