mon 16/06/2025

Film Reviews

Fish Tank

Sheila Johnston

It is, as the best cinema should be, always all about the image. Andrea Arnold's films are born, she says, with just this: a visual imprint - strong, unsettling, inexplicable. The stories then slowly unfurl in her mind from that starting point. On paper, they sound grim: the director goes for terse, no-nonsense titles, and her working-class world seems at first unforgiving.

Read more...

Dorian Gray

Jasper Rees

Oscar Wilde was once bossing a high-society drawing-room with swishes of his rapier wit when someone else had the temerity to mint an aphorism. “I wish I’d said that,” intoned the great man. Back came the devastating retort: “You will, Oscar, you will.”

Read more...

Film: Adventureland

Ryan Gilbey

Superbad was a modern-day coming-of-age comedy with inexplicable 1970s trimmings (the title, groovy credits sequence, Richard Pryor references and so on). Now its director, Greg Mottola, has made a period piece proper in the form of Adventureland, set in the mid-1980s in a cheesy, dilapidated Pittsburgh theme park where the rides make you throw up, and the stalls are rigged against any customer hoping to win more than a dying goldfish.

Read more...

9

Anne Billson

Another year, another animated film which plonks us down into the ruins of civilisation. After WALL-E , it's the turn of 9, but this time the causes of the apocalypse are not ecological; it's the fault of big bad machines which, like the ones in The Terminator and The Matrix franchises, have turned against us and reduced our cities to rubble.

Read more...

Julie & Julia

Josh Spero

If you tried to cross chefs, romantic comedy and cyberspace, you might end up with a YouTube video of Nigella Lawson recreating the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. As much fun as that would be, it would hardly justify two hours of screen time. That’s where Julie & Julia comes in.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Pulp, O2 Arena review - common people like us

Jarvis Cocker is proudly holding the No 1 trophy handed to him on the day Pulp topped the album chart for the first time in 27 years with More...

Stereophonic, Duke of York's Theatre review - rich slic...

The tag “the most Tony-nominated play of all time” may mean less to London theatregoers than it does to New Yorkers, but Stereophonic,...

Mazeppa, Grange Park Opera review - a gripping reassessment

Tchaikovsky has precisely two operas in the standard repertoire (including The Queen of Spades, currently playing at Garsington), and...

Sam Fender, St James' Park, Newcastle review - Geordie...

Had a passer-by from outwith Newcastle been asked to guess...

Dandy, BBC Philharmonic, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Manche...

The opening and closing concerts of a season tend to be statements of intent – to pursue a path of exploration or (latterly) to celebrate a...

Album: Yaya Bey - do it afraid

One of the great untold stories of the past decade is just how potent a cultural force R&B has been. It might not have had the wild musical...

North by Northwest, Alexandra Palace review - Hitchcock adap...

Older readers may recall the cobbled together, ramshackle play, a staple of the Golden Age of Light Entertainment that would close...

Music Reissues Weekly: Pilot - The Singles Collection

"It was really strange. Really quite conflicting, the sort of thing most bands didn't have to deal with. At the front, we'd have the kids who'd...

Tornado review - samurai swordswoman takes Scotland by storm

The opening images of Tornado are striking. A wild-haired young woman in Japanese peasant garb runs for her life through a barren forest...