Category: Films
‘She found the truth of the character’: Downton Abbey’s executive producer on Maggie Smith
As I read the various drafts of Julian Fellowes’ pilot script for Downton Abbey, it was not lost on me that his new invention of [more…]
Nickel Boys review – Colson Whitehead novel becomes intensely moving story of a racist reform school
RaMell Ross’s transcendentally moving and frightening film, adapted from the 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, runs at least initially on a kind of cognitive dissonance. [more…]
Is The Substance brilliant feminist critique or a soulless mess?
For better and for worse, The Substance, the new, buzzy body horror film, sends up oppressive beauty standards with the subtlety of a blowtorch. The [more…]
Streaming: the best private-eye movies
The private detective film will always be the slinkiest and sexiest of thriller subgenres – minus the strictures and/or corruption of police procedure, crime-solving can [more…]
‘She found life hysterically funny and unbearably painful’: Maggie Smith remembered by Nicholas Hytner
Maggie Smith seemed in her performances to care nothing about being loved, but she was as widely adored as an actor can be. The two [more…]
Remembering Maggie Smith: ‘Every day she and Judi would swim in their Victorian swimsuits and every day we would all laugh and laugh’
This one hurts. I knew she was ill, but I always believed she was immortal. And, of course, her work is. But it’s hard to [more…]
Maggie Smith was the grandest of grande dames – and a true cinematic superstar | Peter Bradshaw
Maggie Smith thought she was famous after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in 1969; she gave a glorious, Oscar-winning performance in her mid-30s in [more…]
Can Marvel’s Thunderbolts* avoid the mistakes of DC’s Suicide Squad?
The trouble with Thunderbolts* is that this is a superhero team made up almost entirely of all those Marvel characters you had completely forgotten existed. [more…]
Hellboy: The Crooked Man review – sputtering mess even a metric ton of makeup can’t conceal
Fans of comic books, 00s horror and Guillermo del Toro will recall the latter’s crack at launching a mass-market franchise with Hellboy in 2004, a [more…]
The Outrun review – Saoirse Ronan is mesmerising in sobering addiction drama
The title means an outlying coastal piece of farmland on Orkney; it is not suitable for cultivation, but so continually windswept with Atlantic spray that [more…]
