Disney defends use of streaming terms to block restaurant allergy death lawsuit

Jeffrey Piccolo filed wrongful death suit for $50,000 after his wife died of an allergic reaction at Florida resort

Disney representatives have defended the company’s legal strategy to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a widower over the death of his wife because of the terms and conditions he agreed to when signing up for Disney+ streaming service several years earlier.

Jeffrey Piccolo filed a wrongful death suit against Walt Disney World and Resorts earlier this year, after his wife, Dr Kanokporn Tangsuan, died in October 2023 after eating at the Raglan Road Irish Pub at the resort near Orlando, Florida. Continue reading...


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Klitschko: More Than a Fight review – Kyiv’s mayor confronts Zelenskiy in eye-opening Ukraine war film

Kevin Macdonald’s documentary follows the former boxer in charge of Ukraine’s capital as he deals with the fallout of the Russian invasion

The bad blood between Vitali Klitschko, former heavyweight champ and now mayor of Kyiv, and Ukraine’s hero president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is not exactly a secret but there’s fascinating detail in this film by Kevin Macdonald that shows how both men – who we’d fondly like to think are united at the hip in the struggle to repel the Russian invasion – appear to undermine each other. I say “appear” of course, because this can’t be anything other than a partial view; with Macdonald’s camera and access firmly focused on Klitschko, and no response provided from Zelenskiy’s camp.

Still, the footage Macdonald gets is remarkable, particularly of Klitschko in meetings with senior American politicians (including secretary of state Anthony Blinken) during which he attacks, in a not especially veiled manner, the Zelenskiy government as becoming an autocracy. In other sequences Klitschko claims Zelenskiy is victimising powerful city mayors and running a murky, Soviet-style political operation, that Ukrainian democracy is in danger and that, without “reform” aid money will disappear. In effect, he accuses Zelenskiy of wanting to turn Ukraine into “Russia 2.0”. True or not, it’s sobering evidence of a split at the heart of the Ukrainian establishment, though perhaps not immediately obvious how it will affect the prosecution of the war, or indeed what comes after hostilities have concluded. Continue reading...


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Gena Rowlands: the fiercest, most incandescent star of US indie cinema

Subtle yet tough and fearless, the actor blazed a trail through American movies in the 70s – in particular in close collaboration with her husband John Cassavetes

‘I was always a BROAD! I can’t stand the sight of MILK!” This is Gena Rowlands at her awe-inspiring toughest in John Cassavetes’ extraordinary drama-thriller Gloria from 1980. She is sexy, smart, a match for any man. Rowlands was a strong, passionate heroine in the tradition of Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall. In fact, her director-husband John Cassavetes was in some ways Bogart to her Bacall. Rowlands staked a claim to the male prerogative of being sensual, dangerous and damaged; a natural survivor. In Gloria, and also in Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988), in which she plays a severe philosophy professor, Rowlands wears a belted trenchcoat, the kind that Bogart would wear.

In recent years, Rowlands was known most widely as the sweet old lady in the tearjerking drama The Notebook (2004), being read to in a retirement home by the ageing and gallant James Garner. She was tenderly directed in this film by her son, Nick Cassavetes. For all its mawkishness, the film acquired a real fanbase, but it gives only the most oblique indication of what Rowlands was like in her magnificent, leonine prime. Continue reading...


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Jackpot! review - Awkwafina and John Cena strapped into stunt-heavy action comedy

The efforts of a strong cast to make a future dystopia into knockabout fun result in a discordant mismash of general ridiculousness

It’s the year 2030 in Los Angeles, and a new, vicious game is afoot. The California Grand Lottery, started in response to the Great Depression of 2026, tantalises cash-strapped citizens with hope via a mega-billions jackpot. The catch? If you win, you have to survive until sundown; anyone who kills you – and they have your location – gets your money. Also, no one can use guns.

There are some other stipulations hastily explained in Jackpot!, an Amazon MGM Studios production that, from the jump, struggles to infuse incredibly bleak conditions with lighthearted action humour. LA is beset by worse, though thinly sketched, economic inequality – people use flip phones now, TV anchors cheer a dozen new billionaires, an unhoused couple cooks hotdogs at a camp by a fancy cafe (gasp!). Everyone is perfectly comfortable with murderous zeal for money and ready to kill the moment the winner is announced. “Some people call it dystopian,” a title card reads, “but those people are no fun.” Continue reading...


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‘Rebuilt from scratch’: how Edinburgh international film festival got back on its feet

In a ‘radical rethink’ after its crisis two years ago, the festival returns with world premieres, a new £50,000 prize and a focus on industry

• Peter Bradshaw’s 12 best picks of the festival

The trailblazing producer Lynda Myles knows a thing of two about film festivals. The first female director of the Edinburgh international film festival (EIFF) betweeen 1973 and 1980, Myles declares herself “ecstatic” that the revived programme will take place this month.

“With so many other festivals to compete with, you have to have specificity,” says Myles, who will present a new screening showcase at the EIFF, “and it seems to me that being part of the world’s biggest arts festival offers that. After a difficult few years it was time for a radical rethink.” Continue reading...


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Lone Star review – John Sayles’s powerful crime drama is an extraordinary relic of 90s Hollywood

Sayles’s 1996 film tackles racial division in Texas as a sheriff uncovers dark secrets about his home town and his father’s past

This rerelease of John Sayles’s western crime drama from 1996 is a reminder that he offered a vital but now maybe overlooked strand of indie movie-making and myth-making in 90s Hollywood, distinct from the brilliant ironies and shocks of Tarantino or the literary noir of the Coen brothers. Lone Star is a richly and densely achieved movie that gets a lot of storytelling done in two and a quarter hours; it is thoughtful and complex and grownup, a movie about the old west and the new west and about the culture wars of Texas and Mexico, about the melancholy spectacle of old white guys in Stetsons having coffee together, about who owns the narrative and who prints the legend. And it’s a film about the Freudian fear of the father and the embrace of taboo, with an extraordinary and very subversive ending.

The setting is the (fictional) little town of Frontera, Texas, attractive to a certain kind of visitor for being close to the border and a world of cheap bought sex in Mexico. In the grim words of Sheriff Sam Deeds, played by Sayles’s repertory regular Chris Cooper, the town should have a tourist slogan: “gateway to inexpensive pussy”. Sam should be in a good mood because the local courthouse is being named after his late father, Buddy, once himself the town’s sheriff, but Sam is subdued because a couple of treasure-hunt enthusiasts with a metal detector have dug up a skeleton with a “lone star” badge in some rough scrubland nearby. It is apparently what remains of a notoriously racist and corrupt law enforcement officer from even longer ago called Charlie Wade, played in flashback by Kris Kristofferson. Continue reading...


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Coraline review – delightfully creepy coming-of-age fantasy offers more than just scares

Henry Selick’s adapted from Neil Gaiman’s book about a young girl who finds new parents with buttons for eyes is a nifty stop-motion animation

Henry Selick’s 2009 animated supernatural fantasy Coraline is now rereleased for its 15th anniversary; it is based on a novella by Neil Gaiman, the author now the subject of sexual assault allegations. This stop-motion film looks as amiably creepy as it did when I saw it first – though, as with The Nightmare Before Christmas, another of Selick’s movies, which was produced by Tim Burton, the chills are mixed with adventure, exotic strangeness and comedy, certainly a recipe that has entranced audiences. As before, though, I wondered if this story might have been more frightening if it had been filmed in conventional live-action with regular human beings showing us their eerie smiling faces with buttons for eyes. But straight-up scariness may not be the point.

Coraline (whose name sounds like a twist on “Caroline”) is voiced by Dakota Fanning and comes with her hard-working mom and dad to a strange old house in remote Oregon where the adults plan on working on the gardening catalogue they’re writing. Coraline encounters an odd kid in the house’s grounds called Wyborn (a twist on “why-born?”), voiced by Robert Bailey Jr, and also meets the neighbours: two weird old ladies (Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders) who once had a saucy act in a circus show, and a performing mouse trainer, Mr Bobinsky (voiced by Ian McShane), whose funky accent surely influenced Steve Carell’s Gru in Despicable Me. Continue reading...


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George Clooney says he is ‘irritated’ with Tarantino over movie star remark

The director suggested that Clooney hadn’t played in a Hollywood hit film since the millennium

George Clooney says he is “a little irritated” by director Quentin Tarantino making comments about whether he is considered a movie star.

The Hollywood actor had his first significant big screen part when he starred opposite Tarantino in 1996 cult vampire film From Dusk Till Dawn, directed by Robert Rodriguez. Continue reading...


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Corey Yuen, martial arts director and Jet Li collaborator, died in 2022, Hong Kong film federation confirms

Film-maker who directed films starring Li, Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh and later worked as a Hollywood fight coordinator, died during the Covid pandemic two years ago

Celebrated Hong Kong martial arts actor and director Corey Yuen died two years ago during the Covid pandemic, it has been reported.

The Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers confirmed Yuen’s death following a social media post by action star Jackie Chan naming Yuen (also known as Yuen Kwai) among a list of late disciples of China Drama Academy head Yu Jim-yuen, who died in 1997. Continue reading...


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Only the River Flows review – accomplished Chinese noir is intriguing and ingenious thriller

An ambitious police detective attempts to solve a series of murders from a disused cinema in director Wei Shujun’s crime drama

Wei Shujun’s new film, adapted from a novella by Yu Hua, is a deadpan existential riddle presenting as noir crime, set in provincial China and taking its cue from Albert Camus’s Caligula: “There’s no understanding fate, therefore I choose to play the part of fate …” It’s a movie that wryly questions the thriller genre’s assumptions about the essential knowability of motive and agency; the idea that people commit crimes for clear reasons and their means and opportunity are governed by the equally explicable conditions of the physical world. But in this drama, chaos and meaninglessness keep peeping through – I can imagine David Lynch directing an alternative version. (There is also the plot-muddle tradition of classic Hollywood noir that sometimes uses China as a somewhat racist trope for exotically opaque murkiness, as in The Lady from Shanghai or Chinatown.)

Zhu Yilong plays Captain Ma, a smart and ambitious young officer brought in to solve the murder of a woman whose corpse has been found by a riverbank, and his superiors set up an incident centre in – of all the postmodern places – a disused cinema. Interrogations take place in the projection room, as two more people are killed and a secondary suspect takes his own life. Overworked Capt Ma falls asleep at one stage and his dreams about the crimes are projected on to the screen; later events may or may not be more cinematic dreams or hallucinations. Continue reading...


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The Hypnosis review – watch-through-your-hands squirmfest as woman loses inhibitions

A big-money business pitch is threatened when a tech entrepreneur’s unpredictable inner child is unleashed after hypnotherapy

The squirm factor is high in this dark comedy of social awkwardness from Sweden, ruthlessly directed by first-time feature director Ernst De Geer to maximise audience discomfort. There are a couple of scenes here so excruciating I would have found it less painful watching someone getting their fingernails prised out with pliers. The Hypnosis stars Asta Kamma August and Herbert Nordrum as Vera and André, a couple in their 30s who are the founders of an app that tracks women’s reproductive health in developing countries. Dressed in tasteful knitwear and limited-edition trainers, they look the part of startup entrepreneurs, and seem pleasant enough – though it’s immediately clear that André dominates Vera, who is quieter.

Things start to go pear-shaped when Vera sees a hypnotherapist to quit smoking. This is just before an important pitching event where the pair will be competing against other apps in front of big-money investors. At the session, Vera’s hypnotherapist gently observes that she seems to be holding back her true self; she should listen to her inner child more. And something inside Vera switches and she loses her social inhibitions – in a way that I didn’t quite buy into – instantly, and at full throttle. Continue reading...


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A Nightmare on Elm Street rating change defended by BBFC

Certificate lowered from 18 to 15 after 1980s classic is deemed ‘relatively discreet in terms of gore and injury detail’

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has defended its decision to change the certificate of horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street from an 18 to a 15, saying that its audience research showed “strong support for older content to be reclassified in line with modern standards”.

The classic 1980s horror, featuring the malevolent, razor-gloved Freddy Krueger who stalks and murders teenagers in their dreams, was given an 18 certificate on its first UK release in 1985, a designation confirmed on a subsequent cinema release in 2013 and a series of home entertainment releases. However, after a new application from its studio Warner Bros, the certificate was changed to a 15 on 1 August, ahead of a home entertainment reissue in September. Continue reading...


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Swan Song review – ‘punk rock’ ballet film goes behind-the-scenes to get show afloat

The National Ballet of Canada’s prep for a new production of the biggest ballet there is, while bidding farewell to artistic director Karen Kain, is subtly handled in a nuanced documentary

‘Ballet is fucking punk rock,” declaims corps de ballet member Shaelynn Estrada, towards the end of this absorbing documentary, which might be a bit of a definitional stretch for some viewers – but it sort of makes sense. I guess Estrada wants to celebrate the hardcore commitment the art requires from performers like her, or maybe its capacity to elicit raw emotion. Whatever she’s trying to say, there’s no denying Estrada herself is pretty punk rock herself, a ferociously likable character whose transition from home-schooled army brat (who paid for ballet lessons as a kid by cleaning the studio) to being member of the National Ballet of Canada’s corps makes up one of several very compelling stories in this solid documentary.

As the film’s director Chelsea McMullan and crew observe the rehearsals and lead-up to the company’s debut of a new production of Swan Lake in 2022, a diverse range of characters are introduced. First and foremost is the production’s director Karen Kain, a former prima who became the company’s artistic director, and is about to retire after this show debuts (hence the title). Diplomatic and relentlessly elegant, Kain seems as classical and echt-ballet as Estrada is punk, even if she remembers the night Rudolf Nureyev took her to a party where she met Andy Warhol among heaped bowls of cocaine. (She has a portrait of herself by Warhol to prove it.) Meanwhile, representing another facet of ballet identity, the company’s current superstar, Jurgita Dronina is struggling in near secrecy with a nerve injury. With the lead role of Odette/Odile in the show, Dronina is every bit the stoic star, suffering for her art. Continue reading...


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‘Then Zelenskiy called for him to go’: Kevin Macdonald on how his film about Kyiv’s ex-boxer mayor suddenly heated up

The director was having trouble making his documentary about Vitali Klitschko and his brother Wladimir emotional and dramatic. But when the mayor was blamed for two bomb shelter deaths, everything changed

I’m not a war correspondent. But it’s 3am and, like every night this week, I’ve been woken by the sound of sirens outside, alarms on my phone and a calm voice-broadcast in the corridor of my hotel telling me to go to the basement. I scramble into some clothes and fumble my way down to the hotel laundry/bomb shelter. The smell of detergent is overpowering but also somehow reassuring. I take in the sleep-deprived faces of my fellow basement dwellers: a group of Spanish nuns; a couple of mysterious American “technology workers” with their local girlfriends; and the real-deal journalists and war correspondents who remain entirely calm and tell us: “This is nothing. You should have been in Afghanistan last year.”

Why am I here? Continue reading...


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‘The younger generation condemn us’: stars of Madwomen of the West hit back at cancel culture

Wokeness, gender fluidity, the audacity of ageing … Madwomen of the West is a play giving ‘women of a certain age’ a voice – and audiences are loving it. We meet two of its outspoken stars, Brooke Adams and Caroline Aaron

Brooke Adams was a huge star in her 30s after appearing alongside a brooding Richard Gere in Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick’s tragic and masterful film about farm workers. But she walked away from the business in her 40s and instead devoted herself to painting and parenting. Adams was decidedly retired. “I had quit acting,” she says.

But actor Caroline Aaron, her longtime friend, had other ideas. “I tried to bring her out of retirement,” recalls Aaron, who has notched up more than 40 years in the business, most recently playing mother-in-law Shirley in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. She approached Adams with Madwomen of the West – the timing was right, it was going to co-star other friends – and Adams agreed to appear in the comedy before she’d even read the script. Continue reading...


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‘Actors are strange animals’: Jack Lowden of Slow Horses on playing an alcoholic and working with his new wife, Saoirse Ronan

The Scottish star talks about his forthcoming role in David Ireland’s new play in Edinburgh – and why making an Irn Bru ad counts as national service

The actor Jack Lowden, 34, is Scottish in every respect, except that he was born in England. His parents soon returned the family across the border, where he was enrolled in Scottish Youth Theatre and, at the age of 19, bagged his first major role, the lead in the National Theatre of Scotland’s 2010 revival of the Olivier award-winning Black Watch.

Lowden would go on to win an Olivier of his own, for the role of Oswald in the Almeida’s 2013 production of Ibsen’s Ghosts. Screen work followed, including a BBC adaptation of War and Peace, a Scottish Bafta-winning role in Terence Davies’s final film, Benediction, and the 2018 film Mary Queen of Scots, where he met his now-wife, the four-time Oscar-nominated Irish actor Saoirse Ronan (whom Lowden refers to simply as “Sersh”). Continue reading...


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Babes review – Pamela Adlon’s caustically funny pregnancy comedy

Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau fizz in the Better Things creator’s directorial debut, a rapid-fire riff on pregnancy, motherhood and female friendship

Motherhood changes everything. Or that’s the received wisdom anyway. However, Eden – Ilana Glazer, who also co-wrote the film and rattles out her lines with a flip, crackling energy that veers between the scatological and the screwball – didn’t get that particular memo. A freewheeling, terminally single yoga teacher from Astoria, Queens, she is not about to let an unplanned baby derail her life. Her personality (large, loud, tirelessly hedonistic) is stamped on to every aspect of her pregnancy. Her birth plan features helium balloons and tiaras; she has already compiled a Spotify playlist of party bangers for the delivery room. And holding her hand through it all, Eden assumes, will be her best friend since childhood, Dawn (Michelle Buteau).

But Dawn has a demanding career and family of her own: a newborn whose birth provides the extended comic set piece that opens the film (and sets its forthright tone), and a three-year-old who is dabbling in satanism after Eden’s unorthodox babysitting (she lets him watch The Omen). Dawn is one exploding nappy away from a meltdown. She has, to put it bluntly, more than enough shit to deal with without Eden’s contribution. Continue reading...


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Alicia Vikander: ‘If you’re depicting an abusive relationship, you can’t shy away’

The Oscar-winning Swedish star on keeping her head as Henry VIII’s last wife in a no-holds-barred reimagining of the Tudor court, the rise of AI – and why filming feels like first love

To get into the mindset of her latest character, Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr, Alicia Vikander would put in her AirPods between takes, alternating between classical music and “a lot” of techno. “It gave me a bit of physical stress,” she recalls. “Something that never stopped, like a heartbeat that always goes a bit too fast.” Jude Law, who plays her on-screen husband, got into character by dousing himself in the scent of blood, faecal matter and sweat. “It was unbearable – like rotten fish,” says Vikander. “It was a very present reminder of what it must have been like to enter the same room as Henry VIII during that time.”

Karim Aïnouz’s handsome, visceral film Firebrand is a distinctly modern take on Tudor history, getting under the skin of what it might have been like to be married to someone who could at any point call for your beheading. For many viewers, it will provide an introduction to the somewhat overlooked historical figure of Parr, the first woman to be published under her own name in England. It also marks a shift in the way Henry VIII has traditionally been portrayed: less of a vigorous womaniser, and more of a domestic abuser prone to petty cruelties and violent mood swings. “If you’re showing an abusive relationship, in which you’re afraid for your life every day, you can’t shy away,” says Vikander. “It was pretty grim. There would have been 300 men in the palace and about 12 women, who were confined to two chambers. Just imagining these women, never being able to go outside – it dawns on you emotionally, what that can be like.” Continue reading...


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Avatar, Tron, Fantastic Four and Star Wars: Disney rolls out raft of new films at fan event

The studio’s annual convention in Anaheim, California brought a blizzard of announcements and footage for its most popular film series and franchises

Thank goodness Deadpool & Wolverine is still in cinemas, or Ryan Reynolds’ sweary mutant might have taken over Disney’s usually squeaky-clean D23 fan event in Anaheim, California. As it was, Reynolds only appeared briefly on the spectacularly giant screens at the 15,000 capacity Honda Centre for a recorded segment thanking fans for supporting his film to a likely $1bn global box office return this weekend. And naturally to remind Marvel boss Kevin Feige – tongue firmly in cheek – who saved the studio.

It was left to Disney’s more conventional franchises across its subdivisions Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and what used to be 20th Century Fox to steal the show. And with a number of new movie announcements and impressive sneak peeks, this was a fan event to suggest the Mouse House has plenty up its sleeve to keep audiences interested over the next few years. Continue reading...


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Joaquin Phoenix exits Todd Haynes gay drama five days before filming begins

Actor was set to lead an explicit love story set in 1930s but has left leaving the project to collapse

The Oscar-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix has dropped out of a new gay drama, directed by Todd Haynes, just five days before filming was set to begin.

According to Indiewire, Variety and Deadline, the actor is alleged to have got “cold feet” and sources close to the film-makers have confirmed to the Guardian that the project is cancelled altogether with no plans to recast the role. Continue reading...


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Luce review – enigmatic Italian drama of dreams and drones

Locarno film festival
A young woman’s breakdown – or is it an epiphany? – in coastal Italy, in Luca Bellino and Silvia Luzi’s film, does not surrender its meaning easily

Luca Bellino and Silvia Luzi’s new film is an intriguing yet perplexing piece of work; it’s opaque and indirect, the storytelling appears incomplete and recedes implacably before the audience’s pursuit. It’s a kind of cinema that does not render up its meaning right away – or indeed at all. The keynote of extreme closeup on the lead character’s face is in implied contrast to the hazy distance where the film’s significance is perhaps sited.

A young woman played by Marianna Fontana lives in a tough Italian town on the coast, miserably working in a leather garment factory; she is one of a whole group of women whose job is to stake and stretch out pieces of leather on an automated production line. The person in charge is a man who sometimes hands out punishment by making certain workers go upstairs to work on the “drum”, where you have to heave out great mounds of leather pelt to be transported down to the factory floor via a kind of dumb-waiter shaft. Continue reading...


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Is this really the end of the line for Deadpool? Disney will never turn off the money tap

Poised to take a billion dollars at the box office, the sweary and ultraviolent Deadpool & Wolverine proves where there’s muck there’s brass – so there can’t not be a sequel

As Deadpool & Wolverine is about to hit $1bn at the global box office this weekend, the question Disney suits will no doubt be asking themselves is whether there’s more wonga to be made here. Just about everybody expected Ryan Reynolds’s debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be a success, but few could have imagined that Shawn Levy’s film would look set to overtake Todd Phillips’s Joker as the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time in only its third week of release. This one is going to run and run.

All eyes will now turn to what happens next, because the whole point of the MCU is that there is ALWAYS something coming next. Where once Hollywood was dependent on sequels, prequels, spin-offs and reboots to keep the gravy train rolling when it finally had a big hit on its hands, it now boasts a seemingly endless saga that acts more like an ever-expanding, constantly evolving fanboy joy virus. Which is why the screams coming from Mouse House HQ this week must have been more palpable than the tortured yelps of those destined to spend eternity in Dante’s Inferno when Reynolds was quoted as saying that he had precisely zero plans for a follow-up. Continue reading...


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‘There is an incredible hunger for it’: why classic films are making a comeback in cinemas

From Caligula to Forrest Gump and My Neighbour Totoro, rereleases are hitting the big screen once again – and are proving lucrative at the box office

Glance at the lineup of films at your local cinema and you might briefly believe you have passed through a time portal. Stirring athletics biopic Chariots of Fire sits cheek by jowl with schmaltzy Tom Hanks fable Forrest Gump; magical Japanese animation My Neighbour Totoro finds houseroom next to melancholic Hungarian art film Werckmeister Harmonies; 1990s action yarn The Mummy galumphs alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid 70s classic The Conversation. The surge of reissues and restorations appears unstoppable. This week sees the release of a new edit of the notoriously sleazy Caligula, first released in 1979, with the Tex-Mex crime story Lone Star (1996) and Coraline (2009) to follow shortly.

Previously they were largely the preserve of organisations such as the BFI making archive treasures available on the big screen, or to publicise home entertainment releases on DVD and Blu-ray, the surge is in part down to simple issues of supply and demand. According to Jack Reid Bell, marketing manager of reissue specialist distributors Park Circus, the drying-up of the industry pipeline due to the pandemic and then the writers’ and actors’ strikes, left cinemas casting about to fill their screens. “It gave cinemas, who may not have had much of a tradition of playing reissues, really strong results when they did that. And it’s just continued from then. I suspect the appetite has always been there, but that the market hasn’t been geared to it.” Continue reading...


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‘Sobbing in the aisles’: writers on their most memorable parent-kid film experiences

Whether a terrifying Postman Pat, a mortifying sex scene, or a brush with button-phobia, our writers report on the family viewing they will never forget

This summer, a new book of movie recommendations for children called Hey Kids, Watch This! will be published. It’s been produced by distributor A24, an outfit whose own titles – Uncut Gems, Midsommar, The Zone of Interest – are not immediately family friendly.

The book is correspondingly chewier than most. Yes, Free Willy features, but so does Hedgehog in the Fog, Yuri Norstein’s 10-minute short from 1975. It sings the praises of modern mainstream blockbusters such as Chicken Run, along with older, more niche titles such as Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Continue reading...


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Colin Farrell opens up about son with Angelman syndrome: ‘We still struggle’

Actor discusses son’s neurological condition and launches foundation supporting people with intellectual disability

In a new interview, Colin Farrell opened up about his son who has a rare neurological condition called Angelman syndrome, and announced that he is launching a foundation to support people with intellectual disabilities.

Farrell’s son, James, who is now 20 years old, was diagnosed with Angelman syndrome when he was a two and a half years old, the Irish actor said in an exclusive interview with People Magazine released on Wednesday. He said his son was previously misdiagnosed with cerebral palsy, which shares many of the same characteristics. Continue reading...


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Borderlands review – Cate Blanchett is wasted in janky video game adventure

The Oscar winner tries to rise above Eli Roth’s juvenile and derivative adaptation of the hit game but gets lost in the mess

Video game fans will probably have a strong opinion on how the new sci-fi movie Borderlands fares as an adaptation of the game franchise. (A negative one seems most likely, based on any number of factors.) But for a different genre of nerd, Eli Roth’s long-delayed, faux-irreverent space adventure will feel like something out of 90s comic books, crossbred with contemporary superhero movies. Specifically, this incarnation of Borderlands is reminiscent of a third-tier title from a company nipping at the heels of DC or Marvel. It’s as if early-period Dark Horse or Image Comics tried their hand at ripping off Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy or DC’s Suicide Squad, in all their needle-dropping, ragtag boldness.

Lining up the knockoffs with their bigger-name equivalents is almost fun: Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is a distaff Star-Lord or, going back further, Han Solo, a bounty hunter offered untold riches to retrieve Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the teenage daughter of Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), a powerful corporate exec – though functionally, Tina is more like the spawn of Harley Quinn and Baby Groot. Others joining the hunt and just maybe forming a quarrelsome makeshift family include the sassy robot Claptrap (Jack Black), sort of a Rocket Raccoon take on the Star Wars droids; fearsome-looking Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a low-budget Drax; and Roland (Kevin Hart), a Rick Flagg type (he’s in the Suicide Squad; no need to look it up). They converge on the planet of Pandora – not the pretty one from the Avatar movies, but a junk heap that’s like several different Mad Max societies smushed together – where plenty of other shady types are on the hunt for the key to a vault that holds vast and powerful … knowledge? Technology? I lost track. There’s also a vaguely sourced but intensely predictable prophecy involved. Continue reading...


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Aliens, artists and Abscam: Amy Adams’ 20 best performances – ranked!

The six times Oscar-nominated actor, who turns 50 this month, stars in new comedy horror Nightbitch. We look back at some of her best roles

After paying her dues in dinner theatre, Adams made a promising big-screen debut as delightfully dimwitted Leslie Miller, just one of the teenage contestants in a small-town Minnesota beauty pageant with a suspiciously high body count. This satirical mockumentary has built up a cult following since its release. Continue reading...


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Post your questions for Teri Hatcher

What’s it like playing a Bond girl? Lois Lane? Being one degree from Kevin Bacon? The actor is here to tell all. And she might even talk about starring in the odd era-defining comedy drama

If you haven’t seen Coraline – the spooky animated dark fantasy film based on British author Neil Gaiman’s novella and produced by American stop-motion animation studio Laika – now’s your chance. But don’t forget your 3D glasses (also available in the foyer) because it’s been remastered in 3D to mark its 15th anniversary. A creepy story about people with buttons for eyes, Coraline features the voices of Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, our old friend Ian McShane – and Teri Hatcher who’s kindly agreed to take the reader interview.

So … what to ask? Hatcher has been a Bond girl of course, in Tomorrow Never Dies; in fact, she plays Bond’s former girlfriend whom Pierce Brosnan is sent off to seduce for information. So you can probably guess how that ends. Not well. Or if it’s celeb goss you’re after, she starred with Kevin Bacon in Christopher “Spinal Tap” Guest’s The Big Picture, Sly Stallone in buddy cop action thriller Tango & Cash, Robert Downey Jr in Soapdish and Dolly Parton in Straight Talk. On TV she’s been in episodes of Seinfeld, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Quantum Leap and Frasier and gets it on with Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men. There’s the tiny matter of playing Lois Lane in the 90s for four series of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Oh, and something about some sort of housewife. A desperate one, wasn’t it? Continue reading...


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It Ends with Us review – Blake Lively anchors glossy romance adaptation

Colleen Hoover’s smash hit novel gets a winning and emotionally effective transfer to the big screen

Arriving as counter-programming to her husband’s No 1 Marvel skit Deadpool & Wolverine, Blake Lively’s glossy, and often rather graceful, romantic drama It Ends with Us is also trying to appeal to a powerful and vocal fanbase. Two of them, in fact, just one more obviously than the other.

It’s based on the bestseller by Colleen Hoover, a self-published phenom who rose to ubiquity thanks in part to the rabidity of BookTok and also a Covid-inspired rise in escapist forms of reading at home. Her novels have sold over more than 20m copies worldwide, with It Ends with Us being the most popular. Her female fans are so intense that Hoover, known as CoHo, sells branded press-on nails, quote-covered sweatshirts and character-inspired earrings (her followers are known as the CoHort of course). Hoping for a Fifty Shades-adjacent hit, rights were smartly snapped up for an inevitable adaptation, and it’s one that’s also been cleverly marketed to another, even more intense and financially powerful group of fans: Swifties. Continue reading...


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Broad City’s Ilana Glazer on her new pregnancy comedy: ‘I had no idea how effortful having children is’

After defining goofy millennial aimlessness with her beloved sitcom Broad City, the writer-actor is facing up to motherhood with new film Babes. But don’t worry: she hasn’t grown up too much

Ilana Glazer is trying to think of films about pregnancy and early parenthood that aren’t told from a man’s perspective. “There’s Knocked Up, but that’s about Seth Rogen. And there’s Nine Months, but that’s about Hugh Grant. Three Men and a Baby cracks me up because it’s like, three?!” says the 37-year-old, with comically perfect levels of incredulity (cracking me up in the process).

Glazer – best known as co-creator of the seminal millennial sitcom Broad City – is making a serious point: there are outrageously few movies about birth and babies that centre on the female experience. The comedian’s attempt to rectify this, however, has taken the form of a distinctly unserious film: in fact, Babes has to be among the most viscerally funny depictions of motherhood ever created. Continue reading...


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Caligula: The Ultimate Cut review – 1970s Roman empire sex shocker returns to the source

Without the extra sex that made writer Gore Vidal want his credit removed, Tinto Brass’s epic of imperial eroticism showcases a powerhouse Malcolm McDowell

Here it is, in all its seedy absurdity and shame-filled grandeur, the controversial 1979 Romesploitation shocker Caligula, originally released towards the end of the movies’ porn-chic period. It is about the rise and fall of obscene tyrant Caligula, the Roman emperor who married his sister and ennobled his horse, extravagantly played by Malcolm McDowell. It is now rereleased in an extensively reconstructed and restored form, with a wittily designed new opening title sequence showing the animated McDowell doing the “Caligula” dance.

This is the version originally envisaged before producer Bob Guccione took over at the editing stage and tried to raunch the whole thing up for commercial purposes by adding extraneous porn footage, which infuriated the director Giovanni “Tinto” Brass – hardly, as they say, a choirboy in these matters – and screenwriter Gore Vidal. Both wanted their names taken off the credits. Had he been around today, I suspect Vidal might well have whimsically announced he still wanted his name removed; he originally told interviewers he saw Caligula as an essentially ordinary person corrupted by power and fate and said that his preferred casting in the lead would be a young Mickey Rooney in clean-cut Andy Hardy mode. Continue reading...


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Gracie and Pedro review – star names can’t make up for charmless cat and dog odd couple

By-the-numbers animation does nothing to lift cliched tale that squanders the talents of A-list actors including Bill Nighy and Susan Sarandon

Featuring the vocal talents of Bill Nighy, Susan Sarandon, Alicia Silverstone, Danny Trejo and Brooke Shields, here is a new animated family adventure, in which prim pup Gracie and wisecracking cat Pedro travel cross-country to reunite with their loving family after being misplaced during a relocation … sounds OK, right? Maybe not the most original, but some good names there. We all like Nighy. Sarandon, what a legend. Alicia Silverstone! What’s she been up to lately? And so on. In truth, the big names are all appearing in minor character roles that seem likely to have appealed due to how little time they would take to complete – a quick session in an audio recording booth, send in the invoice, boom, done.

But the actors voicing lead characters Gracie and Pedro are less well known, and most of the story is taken up with their interactions. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – animated films always used to be voiced mostly by talented but not particularly A-list voice actors to splendid effect. But even the most accomplished voice actors need something to work with, and for the majority of the runtime, we’re stuck with the supremely unlovable cat-and-dog duo, who are incredibly annoying and charmless. The mismatched pair are a typical example of 1990s sitcom style insult humour, whereby almost everything the characters say to each other is a would-be comic putdown. It can work well when the dialogue is witty or original, but unfortunately in this case is more like being trapped with two bickering children on a long and fractious road trip. Continue reading...


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Cuckoo review – stylish horror offers atmosphere with incoherence

Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer is a convincing scream queen in this Germany-set chiller which prioritises mood over plot

There’s a dizzying amount to see and hear in German film-maker Tilman Singer’s brash style-over-substance horror Cuckoo, a film that pokes and prods and screeches with just about enough vim and volume to keep us mostly engaged. As the work of a newish-to-the-scene director, it’s a big, bold flex, and one that serves as more than ample evidence that he can be trusted to take on, and add flavour to, far more commercial movies. As proof of his ability as a writer it’s far less persuasive, a script that could generously be labelled opaque and more fairly called frequently incoherent.

How much one will be turned off by such hazy, haphazard plotting will be a matter of personal taste and in a period that’s seen the horror genre beset by films prioritising mood and atmosphere above all else, it will probably find its unbothered audience. It’s far easier to like than last month’s similarly lopsided Longlegs, another stylish yet baffling indie horror, mostly because it’s taking itself far less seriously, its charmingly goofy streak almost excusing its inevitable descent into nonsense. Continue reading...


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Daughters review – heartbreaking record of girls and their imprisoned fathers

Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s documentary about a ‘daddy-and-daughter’ prom for prisoners is an intimate window on lives torn apart by mass incarceration in the US

It took less than two minutes into this Netflix documentary about a “daddy-and-daughter” prom dance at a prison in Washington DC to get my waterworks going. A little girl of five or six, dressed up in a frilly white party dress, is crying. It’s all too much – the dance, the big feelings; her body shakes with sobs. Then her dad holds her face and pulls the girl in tight. It’s an intimate moment, emotional and desperately sad – because for some of the girls this dance might be the only time they will get to hug their dads during their prison sentences. There are jails in the US, we learn, that are phasing out face-to-face visits, replacing them with video calls (which prisons cynically monetise by charging families a monthly fee for the platform).

Daughters is co-directed by Angela Patton; she is a woman with an inexhaustible supply of energy who has been organising dances for girls and their incarcerated dads since 2013. Her film feels like a companion piece or B-side to Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th. That was an intellectually rigorous, angry lesson about mass incarceration in the US, which has the highest prison population in the world, disproportionately black and brown. What Daughters does is to look at the human cost, lives destroyed, families devastated and children traumatised by separation. Continue reading...


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Radical review – Mexico’s heartwarming answer to Dead Poets Society makes the grade

Based on the true story of an inspiring teacher arriving in an impoverished school, this bullies you into uplift but succeeds thanks to its top quality cast

The expression “feelgood” is usually just an indicator of cheerful and positive content, but don’t forget it also works as an imperative. As in, you better feel good about this movie or its admirers will get very cross and maybe call you names. Such may well be the case with this Mexican comedy-drama about an unorthodox schoolteacher (winningly played by Eugenio Derbez); it is a film that a certain constituency of viewers is going love so passionately that woe betide any who might suggest that it is profoundly manipulative and unabashedly sentimental.

That said, there’s no gainsaying the skills of director Christopher Zalla and the cast, which is why, by the end, Radical earns the tears of bittersweet joy it yanks out from even the grouchiest of grouches. Zalla co-wrote the script with Laura Guadalupe, working from a 2013 Wired article by journalist Joshua Davis about a real-life teacher and his students called A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses. Continue reading...


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Duchess review – sneers and smiles in noughties throwback Brit-crime revenger

A heroine who looks good in Lycra and a love interest with no chemistry don’t leave you wanting more, despite Duchess’s sequel-friendly ending

So derivative that it almost qualifies as a type of financial instrument, this crime thriller is clearly investing in its own future as a low-budget franchise, given how sequel-friendly it leaves the conclusion. Much will depend on whether viewers take to its titular heroine, scrappy Londoner Scarlett Monaghan (Charlotte Kirk). Our leggy heroine graduates from minor crimes such as pickpocketing drunks to more advanced forms of larceny when she hooks up with mid-level gangster Robert (Philip Winchester), whom she describes in voiceover as the love of her life. That assertion isn’t all that convincing given how little chemistry there is between the two leads, but who are we to question the feelings of fictional characters?

At least there is no need to ponder too long on the authenticity of their affection once the locus of action shifts to photogenic Tenerife in the Canary Islands where poor old Robert reaps the whirlwind of his criminal career. This leaves Scarlett, now nicknamed Duchess, as per the title, to do revenge stuff that involves lots of montages and bantering with her inherited crew of perps, members of Rob’s gang. One is played by director Neil Marshall’s frequent collaborator Sean Pertwee, who appeared in Marshall’s Dog Soldiers and Doomsday and seems sanguine about passing the leading baton to Marshall’s new muse. Continue reading...


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David Lynch says he is too ill to direct films in person

The Twin Peaks creator says he has emphysema caused by smoking and cannot leave the house because of the risk of Covid

Film-maker David Lynch has said he is now too ill to direct films in person and could only work on projects remotely.

In an interview with Sight and Sound magazine, Lynch said: “I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long, and so I’m homebound whether I like it or not. I can’t go out. And I can only walk a short distance before I’m out of oxygen.” Continue reading...


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Together 99 review – quarter-century renuion for Lukas Moodysson’s Swedish commune comedy

Moodysson reunites the gang of hippies from his joyful 2000 sendup for a fun yet slightly sour sequel

More than 20 years ago, Lukas Moodysson directed the Swedish comedy Together: set in 1975, it was about a bunch of hippies living in a Stockholm commune on a diet of chickpeas and porridge. The film gently poked fun at the hopeless lefties – failing at open relationships, never quite managing to live up to their ideals – and it was hard to know which was woollier, their jumpers or their politics. Now comes a slightly disappointing sequel set 24 years later, featuring the same cast, but lower levels of warmth and affection. It’s a less lovable film; it is directed, I felt, with a bit of a sneer.

The year is 1999. The population of the commune has dwindled to two men: bearded Göran (Gustaf Hammarsten) and gentle-souled artist Klasse (Shanti Roney). They call themselves a commune, but really the pair are more like flatmates (they got kicked out of the last commune for not being vegan). Then, one summer afternoon, Klasse gets the old gang back together, throwing a surprise 53rd birthday party for Göran. Continue reading...


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The Weak and the Wicked/No Trees in the Street review – tough, old school British drama

★★★★☆ / ★★★☆☆
Two of J Lee Thompson’s early films – a gritty women’s prison drama and a postwar crime thriller – serve as a reminder that the director deserves more kudos as an artist

J Lee Thompson is a British director who could maybe do with a bit more auteur respect: here is a double-bill rerelease of two of his early black-and-white films from the 1950s. The Weak and the Wicked (★★★★☆) is a melodrama that came out in 1954 just before his wrenching classic Yield to the Night, which featured Diana Dors on death row. It is a tough women’s prison film as well, one that quickly morphs into a social-issue sermon; it is richly flavoured, speckled with comic interludes and gloriously cast with Glynis Johns as Jean, a young society beauty and gambling addict whose dud cheque leads to an appearance in court and whose head-girl demeanour never falters in the clink. She becomes a good pal inside to brassy blond Betty Brown, played by Dors.

The movie is adapted by dramatist Anne Burnaby from the sensational autobiographical novel by the real-life upper class ex-con Joan Henry who also wrote the original source material for Yield to the Night. Henry married Thompson, helped him quit drinking and stayed with him through subsequent movies including Woman in a Dressing Gown, Ice Cold in Alex and The Guns of Navarone, until they divorced. (Startlingly, Burnaby was herself imprisoned in 1960 for stabbing a man with whom she had reportedly become obsessively infatuated.) Like the book, The Weak and the Wicked fudges the issue of Jean’s guilt by claiming that while she did bounce a cheque in a gambling club, the insurance fraud that got her arrested was an elaborate frame-up masterminded by the vengeful casino manager. It delivers the time-honoured frisson of the women’s prison film: hatchet-faced wardresses telling the new inmates to “strip”, with the scene subsequently held just long enough to let the audience think they are actually going to see something. Continue reading...


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The Last Human review – despair and hope for Greenland youth in crosshairs of climate peril

Ivola Frank’s documentary draws in deep science about the origins of life on Earth along with warm portraits of the young people who face environmental crisis

A love letter to her Greenland home, Ivola Frank’s stirring documentary explores the paradoxes of this beautiful and remote island. According to a groundbreaking study by geologist Minik Rosing, it is where life on Earth began, among the rock formations that have existed for nearly 4bn years. At the same time, the residents of Greenland are also bearing witness to what could be the first signs of our environmental annihilation, as the island’s icecap continues to melt at a terrifying speed under the effects of global heating.

The question of human survival is an overwhelmingly existential one. Frank’s film, however, also makes spaces for expressions of life both big and small. Intimate conversations with Greenlandic teenagers reveal their dreams for the future, as they look to find love, friendship and economic stability. Their aspirations are coloured by interviews with scientists, including Rosing, who discuss frankly the detrimental effects of human exploitation of the planet. Due to the neglect of previous generations, these youths will now inherit a much more inhospitable one. Continue reading...


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The second act of Sam Neill: ‘The truth was, I didn’t know how long I had to live’

He is one of the world’s best actors – but can still go to Starbucks without anyone recognising him. He discusses cancer, remission, happiness, fame and video nasties


Sam Neill, 76, is speaking to me via Zoom from Vancouver, where he is filming Untamed, a new Netflix series. We’re here, though, to discuss the new season of The Twelve, a pacy Australian courtroom drama in which Neill plays barrister Brett Colby SC. It’s a heightened murder mystery and subtle social commentary, and “the second series is considerably stronger than the first”, he says, rightly and also surprisingly, because it’s a little bit like saying the first season wasn’t very good. But then, he’s done enough time in this business that he’s allowed to say what he likes, within reason.

For instance, he doesn’t especially like the modern blockbuster: “Now we’re in the age of Marvel action films, people destroying entire cities on a whim, they’re not particularly interesting to me.” (But that didn’t stop him making cameos in the two most recent Thor films, directed by fellow New Zealander Taika Waititi.) Or that “the great years of cinema were the 50s through to the 70s”, which is, again, surprising, since in a career spanning 45 years, the golden age tapped out (according to him) after his fourth film in 1979, My Brilliant Career. This was an absolutely epochal feminist masterpiece, which anyone of a certain vintage – 50 – will remember because of how many times their mum made them watch it. “It was a film about women, made by women, and that was almost unheard of then. And rare enough today,” he says. If you run the numbers, how many female antipodean directors made it big in the 20th century, and how many cast Neill as their leading man, you come back with “both of them” (Gillian Armstrong and, of course, Jane Campion with The Piano, in 1993). When feminists all (both) like the same guy, it’s usually because he’s not a dick. Continue reading...


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British artist’s cartoons that inspired Bond films on show at Oscars museum

John McLusky’s comic strips for the Express in the 50s and 60s came to define the character, as his son explains

“You only live twice, or so it seems” – at least, that is, if you are the work of the late illustrator John McLusky, ­creator of the popular James Bond newspaper cartoon strips. His dynamic, almost-forgotten drawings brought a reliable touch of glamorous machismo into the lives of readers of the Daily Express between 1958 and 1966, and are now to stir again.

The Los Angeles archives devoted to the glittering history of the Oscars will display McLusky’s influential images alongside other mementoes of the film franchise, which was based on the spy novels of Ian Fleming a former British intelligence officer. Continue reading...


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Historian Richard J Evans: ‘I’m planning to write a book about pandemics next. I’ve had enough of Nazis’

The author of the definitive account of the Third Reich on revisiting nazism one last time, the ongoing need to discredit Holocaust denial and fact-checking Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest

Richard J Evans was regius professor of history at Cambridge University from 2008 to retirement in 2014. In the millennium year, he served as the expert witness for Penguin Books in the libel case brought unsuccessfully by Holocaust-denier David Irving. Evans’s three-volume history of the Third Reich, completed in 2008, is the definitive account. A new book, Hitler’s People, re-examines that history through the life stories of prominent Nazis.

After completing your trilogy on the Third Reich, why did you want to return to this material now?
There were several reasons. One was that the biographical approach to German history became very unfashionable – because historians were wary of the Nazi cult of personality. But I think around about the turn of the century, the biographical approach came back; the big pioneer there was Ian Kershaw’s wonderful biography of Hitler. And also that approach coincided with the rise of strongmen and would-be dictators in Europe, and also, of course, more recently in the States. So it has become urgently important to study why people, again, at every level, have started to depart from democratic norms. Continue reading...


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Mark Kermode on… director Hayao Miyazaki, who speaks to the child in all of us

The great Japanese animator and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, whose 1988 masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is back in UK and Irish cinemas, embraces the universe yet never shies away from life’s grittier elements

Is Japanese film-maker Hayao Miyazaki “the greatest family entertainer of our time”? That was the conclusion I reached about the writer-director behind such animated wonders as Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Spirited Away (2001) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) when reviewing Miyazaki’s 2008 charmer Ponyo in this paper. A few years later, while compiling a list of the 25 best films for children – a list that ranged from Chaplin’s 1921 classic The Kid to Nora Twomey’s 2017 beauty The Breadwinner – I wrote that “it’s hard to decide which of Hayao Miyazaki’s matchless animations to include in this list”.

Born in Tokyo in 1941, Miyazaki joined Toei Animation in 1963 and co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985, creating a stream of world-beating animations, any one of which would have been a worthy contender. In the end I plumped for My Neighbour Totoro (1988; Netflix), the beloved Studio Ghibli gem about youngsters befriending forest spirits that retains a special place in viewers’ hearts, not least because it perfectly embodies the pan-generational appeal of Miyazaki’s finest work. Continue reading...


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Trap review – M Night Shyamalan’s concert thriller is a mess

Josh Hartnett plays a serial killer trapped at a pop show in a suspense-free dud that acts as embarrassing promotion for the director’s daughter

The reintroduction of M Night Shyamalan offered the kind of specifically alluring comeback narrative that a certain generation was compelled to blindly support. Those of us who came of age with the flashy writer-director’s pack-em-in event movies could easily remember the flurry of excitement that came with each one – a rare example of a figure behind the scenes becoming as instantly famous as those in front.

His downfall, with movies so heinous that a snarky fund was once set up to send him back to film school, allowed us to see someone lose all of their instincts in crushing real time and fall prey to considerable ego; the guy who crafted Oscar-nominee The Sixth Sense ended his run as star director with four Razzie contenders in a row boasting an average Rotten Tomatoes rating of 15%. His work had lost all personality, the film-maker reduced to just some hack hired to direct big, dumb studio fare like The Last Airbender and After Earth – so new Shyamalan pictures were met with less intrigue and more frustration. Continue reading...


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Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie review – another enjoyably madcap SpongeBob adventure

An incredibly game Wanda Sykes leans in to the evil inventor trope as the gang follow their favourite scientist squirrel to the Lone Star State in a bid to save their world

For around a quarter of a century, the happy-go-lucky yellow sea sponge called Bob has been entertaining kids (and a fair number of adults) with better-than-it-needs-to-be metatextual humour and maritime hijinks set mostly in the underwater enclave of Bikini Bottom. The SpongeBob SquarePants TV show has been going for over 300 episodes, spawning video games, memes, merch, comics, a Broadway musical and, of course, movies along the way. Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie is the fourth SpongeBob film, albeit a spin-off centring on beloved squirrel scientist Sandy Cheeks (voiced here, as in the series, by Carolyn Lawrence).

As is traditional with big-screen ventures for small-screen characters, this takes the gang out of their comfort zone and into a brave new world, in this case Texas, the Lone Star State being Sandy Cheeks’s original home. The movie takes an admirably nuanced view of science: in the right hands, scientific method is a tool for enriching our collective knowledge and enabling useful activities such as propelling squirrels and sea sponges from the bottom of the sea on a rescue mission to a lab in Galveston. In the wrong hands (a live-action pug-toting evil mastermind played by an incredibly game Wanda Sykes), scientific breakthroughs are misused for naked profiteering and the working through of unresolved childhood issues on a global stage. Continue reading...


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Un oeuf is enough: have we had our fill of movie Easter eggs?

They were once a sweet treat for audiences, but Deadpool & Wolverine proves that gorging on cameos, callbacks and end-credit stingers can leave you gagging

When Deadpool & Wolverine, starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, made $438m worldwide on its opening weekend, Marvel executives must have felt as if Christmas had come early. It is Easter, though, that deserves part of the credit: Easter eggs, that is, those fan-centric surprises with which the modern blockbuster is sprinkled, or in this case cluttered.

They take many forms: unpublicised cameos, in-jokes that only franchise devotees would clock, surprise scenes stowed away in the end credits, abundant references to other movies, even allusions to controversies on the sets of other movies. The Easter eggs in Deadpool & Wolverine belong to all these categories and more. There are so many, in fact, that it’s tempting to ask: which came first, the movie or the eggs? Continue reading...


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