Cinema

I’ve found the perfect family film (eventually)

11 January 2020 9:00 am

As a member of Bafta, I get sent about 75 ‘screeners’ during the awards season, which is always a treat…

How could any woman fail to be won over by my new cinema room?

14 December 2019 9:00 am

As Christmas approaches, fighting has broken out in the Young household. No, I’m not talking about my three boys, aged…

Sergio Leone’s 1968 Once Upon a Time in the West

Quentin Tarantino on how spaghetti westerns shaped modern cinema

1 June 2019 9:00 am

The movie that made me consider filmmaking, the movie that showed me how a director does what he does, how…

Manspreading, The Movie: Loro reviewed

20 April 2019 9:00 am

Fans of Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, The Great Beauty (which won an Oscar) and his HBO series, The Young Pope,…

Still life: Iris Bry, Laura Smet and Natalie Baye in The Guardians

A captivating addition to the filmography of the first world war: The Guardians reviewed

18 August 2018 9:00 am

There are moments in The Guardians when you can imagine you’re in the wrong art form. Time stills, the frame…

Don’t believe the sales figures – DVDs are thriving

4 November 2017 9:00 am

According to the accountants’ ledgers, DVDs are dying. Sales of those shiny discs, along with their shinier sibling the Blu-ray,…

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot

The death of cosy Christie

4 November 2017 9:00 am

This is not Midsomer Murders. The new film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is thick with…

Tears of a clown: ‘Clowns hate Stephen King. They blame him for the “creepy clown” epidemic, which has led to multiple clown arrests’

Art of darkness

14 September 2017 1:00 pm

Stephen King, 69, has sold more than 350 million books, and tries not to apologise for being working-class, or imaginative,…

I swear this is the last Marvel film I see: Captain America reviewed

30 April 2016 9:00 am

Captain America: Civil War is the 897th instalment — or something like it — in the Marvel comic franchise. This…

With the release of Oculus Rift, cinema will never be the same again

2 April 2016 9:00 am

With the release of Oculus Rift – virtual reality you can buy from a shop – cinema will never be the same again, says Peter Hoskin

Orson Welles: ‘I started at the top and worked my way down’

Homage to awesome Welles on his centenary

12 December 2015 9:00 am

One day in May 1948 in the Frascati hills southeast of Rome, Orson Welles took his new secretary, Rita Ribolla,…

Giselle has floored many a ballerina — it did so again last week

17 October 2015 8:00 am

English has all sorts of emotive metaphors for how we feel about the ground. We’re floored. Or well grounded. Or…

The eyes have it: Andy Warhol’s gift for second sight was preternatural

What I learned from reshooting the dullest film ever made

15 August 2015 9:00 am

Stephen Smith finally sees the point of Empire, one of the dullest films in cinema history

Adi Rukun tests the eyes of one of the men who killed his brother

Stunning, riveting, horrifying: Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence reviewed

13 June 2015 9:00 am

With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done,…

Poster for Pulgasari, Shin’s answer to Godzilla

The Dear Leader’s passion for films — and the real-life horror movie it led to

7 March 2015 9:00 am

Ahead of last year’s release of The Interview, the Seth Rogen film about two journalists instructed to assassinate Kim Jong-un,…

Anna Netrebko as Lady in Verdi’s ‘Macbeth’, Metropolitan Opera

Met Opera Live's Macbeth: Netrebko's singing stirred almost as much as her décolletage

1 November 2014 9:00 am

This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth…

Carol White in Jeremy Sandford’s BBC play Cathy Come Home. Watched by 12 million, the drama’s hard-hitting depiction of homelessness and unemployment made a huge impact on its shocked audience in 1966

From Anthony Trollope to Meryl Streep: the theatre of politics on stage and screen

31 May 2014 9:00 am

On 1 October 1950 the BBC broadcast a seemingly innocuous little play by Val Gielgud. A light-hearted and critically unremarkable…

Dear Mary: How to stop cinema iPhone pests

1 February 2014 9:00 am

Q. At a private screening of a documentary about the artist David Bomberg, a woman sitting near me in the…

Jennifer Lawrence is plain brilliant in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

23 November 2013 9:00 am

In the future, everyone will have silly names. Some people will be called Haymitch Abernathy. Others will be Effie Trinket…

Scary monsters: the demon from Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 film

How I learned to start screaming and love the horror movie

2 November 2013 9:00 am

Peter Hoskin looks forward to being scared witless courtesy of the BFI’s feast of Gothic cinema

Philomena is Dame Judi’s film

2 November 2013 9:00 am

Philomena is based on the true story of an Irish woman searching for the son stolen from her by the…