Film

Plot twist: the 10 most surprising Best Picture Oscar winners

The received wisdom that the Oscar for Best Picture always goes to mainstream, generally inoffensive ‘quality’ pictures is only partially true. There have been multiple exceptions to this – and increasingly so over recent years, with an influx of younger Academy voters and a desire to be seen as more progressive than in the past. Who knows what it might mean for this year’s Best Picture nominees – which are All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle of Sadness and Women Talking. But while we wait to find out

The legacy of Chaim Topol

In 1969, for my seventh birthday, I was taken – dragged, probably – ‘up west’ to the theatre to see a musical. As I recall, it didn’t fill me with joy to be going, but it turned out to be fantastic. The songs, the acting, the dancing: it was great fun. Then we went for pasta in Soho, which was also a special event in those days. More importantly, though, I think it was the first time I became truly aware of a vital part of my identity: that I was here because decades earlier my great-grandfather had arrived on these shores, driven out of his native Russia by a

Harry, Meghan and the rise and fall of the folie à deux

I was interested to read that the next Joker film has the subtitle ‘Folie à Deux’ – a lovely phrase not used enough these days. When shrinks talk about folie à deux (also known as Lasègue-Falret Syndrome, after the 19th-century French psychiatrists who discovered it) they mean a ‘shared delusional disorder’ in which symptoms of an irrational belief are transmitted from one individual to another – including folie en famille or folie à plusieurs (‘madness of several’), sometimes leading to violence and even murder. But in popular culture, we generally mean a pair of lovers who act in such a way that anyone outside their set-up sees them as insane

Bored of the Rings: the Tolkien industry has gone far enough

In 1969, Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney, future founders of National Lampoon, published a satirical takedown of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, entitled Bored of the Rings. It holds up remarkably well today as a closely observed parody of Tolkien’s more windy stylistic tics. One critic, David Bratman, remarked: ‘Those parodists wrought better than they knew. I think it is highly significant how close Tolkien came to inadvertently writing the parody version of his own novel – and how completely, in the end, he managed to avoid it.’ Yet recent news that the ‘official’ Lord of the Rings series is to have yet more film adaptations made of it should not only send any right-minded cineaste

The dangerous myth-making in the Banshees of Inisherin

I never made it to the end of Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, which won four Baftas on Sunday and has been tipped for further success at the Oscars next month. Inisherin is a fictional place that apparently translates as ‘Island Ireland’. I know it’s probably churlish of me, but, being Irish, I was turned off by the film’s maudlin sentimentality mixed with self-obsession, self-harm, child abuse, wanton violence, dead pets and suicidal ideation. It bothered me that the film trotted out as many Oirish stereotypes as were in Gone With the Wind, released in 1939. Let me list some of the most obvious of these at the outset.

Why hasn’t the Scream franchise been killed off?

In December 1996, audiences lining up to see a teen horror picture starring Drew Barrymore, from the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street, got the shock of their lives. Not only was Barrymore, the best-known actor in the film, murdered in the first 15 minutes, but the opening set-piece was arguably the most shocking moment in movies since Janet Leigh had met a grisly end in the shower in Psycho. As Barrymore is stalked, first by telephone and then in person, by a sinister masked killer, the tension and horror build to virtually unbearable levels before its horrific climax. The rest of the film lived up to its opening, but for

10 romcoms that are actually worth watching

The romcom genre has a decidedly mixed record, often becoming a lazy way for stars to cash in on their popularity – with less than loveable results. Witness the career of Matthew McConaughey, which could have been described as ‘Death by romcom’ (Failure to Launch, The Wedding Planner, Fool’s Gold etc) until his 2011 comeback with Killer Joe. Gerard Butler also tried his hand with a slew of mediocre pictures (Playing for Keeps, The Bounty Hunter, The Ugly Truth etc), before reverting to action flicks. But once in a while, the chemistry is just right and everything falls into place. Here’s my pick of ten alternative romantic comedies that avoid the

The Disneyfication of Prince Harry

After Prince Harry’s first date with the future Duchess of Sussex, he repaired to a friend’s house off the King’s Road. ‘Out came the tequila,’ he recalls in his much-discussed autobiography, Spare. ‘Out came the weed. We drank and smoked and watched… Inside Out.’ Meghan, however, interrupted his stoned reverie by Facetiming him, and immediately asked: ‘Are you watching cartoons?’ Harry replied: ‘No. I mean, yeah. It’s… Inside Out.’ It was, he recalls, ‘good weed, dude’. The quality of the Disney film, he doesn’t mention – though his pointed double use of ellipses around its title suggests it perhaps has some significance in relation to this new girlfriend. Three years

Madonna and the curious business of biopics

Reading that Madonna has decided to cancel the film about her life that she has been working on for the past two years, I felt a pang of sorrow. The biopic sounded like the biggest vanity project ever attempted – and thus promised to be an excellent ‘mock-watch’, as I’ve named the cinematic equivalent of the ‘hate-read’. In the specific case of biopics (always an easy thing to get wrong when one person imitates another, often with hilarious results), perhaps ‘sham-shaming’ is even better. Madonna was reported to be directing, producing and co-writing the film with the Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, who has since moved on to the live-action Powerpuff

The Whale is a work of art

If the 20th century was the age of the common man, the 21st is the age of the common man’s confounding. Between shambolic politics, culture wars and actual war, nothing is turning out quite as well as anyone expected. What was meant to be an era of freedom and enlightenment seems to have become the opposite.   Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we interact with one another. In what feels like the blink of an eye, discourse, and by extension society, has taken up residence on the internet. The pace of the outrage cycle has gathered such speed that we must always be finding something new

Is Amazon wasting Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s talents?

The Tomb Raider franchise seems to have been a graveyard for oddly overqualified people. Angelina Jolie played the character of Lara Croft twice after winning an Oscar, and subsequently Alicia Vikander gave the English aristocrat-turned-global adventurer a go. Neither left much of a mark – which is why it is all the more surprising that Fleabag creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge is to write the scripts for a new Amazon series based on the video game. It has been wryly observed that, despite her heroics in the forthcoming Indiana Jones film, Waller-Bridge herself is not expected to play Lara Croft. That’s a disappointment for those of us who would enjoy a mixture of arch smirks to

Gina Lollobrigida and the changing face of fame

Gina Lollobrigida, who died this week at the age of 95, was known in the 1950s and thereafter for the kind of beauty which drove Italian men to self-destruction; and for performances in films which seemed to define a scrappy, energetic, self-possessed Italian womanhood.   During her career, ‘La Lollo’ sculpted, took photographs, did a little journalism and maintained a chaotic personal and political life, in which both her husbands and her male executive assistants always seemed to be in their late twenties. But she ought to also be famous for something else: being the subject of one of the most exciting and vital early experiments in television, a great short film

Why Avatar 2 has confounded the critics

The pundits called it long ago: Avatar 2: The Way of Water was going to be a flop. They did allow that betting against the so-called ‘king of the world’ James Cameron was rash – after all, Titanic and the first Avatar film overcame almost hysterically negative buzz in order to become box office behemoths. But there were too many reasons why the latest Avatar was going to fail. Nobody remembered the first film, they said. It wasn’t meme-able, they warned. Sam Worthington, its supposed star, was a nobody. There were too many blue people in it. The first film had had the novelty of 3D, but that was now a completely defunct format, popular only in China.

Noma and the death of fine dining

The Menu is a horror film about fine dining that revolves around a psychotic head chef (Ralph Fiennes) who runs a destination restaurant on an American island. The island is uninhabited apart from the chef and his staff, who pluck it for the most refined marine treats to serve the obnoxious clientele on a nightly surprise menu. As I sat in the cinema watching it recently, I felt delighted, then sick, then scared – and then enlightened. Enlightened because I finally understood that fine dining – once the summit of high living and my own former obsession as a greedy twenty-something working in lifestyle journalism – is over. It is

10 films about brothers at war

Sibling rivalry is nothing new, as the Old Testament’s story of Cain and Abel attests. Back in 1966, director John Huston cast hellraiser Richard Harris as fratricidal bad boy Cain in The Bible: In the Beginning. Years later, Ray Winstone played Cain’s even naughtier descendent Tubal-Cain in Darren Aronofsky’s decidedly odd Noah (2014). 2009 also saw the tale of Cain and Abel recounted more jocularly in Year One (2009), with David Cross and Paul Rudd as the feuding brothers. Of course, the Biblical duo’s argument was settled in a more lethal way than Harry and William’s ‘dog bowl brawl’. Moving to the 17th century, rivalry between identical royal twins was

Films to watch out for in 2023

It would be fair to say 2022 was not a vintage year in cinema, reflected in UK box office receipts which remain around a third below the pre-pandemic year of 2019. That’s not to say there weren’t some enjoyable releases (such as The Banshees of Inisherin, Triangle of Sadness and The Northman) – but the biggest hits of the year consisted of superhero franchises and movie sequels (Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, Jurassic World Dominion, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, etc). It’s a situation which looks to continue in 2023, with Marvel and less-successful rival DC churning out at least eight movie releases over the year,

The Spectator’s best films of 2022

Banshees of Inisherin: a magnificent cinematic metaphor The In Bruges writer-director Martin McDonagh has made another film starring Colin Farrell and Brendon Gleeson which, this time, is set in 1923 on the tiny Irish island of Inisherin. Colm (Gleeson) and Padraic (Farrell) are lifelong pals and drinking buddies until Colm abruptly decides that’s it, friendship over, and he’s deadly serious. If Padraic so much as approaches him he’ll cut off one of his own fingers. A cinematic metaphor for the Irish Civil War – you can occasionally hear distant guns from the mainland – where neighbour turned on neighbour, this is funny, sad, violent, despairing, always gripping, and features two magnificent, virtuoso performances.

Forget Love Actually: the best alternative Christmas films

It’s become one of the traditions of the modern festive period: arguing about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The explosive 1988 film features, you may recall, a vest-clad Bruce Willis confounding Alan Rickman and his terrorist cohorts’ evil plans in a Los Angeles skyscraper on Christmas Eve – and it’s peppered throughout with fir trees and tinsel.   Some claim this means it should take its place as a festive staple alongside more conventional classics of the season, It’s a Wonderful Life et al. Opponents furiously insist that a proper Christmas film shouldn’t feature machine guns and explosions, but instead depict rather more heartwarming scenes. Surely the solution is to

Most-read 2022: Everyone involved should be in prison: Netflix’s Persuasion reviewed

We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number nine: Deborah Ross’s piece from July on the pitfalls of adapting Austen. You may already have read early reviews of Netflix’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion saying it’s ‘the worst adaptation ever’ as well as ‘mortifying’ and ‘a travesty’, but I know you won’t believe it unless you hear it from me, so here you are: it is truly horrible. I would also add that everyone involved should probably be sent to prison. Not for life, but until we could be confident they’d learned the error of their ways and there was minimal risk of

Peace on Earth? 10 films about Christmas on the front line

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 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 group