Film

Anthony Weiner is the American politician who made a comeback after a sexting scandal and stood for New York mayor. He was topping the polls, when a second sexting scandal broke, which proves what, probably, none of us had suspected all along: that thing you do where you send women pictures of your erect penis must be awfully hard to quit. This fly on the wall documentary was, happily, already filming Weiner and his fascinating wife (Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s long time aide) when his career imploded, and the result is as supremely entertaining, painfully funny and queasily riveting as you might have hoped, with one caveat: why is it

Perhaps you have sometimes wondered: how would you even begin to make a film about going blind and being blind and what that means? How, when the subject is so profoundly and inherently uncinematic? Or maybe it’s other thoughts that keep you awake at night — such as when we all finally receive our £350 million a week plus free puppy, where will we be expected to keep them? — but even if that’s so you’ll still find Notes on Blindness to be a singular achievement, as well as a truly wonderful one. This is based on the audio recordings of John Hull, the academic, writer and theologian who was

The Secret Life of Pets is the latest animation from Illumination Entertainment, which also brought us Minions and Despicable Me, but whereas they were smart, funny, charming and original, this is not that smart, not that funny, not that charming and not that original. It’s an average caper that feels familiar and suffers mightily from an excess of chase scenes although, in the interests of full disclosure, I should add I attended the screening with a six-year-old who said afterwards: ‘I loved it.’ Six-year-olds. We are fond of them and all that, but they just don’t ever get the bigger picture, do they? This is set in Manhattan and concerns

Every now and then, with great infrequency (alas), a film comes along that is like no other and completely knocks you for six, and that is Embrace of the Serpent. The first Colombian film to be nominated for an Oscar — it lost to Son of Saul, should you set any store by such things — it was filmed in the Colombian section of the Amazon basin, with a script developed in consultation with native tribes, and tells the story of a shaman’s encounters with two white scientist explorers, which unfold in different time periods. So far, so National Geographic; a world disappeared by colonialism and all that (sorry; our

Isabelle Huppert does nothing by halves. And she doesn’t, I think, care greatly for journalists. She expects them to ask stupid questions. Sitting before me in an airless room in the eaves of Paris’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, she is tiny, dressed entirely in black and more or less unsmiling. Lily-skinned, red-haired, and with a fabulous curl in her upper lip, she’s appeared in more than 100 film and TV productions. Ninety minutes after our meeting, she will be on stage. I sense she wants this interview over fast. But at the start she makes me, I must report, comatose with wonder. I have adored Mme Huppert on screen for three

‘This film would not have been possible without the following encryption tools,’ is one of the least expected film credits I can think of. But then again, Laura Poitras’s Risk is not exactly your run-of-the-mill documentary. After her Oscar-winning Citizenfour, a gripping hour-by-hour account of Edward Snowden’s NSA surveillance disclosures from his Hong Kong hotel room, Poitras’s latest is an intimate portrait of WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange. Poitras started filming Assange at work in 2010 and her film follows the whistleblower’s mission and his various legal travails since then. As a result, Risk is far less dramatically sensational than Citizenfour, which unfolds over the course of several history-making days.

The first time we see Elle Fanning in The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn’s cannibalistic catwalk, she’s reclining on a silk couch in a purple dress, her blonde hair up in an elaborate crown braid and her throat slashed. Colourful gemstones circle her eyes and deep red is streaking all the way from her neck down her arm. It doesn’t take long for us to figure out this isn’t a crime scene but a fashion shoot. In the next scene, Fanning ritualistically wipes the stage blood away while a makeup artist (Jena Malone) undresses her with her eyes. Malone is the first of several women who will look at Fanning

Pedro Almodóvar’s last two films were affronts to his reputation as a director. The Skin I Live In (2011) was a grotesque horror show starring Antonio Banderas as a mad plastic surgeon. I’m So Excited was a wacky romp in an airplane that badly needed fuel. His latest, Julieta, currently in competition at Cannes, was a box office disappointment in Spain, where it opened last month – possibly due to the director being named in the Panama Papers – but it’s better than a lot of what he’s done lately, as well as the closest thing to a mainstream movie that one can imagine from the Spanish eccentric. There are

Everybody Wants Some!! is a comedy written and directed by Richard Linklater, which is the good news, but it’s set among baseball jocks at a Texas college in 1980, which may be the less good news. Your enjoyment of the film may depend not on Linklater’s abilities, which are there for all to see — Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Boyhood — but on how much time you wish to spend with these dudes anyhow. They drink and party, party and drink, and drive around town tooting at girls in short shorts who are just short shorts as they aren’t given any actual dialogue except in one trying instance. I

When the Fat Lady Sings, everyone is primed to chortle, even if she is Montserrat Caballé and doing it wonderfully well. Hergé’s cartoon creation of Bianca Castafiore embodies the type: with her flaxen plaits and heaving embonpoint, she is a ridiculously bad fit for the simpering virginal heroine of Gounod’s Faust, particularly when carolling her Jewel Song at such a pitch that an agonised Tintin and Captain Haddock are forced to cover their ears. But at least Madame Castafiore has a brilliant international career: what about the Fat Lady who Can’t Sing — the diva deluded into thinking she is a nightingale when in fact she is nothing but a

Captain America: Civil War is the 897th instalment — or something like it — in the Marvel comic franchise. This time round, the superheroes take sides, with the marketing asking if you’re #TeamCap or #TeamIronMan but not if you’re #TeamNeither, as would be most useful in my case. I swear this is the last Marvel film I will see as I never get anything out of them and whatever I say only sets the fans against me, which is not what you want at my age. I only attended this one because I had read the American critics (and some of the British ones who’d had a heads up). They