thu 14/08/2025

Film reviews, news & interviews

Beating Hearts review - kiss kiss, slam slam

James Saynor

Andrew Garfield was 29 when he played the teenage Spiderman and Jennifer Grey was 27 when she took on a decade-younger-than-her character called “Baby” in Dirty Dancing. So you’d think that directors and casting experts could find actors to advance on the screen through that kind of age gap readily enough.

Materialists review - a misfiring romcom or an undercooked satire?

Helen Hawkins

The Canadian-Korean director Celine Song burst onto the scene with her debut feature, Past Lives, two years ago, a bittersweet film about a woman torn between her first love, a Korean, and her current one, her American husband. Song is back with another woman at a crossroads, but in Materialists her heroine’s decision is much less painful to make, and far less affecting. 

theartsdesk Q&A: actor Leonie Benesch on...

Pamela Jahn

The German actor Leonie Benesch has an issue with erratic pacing in films. "I find it awful when a character talks and then there's a two-second...

Freakier Friday review - body-swapping gone...

Justine Elias

Before Freakier Friday there were the two film versions of Freaky Friday based on Mary Rodgers’s lively, perceptive 1972 Young Adult novel, the...

Eight Postcards from Utopia review - ads from the...

Helen Hawkins

If you saw it blind, with no information about its origins, Eight Postcards from Utopia might look like 70 minutes of outtakes from lost Fast Show...

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The Kingdom review - coming of age as the body count rises

Graham Fuller

A teen belatedly bonds with her mysterious dad in an unflinching Corsican mob drama

Weapons review - suffer the children

Nick Hasted

'Barbarian' follow-up hiply riffs on ancient fears

theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud on sex, love, and confusion in the modern world

Pamela Jahn

The writer-director discusses first-love agony and ecstasy in 'Dreams', the opening UK installment of his 'Oslo Stories' trilogy

Oslo Stories Trilogy: Dreams review - love lessons

Nick Hasted

First love's bliss begins a utopian city symphony

Blu-ray: Two Way Stretch / Heavens Above!

Graham Rickson

'Peak Sellers': two gems from a great comic actor in his prime

Late Shift review - life and death in an understaffed Swiss hospital

Markie Robson-Scott

Petra Volpe directs Leonie Benesch in a compelling medical drama

The Naked Gun review - farce, slapstick and crass stupidity

Adam Sweeting

Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson put a retro spin on the Police Squad files

theartsdesk Q&A: actor Lars Eidinger on 'Dying' and loving the second half of life

Pamela Jahn

The German star talks about playing the director's alter ego in a tormented family drama

The Fantastic Four: First Steps review - innocence regained

Nick Hasted

Marvel's original super-group return to fun, idealistic first principles

Dying review - they fuck you up, your mum and dad

Demetrios Matheou

Family dysfunction is at the heart of a quietly mesmerising German drama

theartsdesk Q&A: director Athina Rachel Tsangari on her brooding new film 'Harvest'

Pamela Jahn

The Greek filmmaker talks about adapting Jim Crace's novel and putting the mercurial Caleb Landry Jones centre stage

Blu-ray: The Rebel / The Punch and Judy Man

Graham Rickson

Tony Hancock's two film outings, newly remastered

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire review - a mysterious silence

Nick Hasted

A black Caribbean Surrealist rebel obliquely remembered

Harvest review - blood, barley and adaptation

James Saynor

An incandescent novel struggles to light up the screen

Friendship review - toxic buddy alert

Sebastian Scotney

Dark comedy stars Tim Robinson as a social misfit with cringe benefits

S/HE IS STILL HER/E - The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary review - a shapeshifting open window onto a counter-cultural radical

Tim Cumming

Intimate portrait of the Throbbing Gristle & Psychic TV antagonist

Blu-ray: Heart of Stone

Graham Rickson

Deliciously dark fairy tale from post-war Eastern Europe

Superman review - America's ultimate immigrant

Nick Hasted

James Gunn's over-stuffed reboot stutters towards wonder

The Other Way Around review - teasing Spanish study of a breakup with unexpected depth

Helen Hawkins

Jonás Trueba's film holds the romcom up to the light for playful scrutiny

The Road to Patagonia review - journey to the end of the world

Hugh Barnes

In search of love and the meaning of life on the boho surf trail

theartsdesk Q&A: actor Emma Mackey on 'Hot Milk' and life education

Pamela Jahn

The Anglo-French star of 'Sex Education' talks about her new film’s turbulent mother-daughter bind

Blu-ray: A Hard Day's Night

John Carvill

The 'Citizen Kane' of jukebox musicals? Richard Lester's film captures Beatlemania in full flight

Hot Milk review - a mother of a problem

Graham Fuller

Emma Mackey shines as a daughter drawn to the deep end of a family trauma

The Shrouds review - he wouldn't let it lie

James Saynor

More from the gruesome internal affairs department of David Cronenberg

Footnote: a brief history of British film

England was movie-mad long before the US. Contrary to appearances in a Hollywood-dominated world, the celluloid film process was patented in London in 1890 and by 1905 minute-long films of news and horse-racing were being made and shown widely in purpose-built cinemas, with added sound. The race to set up a film industry, though, was swiftly won by the entrepreneurial Americans, attracting eager new UK talents like Charlie Chaplin. However, it was a British film that in 1925 was the world's first in-flight movie, and soon the arrival of young suspense genius Alfred Hitchcock and a new legal requirement for a "quota" of British film in cinemas assisted a golden age for UK film. Under the leadership of Alexander Korda's London Films, Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929) is considered the first true sound movie, documentary techniques developed and the first Technicolor movies were made.

Brief_EncounterWhen war intervened, British filmmakers turned effectively to lean, effective propaganda documentaries and heroic, studio-based war-films. After Hitchcock too left for Hollywood, David Lean launched into an epic career with Brief Encounter (pictured), Powell and Pressburger took up the fantasy mantle with The Red Shoes, while Carol Reed created Anglo films noirs such as The Third Man. Fifties tastes were more domestic, with Ealing comedies succeeded by Hammer horror and Carry-Ons; and more challenging in the Sixties, with New Wave films about sex and class by Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey and Tony Richardson. But it was Sixties British escapism which finally went global: the Bond films, Lean's Dr Zhivago, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music made Sean Connery, Julie Christie and Julie Andrews Hollywood's top stars.

In the 1970s, recession and the TV boom undermined cinema-going and censorship changes brought controversy: a British porn boom and scandals over The Devils, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange. While Hollywood fielded Spielberg, Coppola and Scorsese epics, Britain riposted with The Killing Fields, Chariots of Fire and Gandhi, but 1980s recession dealt a sharp blow to British cinema, and the Rank Organisation closed, after more than half a century. However more recently social comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Full Monty, and royal dramas such as The Queen and The King's Speech have enhanced British reputation for wit, social observation and character acting.

As more films are globally co-produced, the success of British individual talents has come to outweigh the modest showing of the industry itself. Every week The Arts Desk reviews latest releases as well as leading international film festivals, and features in-depth career interviews with leading stars. Its writers include Jasper Rees, Graham Fuller, Anne Billson, Nick Hasted, Alexandra Coghlan, Veronica Lee, Emma Simmonds, Adam Sweeting and Matt Wolf

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