Film

The politics of horror

Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, even though it’s deeply relatable, in that it features a helpless chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch doomreels of ultraviolence until it loses its little monkey mind and eats David Schneider. But it’s eclipsed by the famous sequence that follows where Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital bed to find that he has slept through a deadly pandemic and the ensuing collapse of civilisation. As Murphy drags his not-yet-world-famous cheekbones through an eerily abandoned metropolis, we see Piccadilly plastered with the names and faces of the missing and the dead. Audiences in 2002 were reminded of the

Magnificently bloodthirsty: 28 Years Later reviewed

First it was 28 Days Later (directed by Danny Boyle, 2002), then 28 Weeks Later  (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) and now Boyle is back at the helm with 28 Years Later, which is, as I understand it, the first in a new trilogy. This post-apocalyptic horror franchise could go on for ever. As the last film was generally (and rightly) regarded as a desultory cash grab, there is much riding on this one. The verdict? It’s entertaining but not outstanding. The biggest surprise is its tonal swerve into sentimentality. Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, however, bring character and heft and, just to put your minds at rest, yes, it’s as

Darkly comic samurai spaghetti western: Tornado reviewed

Tornado is a samurai spaghetti western starring Tim Roth, Jack Lowden and Takehiro Hira (among others). Samurai spaghetti westerns aren’t anything new. In fact, we wouldn’t have spaghetti westerns if it weren’t for the samurai genre – Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (1964) was, as Clint Eastwood conceded, an ‘obvious rip-off’* of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) – yet this may be the first one set in 1790 and filmed in Scotland. It may also be the first one to feature thick woollens and tweed. That makes it sound twee which it isn’t. It’s a super-bloody revenge story filmed in just 25 days with a running time of 90 minutes. We

Literate and sensitive romance: Falling Into Place reviewed

Falling Into Place is a love story written by Aylin Tezel, directed by Aylin Tezel, and starring Aylin Tezel. That’s a lot of Aylin Tezel so I was nervous going in. What if it’s too much Aylin Tezel? What if Aylin Tezel and I don’t get along? Who even is Aylin Tezel? But I knew within the first few minutes we were in safe hands and I was set to like this Aylin Tezel. In Falling Into Place she’s created a literate and sensitive romance that is allowed to unfold gently. If it’s ‘high-octane action’ you’re after, then your better bet this week is Ballerina, the John Wick spin-off. This

A remarkable story: The Salt Path reviewed

The Salt Path is an adaptation of the best-selling book by Raynor Winn. It tells the true story of how she and her husband, Moth, lost their home and lost all their money. At one point they go to a bank to withdraw all their funds: £1.38. And if that wasn’t bad enough he’s then diagnosed with an incurable neurodegenerative disease. So what do they decide to do? They decide to embark on a 630-mile walk along the South West Coast Path. Isn’t that what any of us would do, given the circumstances? It is a remarkable story and while this may well frustrate those who like a juicy plot

Cinema has reached a nadir in the new Mission: Impossible

You have to time your arrival at cinemas carefully if you want to avoid the high-volume, rapid-fire edits of trailers for upcoming mind-rot. That’s conceptually impossible with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The first half an hour is a debrief in the form of an extended trailer of highlights from previous missions. At one point during this hyper-extended prelude Tom Cruise and a pal sneak into a disused London tunnel, as if to an underground club. This planted the seed that the rest of the film would be an all-action allegory of a group of friends’ determined efforts to get into the Entity, a sinister Berlin nightclub whose bouncers

Wes Anderson’s latest is as hollow as anything AI could come up with

AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, but especially mine. There is absolutely no good reason for The Spectator to keep sending me to watch films with my wobbly biological eyes, not when they could just feed the latest releases into a computer, set the parameters to ‘contemptuous’, and watch a perfectly serviceable review assemble itself, for free, before their eyes. They’re losing money on every column. They may as well be paying a scriptorium full of monks to illuminate each copy of the magazine on vellum. I’m doomed, surplus to requirements, and the 21st century will replace me with a few lines of code. But it could be worse. At

Tantalisingly ambiguous – or just plain baffling: Hallow Road reviewed

An 80-minute film which for almost all of the time features two people in a car mightn’t sound particularly ambitious. In fact, though, Hallow Road is bursting with so many ideas and genres that by the end they risk blowing it apart completely. At first, it looks as if we’re in for a mix of family drama, psychological thriller and anxiety dream – which indeed we are, but only for starters. After some characteristically disorientating (it turns out) shots of an apparent crime scene – an abandoned meal, glass strewn across the floor – Maddy Finch (Rosamund Pike) receives a 2 a.m. phone call from her distraught daughter Alice (the

The Lord of the Rings gave me my moral compass

In a recent diary for The Spectator, the editor noted that many of the world’s leading tech companies have names inspired by The Lord of the Rings: Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Mithril; Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. ‘J.R.R. Tolkien has a curious hold on the minds of Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters,’ he wrote. Well, they’re not the only ones. If I had founded a company I probably would have called it Anduril too. While less odd teenagers spent their money on CDs or football boots, I used to have a life-sized replica of the Elvish sword hanging above my bed. I, like the tech bros, was a LOTR obsessive. A super fan.

What did Leni Riefenstahl know?

Leni Riefenstahl: what are we to make of her? What did she know? Often described as ‘Hitler’s favourite filmmaker’, she always claimed that she knew nothing of any atrocities. She was a naive artist, not a collaborator in a murderous regime. This documentary wants to get to the truth. But even if you’ve already made your own mind up – I had! – it’s still a mesmerising portrait of the kind of person who cannot give up on the lies they’ve told themselves. Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. A striking, Garbo-esque beauty in her youth she looked like a haunted Fanny Craddock by the end. She

Worth watching for the dog: The Friend reviewed

The Friend is an adaptation of the novel by Sigrid Nunez starring a harlequin Great Dane. If I remember rightly, Naomi Watts and Bill Murray are also in the mix somewhere but I can’t be sure. Who could notice anything but Apollo in all his noble, giant, majesty? Watts and Murray are fine – if they are even in it? – but Bing, who plays Apollo, is astonishing. It’s his first role, yet he must be a shoo-in for the Palm Dog prize at Cannes this year. Even if you’re not into the ‘non-action’ genre it’s worth it for the dog To be clear, though, this isn’t your usual cute-doggo

Dry retelling of the Odyssey – but Fiennes is ripped: The Return reviewed

Uberto Pasolini’s The Return stars Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in a retelling of the last section of Homer’s Odyssey. He is Odysseus and she is Penelope in a stripped-back tale that presents the pair as psychologically plausible human beings rather than characters from Greek myth. Fiennes and Binoche are, of course, spellbinding. I could look at their faces all day. But the narrative is so parched and meditative it’s ultimately enervating and seems as depressed as the hero himself. I ended up longing for a Cyclops or at least a six-headed monster. Written by John Collee, Edward Bond and also Pasolini, the film throws no Gods or monsters in

Never fully comes to life, alas: Mr Burton reviewed

Mr Burton is a biopic of Richard Burton’s early years and an origins story, if you like. It stars Harry Lawtey as young Richard and Toby Jones as Philip Burton, the inspirational teacher whose name he would take. It’s a fascinating story. In essence, Richard’s drunkard father sold him for £50. But the film is too devoted and sedate to fly as a cinematic event. It has the feel of a Sunday evening television drama. Nothing wrong with that – although you could just stay home on a Sunday evening and watch television if that’s what you’re after. Cheaper, and much less bother. There’s too little Manville here for my

I genuinely feared The End would never end

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End is a ‘post-apocalyptic musical’ starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon that is being sold as a ‘bold vision’. And as you know I’m all for bold visions – except perhaps ones that go on for two and a half hours (I genuinely feared The End would never end) and give the impression throughout of being like a premise in search of a story. The musical, however, does definitively answer one question: can Swinton and Shannon carry a tune? Spoiler: not really. This is the first dramatic feature from Oppenheimer who is best known as the documentarian behind two stunning films about the 1960s Indonesian genocide (The

John Hemingway and the lost world of Angels One Five

You will doubtless have read the news and possibly even an obituary of Group Captain John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last of ‘the Few’, who died this week at the great age of 105. That he lived beyond the age of 21 is little short of miraculous, of course – given that he was shot down no fewer than four times in just a fortnight during the Battle of Britain, which claimed the lives of 544 pilots out of nearly 3,000 who fought for Fighter Command. Without the victory their service and sacrifice brought, it’s highly likely that the outcome of the second world war would have been reversed. Therefore Group

Irresistible: Clueless, at the Trafalgar Theatre, reviewed

Cher Horowitz, the central character in Clueless, is one of the most irritating heroines in the history of movies. She’s a rich, slim, beautiful Beverly Hills princess obsessed with parties, boys and clothing brands. According to her, the world’s problems can easily be settled by using the solutions she applied to the seating plan at her dad’s birthday dinner. But Cher is also a creation of genius because she draws us into her life and makes us understand the raw, damaged reality that lies behind her superficial perfection. She’s not a privileged brat. She’s all of us. At the start of this musical remake, Cher takes us on a tour

Who wants a ‘girl boss’ Snow White?

Disney’s new Snow White is a live-action remake of the beloved 1937 classic that was cinema’s first full-length animated feature and is still regarded as Walt’s greatest masterpiece – even if fans of The Jungle Book will always have something to say about that. It stars Rachel Zegler, which set the cat among the pigeons, as she is Latino so doesn’t have ‘skin as white as snow’. However, because I’m not a stickler for ‘historical accuracy’ when it comes to fictional characters in fairy tales, this didn’t bother me. The problem with the film isn’t that it’s gone ‘woke’, it’s that it contains workaday narrative, blandly generic characters and a

Toby Young

The curse of Disney’s Snow White

One of the early decisions David Zaslav made after becoming the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery in 2022 was to cancel the release of Batgirl, a summer blockbuster the studio had spent $90 million making. According to industry insiders, Zaslav thought the politically correct reimagining of the comic book character, whose best friend in the film is played by a trans actor, would be box office poison. Better to take the tax write-off, he decided, than spend tens of millions of dollars trying to market the film to an American public that was fed up with being lectured by virtue-signalling Hollywood liberals. Incidentally, the highest-grossing film of 2022 in the

Will I be sidelined by AI?

I’ve been head down for the past few weeks, preparing for my one-man show. The title is catchy – Nigel Havers Talking B*ll*cks. I’m not sure this was a good idea because in every interview that I have done, I’ve been told that we can’t use this word on air. I seem to hear nothing but four-letter words on the TV these days, so I hadn’t realised that people would mind the bollocks. It seems to be more offensive than the entire four-letter cannon. I am obviously not down with the kids. I have never done anything like this before and have been worrying about three things: will anyone come;

Cartoonish, sub-Armando Iannucci comic caper: Mickey 17 reviewed

Mickey 17 is the latest film from the South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho, who won an Oscar for Parasite and made Snowpiercer and Okja. It’s a dystopian sci-fi satire starring Robert Pattinson twice over (all will be explained) but while it initially kicks some decent ideas around, it eventually descends into a cartoonish, sub-Armando Iannucci comic caper with, as far as I could ascertain, nothing fresh to say. It’s not the biggest disappointment I’ve had in my life but it’s up there. The film is set some time in the future and Pattinson plays Mickey 17, a crew member on a space-colonisation mission who, in the opening sequence, has fallen