Film

‘Why did you want to climb Everest?’ reporters quizzed mountaineer George Mallory in 1922. That the question even needed asking shows mountaineering is fundamentally different from other pursuits. No journalist would ever ask a footballer why they kick a ball around. But mountaineering is gruelling and you’re way more likely to perish from it than to make a fortune. So why would anyone climb any mountain, let alone Everest? Mallory’s rationale was short and sweet: ‘Because it’s there.’ And what about Jimmy Chin? Why does he climb? Chin, 48, is part Bear Grylls, part David Attenborough. He has not only climbed snow, ice and rock terrain on all seven continents,

Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci has been much anticipated. The cast is stellar. It’s based on a luscious, true story (so juicy) featuring vicious family infighting and culminating in a murder. I was thinking Succession, but with luxury leather goods and the hiring of a hit man. It can’t miss, I was thinking. Except it can. Not entirely. It has its moments. But the middle act drags (it’s two hours and 40 minutes long) and also the decision to have the English-speaking cast a-speak-a in Italian accents may not have been the wisest one. There were many times I thought Gino D’Acampo was in the room-a. This stars Lady Gaga

Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog could also be called The Power of Benedict Cumberbatch, as he’s so spectacular. He plays a ruggedly masculine cowboy with an inner life that isn’t written, but that we somehow still see. It is also clearly Campion’s best film since The Piano or my own favourite, An Angel at My Table (as for Bright Star, we said we’d never talk of it again — why did you even bring it up? We all have our off days). If Cumberbatch doesn’t win every award going, I’ll eat my hat, but probably not his ten-gallon one The film is based on the 1967 novel by

Clint Eastwood is 91; Cry Macho may well be his last film. Or maybe not. He has, after all, been directing himself as majestically craggy old guys for decades. Craggiest and most majestic of all, he was, in 1992, Will Munny in Unforgiven and, in 2008, Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino. In both those films, and now in Cry Macho, he is not just craggy, he is also broken. Munny is an old, widowed gunfighter barely surviving on his pig farm in Kansas. Kowalski, also widowed, is angry with America and missing, bitterly, the great days of the Detroit car makers. And now, in Cry Macho, he is Mike Milo,

Go see Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, which stars Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, and the next day you will wonder: did I go to the cinema last night or did I have a cheese dream? Did she really clear the room of staff by saying she wished to masturbate, or was it the cheddar and crackers I foolishly had before bed? This is a total cheese dream of a film —did she really just eat a pearl? — but also it’s a riveting one as well as a thrillingly entertaining one. Plus it all somehow feels true even if it isn’t. Broken woman, unfeeling family. That seems about right. This is

The Forgotten Battle is a Dutch feature film commemorating the desperate and relatively little-known Allied assault on the Scheldt estuary in October and November 1944. When I went to the battlefield decades later with veterans of 47 RM Commando, they told me it was worse than D-Day because the Germans knew they were coming and had prepared stronger defences. Nearly 13,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded (about the same as the German casualties), half of them Canadians. It has been a long time since I watched a half-decent second world war movie, mostly because they hardly bother making them any more. In the past decade, I can think only

The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but also he has always yearned to make a film about the New Yorker, the magazine with subscribers all round the world, some of whom actually get round to reading it before binning it, and some of whom don’t. (She says, guiltily.) So The French Dispatch is, he has said, the ‘smooching’ of these two ideas, and it is, alas, a ‘smooch’ of a film. That is, not one thing or the other. I would further add it’s as if all the cast had been instructed to act wackily and off-kilter

Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is set in the 14th century and is a tale of rivalry and rape told from three points of view, when two would probably have been sufficient. The best is saved to last, perhaps unforgivably. It’s the woman’s story, starring Jodie Comer who is sensational, so do hang on in there for that. However, I can’t guarantee that you won’t have severe battle-scene fatigue by then. The last duel itself is so extended it puts you in mind of Monty Python and the Holy Grail Based on true events and, loosely, on the book by Eric Jager, it stars Adam Driver (trying hard not to

This week, an excellent film (Moving On) and a film that isn’t at all, but is entirely worth it as it’s one of the super bad ones that don’t come along too often. It’s the kind that, if it were any better, it would actually be a terrible pity. (See also: Cats.) It’s Diana: The Musical and it’s two hours of ‘whaaaaaat?’ and pinching yourself that this is really happening. (After two hours I was black and blue, with the pinching.) I don’t know what the best lyric is but ‘Harry, my ginger-haired son, you’ll always be second to none’ has to be up there. (Also: ‘It’s the Thrilla in

So how exactly did Tony Soprano become a New Jersey mob boss? It’s 1967 and young Anthony is struggling to find meaning and purpose in his life. Luckily, his doting uncle Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola) offers the love and support his feckless parents are incapable of giving. Unluckily, Moltisanti is not quite the role model he’d like to be. Dickie complains about this on a visit to his uncle, Aldo ‘Hollywood Dick’ Moltisanti (Ray Liotta), who is languishing in jail for having killed a made man. Why is it, he wants to know, that even though he does conspicuously good works — bringing Aldo jazz records; coaching a baseball team

It’s a hard heart that doesn’t warm to the musical drama Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I don’t have a hard heart, and I was warmed, but I also have an impatient heart and my patience was sometimes tested. There’s a point in this film where you might, for example, be asking yourself: do we really need yet another song about empowerment set in the school canteen? Or: can we not have another a pep talk about being true to yourself? On reflection, I would say my heart was only around 42 per cent warmed, at a guess. The starting point for the whole Jamie phenomenon was a BBC3 documentary about