Film
Space invaders
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Bafta for best foreign film and is up for six Oscars and it is an…
Curdled foreskin
The Lighthouse stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson (and a very nasty seagull) in a gothic thriller set off the…
Let there be light
Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is a romp told at a lick, and while it’s fun and……
One of those films that never seems to end: A Hidden Life reviewed
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a historical drama based on the true story of Franz Jäggerstätter, an Austrian who…
Alfred Dreyfus is being erased all over again
In London to promote a book, I received an invitation to a secret screening of An Officer and a Spy,…
Gripping, immersive and powerful: 1917 reviewed
Sam Mendes’s 1917 is the first world war drama that this week won the Golden Globe for best film and…
I’ve found the perfect family film (eventually)
As a member of Bafta, I get sent about 75 ‘screeners’ during the awards season, which is always a treat…
I’ve never seen a film like it: Ordinary Love reviewed
Ordinary Love stars Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson as a long-married couple whose lives are disrupted when she is diagnosed…
Wildly entertaining Pope-off: The Two Popes reviewed
The Two Popes stars Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce — that’s two reasons to buy a ticket, right there —…
Detailed and devastating: Marriage Story reviewed
Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is a drama about the breakdown of a marriage and it is, at times, devastatingly painful.…
Scorsese at his most leisurely, meandering and engrossing: The Irishman reviewed
The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic — a mobster-a-thon, you could say — starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino,…
Scooby Doo with better CGI: Doctor Sleep reviewed
Wheeeere’s Johnny? Nearly 40 years ago Jack Nicholson went berserk in a snowbound Rockies hotel, smashing an axe through a…
The best Terminator film since the first: Terminator Six reviewed
The first Terminator film, which came out in 1984, was a high-concept sci-fi serial killer thriller. You can just imagine…
![Angourie Rice, who stars in Bruce Beresford’s 2018 film Ladies in Black [Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images]](https://new-dev.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/26Octhighlife.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
The most uplifting film ever made
New York Should art mirror the world as it is, or does an artist fail the public if the…
The Disney sequel that no one wanted is finally here – what a relief! Maleficent: Mistress of Evil reviewed
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is the sequel to the 2014 film Maleficent, and it will certainly come as a relief…
Only fitfully funny: Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come reviewed
The Day Shall Come is a second feature from British satirist Chris Morris and like the first, Four Lions, it…
If you ever want to sleep again, step away from Joker
Judy is in cinemas this week and so is Joker and if you have to choose between the two, then…
Do Jews think differently?
Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with…
You may not wish to kiss the ground when you finally leave the cinema, but I did: The Goldfinch reviewed
The Goldfinch is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Donna Tartt that centres on a great work of…
The untold story of Judy Garland
Judy Garland is now a myth, a paradigm and a warning: don’t let your daughter on the stage! It’s the…
Painful, funny — and with a brilliant twist: The Farewell reviewed
The Farewell is a quiet film that builds and builds and builds into a wonderful exploration of belonging, loss, family…
Extremely predictable and extremely dull: Downton Abbey reviewed
The much-anticipated film version of Downton Abbey has arrived and I suppose you could describe it as the Avengers Assemble…
Is this film saying relationships between teachers and kids are OK? Scarborough reviewed
Scarborough is a small British film but it will give you a very big headache. Its subject is teachers who…
Why did Mrs Lowry hate her son’s paintings?
‘I often wonder what artists are for nowadays, what with photography and a thousand and one processes by which you…
Why are so many operas by women adaptations of films by men?
Opera’s line of corpses — bloodied, battered, dumped in a bag — is a long one. Now it can add…
