If Ray Winstone is the poor man’s Robert De Niro, Danny Dyer is the poor man’s Winstone. But what a performance he gives in The Last Deal (18). It isn’t so much a film as a one-act play with the camera turned on. Brendan Muldowney’s fluid direction makes us forget that. Dyer is Jimmy Banks,…
When I was in college, back in the days when the earth’s crust was still warm, we saw Emily Brontë as the preserve of intellectuals. Charlotte, her sister, was for the middle-of-the-roaders. How we knew it all then. Wuthering Heights (15A) has been filmed over forty times. The latest version has Margot Robbie and Jacob…
The Testament of Ann Lee (R) is a visceral, high-voltage musical directed by Mona Fastvold. It stars Amanda Seyfried as the eponymous 18th century founder of the woman-led ‘Shaker’ religious cult. The daughter of Mancunian Quakers, Lee came from a poverty-stricken background. When she was 22 she joined a sect run by ‘Mother’ Jane Wardley,…
Baz Luhrmann directed an electrifying biopic of Elvis Presley, Elvis, in 2022. While researching it, he discovered a treasure trove of previously unseen footage of Elvis in concert. He couldn’t use this, obviously, since another person (Austin Butler) was playing Elvis in the film. All we saw of the ‘real’ Elvis was a few minutes…
Domhnall Gleeson recently said Rachel McAdams “changes a room merely by entering it.” I wondered if I was hearing him right. He wasn’t talking about Einstein or Winston Churchill. Domhnall appeared with McAdams in About Time, an average enough film. Where does this kind of hyperbole emanate from? Are film stars on such elevated plateaus…
Someone once said that when you talk about your marriage problems to a third party, all you’re doing is giving evidence at an inquest. The quote was hardly a vote of confidence in counsellors. Alex (Will Arnett) deals with such problems idiosyncratically in Is This Thing On? (15A). Instead of using an individual person, he…
The scatterbrained, chain-smoking Helen (Claire Foy) is a rather unlikely Cambridge lecturer in H is For Hawk (12A). At the beginning of the film she loses her father, photo-journalist Ali (Brendan Gleeson). She deals with her grief by acquiring a wild goshawk as a pet – though she denies it’s a hobby, or that the…
Deirdre Morley is in the news at the moment because of a brouhaha involving the release of her psychiatric records relating to the inquest into her children’s deaths. You may remember she suffocated her three sons in 2020 and was deemed not guilty by reason of insanity. The theme of infanticide in popular culture has…
Failure, they say, is an orphan, whereas success has a thousand fathers. Who should we credit for people’s fame – themselves or the people behind them? Would Barry McGuigan have got where he was without Barney Eastwood? I thought of McGuigan as I watched Giant (15A), a pleasant film about the career of another pint-sized…
The Netflix mini-series Adolescent was the most talked about one of the year. It raised all sorts of questions about peer pressure, cyber-bullying, toxic masculinity and what children get up to when they’re not being monitored by their parents. The King of Kings told the story of Christ’s life in animated form using a neglected…