When Gwen, a 25-year-old sex worker from Toronto, noticed a TikTok trend where people were personifying popular restaurant chains, she immediately spotted an opportunity. “It was perfect to be made into a porn video,” she recalls. “A lot of other creators had done Goth IHOP or Femboy Hooters content – but I wanted to take on milf Denny’s.” In her TikTok-inspired video, Gwen plays a waitress who...
Rebecca Hall makes her directing debut with this intimately disturbing movie, adapted by her from the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen. Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga) are two women of colour, former school friends who run into each other by chance in an upscale Manhattan hotel in prohibition-era America. They are both light-skinned, but Irene is stunned to realise that her vivacious and...
There was a surprising amount of fun to be had in this summer’s gory zombie romp Army of the Dead, a film that turned the not-hugely-enticing prospect of Zack Snyder working with Netflix into something strangely hard-to-deny. It was his most ebulliently entertaining offering for years, and rightly predicting its popularity (it quickly became one of the streamer’s most-watched films ever), Snyder...
In Netflix’s shoddy movie-of-the-week thriller Hypnotic, hypnosis is used as a tool of terror, making people either do horrible things or believe that horrible things are being done to them. For someone under the spell, an hour can feel like a minute, an enviable experience for anyone actually watching Hypnotic, an unrewarding slog being fished out of the garbage for Halloween no tricks or...
Is Antlers, a grisly shift into body horror for the Crazy Heart and Hostiles director Scott Cooper, really about the curse of generational trauma and familial abuse? Or is it really about the grim consequences faced by a society that callously disavows the disadvantaged, allowing those on the breadline to suffer in silence? Or is it really about how white Americans should pay the price for...
Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air. Andreas Fontana is a Swiss director making his feature debut with this conspiracy drama-thriller, shot with a kind of desiccated blankness, about the occult world of super-wealth and things not to be talked about. The title is a Swiss banker’s code-word in conversation for “Be silent”. It is...
The Swedish actor best known for his collaborations with Lars von Trier – as well as Marvel movies, Pirates of the Caribbean and Mamma Mia! – answers your questions about Lars von Trier, porn and pickled herringsAre you ever frustrated with having to wear clothes when you’re working? Do you feel you’re better at your job if you’re able to be naked? I usually take off my clothes when I get home...
China’s most expensive film to date and its second highest ever box-office grosser, The Battle at Lake Changjin possesses worryingly belligerent overtones. An account of a pivotal battle in November 1950 during the Korean war in which Chinese forces, who had infiltrated the country, pushed US marines back over the 38th parallel, this government-ordained project wastes no opportunity – current...
Lin-Manuel Miranda gives us an unashamed sugar rush of showbiz rapture and showbiz solemnity in this heartfelt tribute to Broadway talent Jonathan Larson, played here by Andrew Garfield. Larson was the composer who created the smash-hit 90s show Rent but died at 35 of an aortic failure, just before opening night, an almost unbearable metaphor for the backstage heartbreak of musical theatre...
There’s a tension in the Rocky series between two largely incompatible conceits: Rocky Balboa as the shy, humble, gentleman brawler from working-class Philly or Rocky Balboa as the cartoon avatar of America’s can-do spirit, intrepidly grinding through title matches against stronger, faster, more colorful opponents. The first type won a best picture Oscar for its young writer/star, Sylvester...