sun 07/09/2025

Film

Whip It

Ellen Page flanked by Drew Barrymore (left) and Kirsten Wiig in Barrymore's 'Whip It'

Whip It is not about nefarious S&M practices, nor the art of patisserie, nor even dog racing - although it has trace elements of all of the above. Instead, Drew Barrymore's sweet and swaggering maiden trip as director is a confection set in...

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Sagan

Whisky, cigarettes, gambling and the little black dress: Sylvie Testud in a typical moment from Sagan

A sensational performance by Sylvie Testud is the singular reason to catch this rambling biopic of Françoise Sagan - bestselling novelist, high-rolling playgirl, multiple addict, flamboyant bisexual, monstre sacré - which plays in repertory...

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Clash of the Titans

Just don’t say you weren’t warned. "The Legend Begins in 3D," it says outside the Odeon Leicester Square in rather boisterous capitals. This is very much episode one of what the moneybags on Mount Olympus, working out of their Hollywood 91601...

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Samson and Delilah

A public telephone rings, unanswered, in the middle of the desert; a young girl pushes her grandmother in a rusty wheelchair, jerkily inching their way across the flat red expanse of the outback; a boy digs deep into the sand and lies brownly...

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Double Take

Alfred Hitchcock once claimed to have entered a Hitch look-alike contest and lost, characteristically making a joke out of a long-held private obsession. Doppelgängers, impersonators, imposters and victims of mistaken identity - innocent men wrongly...

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How to Train Your Dragon

How to Train Your Dragon: our hero Hiccup flies on the back of his friend, Toothless

We are in the far north of somewhere, where it's freezing and rains for most of the year. As if the weather isn’t bad enough, the sturdy Viking community of the island of Berk have a pest problem - not mice or foxes, but feral dragons who, with...

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Nightwatching

How might a portraitist, working in oils, describe Martin Freeman's face? If one were a novelist, heavy with description, perhaps the following: fleshy, boneless features; pasty Northern European pallor; flesh the texture of sweaty suet pudding. Not...

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Lion's Den

Martina Gusman in Pablo Trapero's prison drama Lion's Den

Since his astonishing debut Crane World a decade ago, the Argentine Pablo Trapero has been quietly asserting himself as one of the world’s most singular directors. He’s perhaps best known for his breezy verité approach – shooting on location,...

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See 200 films in nine days...

Barney Platts-Mills' cult 1969 film Bronco Bullfrog opens the East End Film Festival

Now in its ninth year, London's East End Film Festival today announced its programme at a reception at the heart of its manor, at the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. The Festival kicks off on 22 April with a preview screening of Barney Platts-...

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Lourdes

Is there a God, and if so is He malevolent, and what's on the menu for dessert? Like one of her characters, Jessica Hausner, the relatively unknown, but startlingly talented director of Lourdes, doesn't shy away from asking the really important...

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The Blind Side

John Lee Hancock's film is a fairly straightforward adaptation of Michael Lewis's biographical book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. Michael Oher is virtually homeless when Leigh Anne spots him wandering the streets of suburban Memphis one...

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No One Knows About Persian Cats

Musicians from the film, including Ashkan and Negar (front)

The protests around the Iranian presidential elections of 2009 brought home to many in the West not only how dominated by youth the pro-democracy movement in Iran is, but also how westernised the youth of that country are. Symbolised by Neda Agha...

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