Phil Hoad

My main takeaway from HAMNET is that Shakespeare had great abs. And, oh, that Jacobi Jupe deserves to have a great career here on in

Grim reapers: what has fertilised the rich new wave of neo-rural noir? The Shepherd and the Bear is part of a new breed of films with a sympathy for country matters that has moved on from othering folk-horror

Me on how European cinema is getting its hands dirty in the countryside and loving the loam www.theguardian.com/film/2026/fe...

Also cut from the piece: the fact that he auditioned for Luke Skywalker. Adore the thought of him in STAR WARS, maybe he would've tried to fuck Yoda

Bud Cort obituary American actor who starred in the 1971 dark comedy film Harold and Maude that later became a cult classic

My obituary of HAROLD AND MAUDE star Bud Cort - where I wasn't allowed to say how much he looks like Simon Pegg www.theguardian.com/film/2026/fe...

David Lynch’s indie empire After a brutal experience on Dune in 1984, which he felt had been butchered by the studio, David Lynch vowed to maintain tighter control of his future projects. Here his business partners, from produc...

Everyone knows about David Lynch's "art life". But what about the business life that made it possible? My Sight & Sound piece about his "indie empire", speaking to his collaborators, is online now www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-so...

Jim Brown: an immovable fixture in American life with a complex legacy The star athlete, Hollywood pioneer and civil rights icon, who died on Thursday aged 87, was the paragon for an unflinching brand of masculinity that remained undiluted to the end

Watched Blaxploitation classic SLAUGHTER last night. He looks to me weirdly like Michael Shannon, but I had little knowledge of Jim Brown's cultural importance. This is an excellent primer: www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/m...

What a gulf that it's close to a decade without a new film from Lars von Trier

Deviant obsessions: how David Lynch predicted our fragmented times His work is freaky and frightening, yet today the Twin Peaks director cuts an almost cosy figure. As he turns 77 – a number of significance – we explore how real life caught up with his dark visions

A piece of Lynchphernalia for the great man's birthday, which I wrote a few years ago: how his Jimmy-Stewart-from-Mars sensibility went mainstream www.theguardian.com/film/2023/ja...

Average running time hasn’t increased significantly since the 1960s. What has changed is the amount of the box-office pie taken by longer movies. The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough short movies. It’s that audiences prefer long ones.

Theatre of catastrophe: the hard-hitting play about France’s Grenfell moment Mathilde Aurier’s 65 Rue d’Aubagne looks at the 2018 house collapse in Marseille and how the city healed itself through ‘love and solidarity’

A reminder from Marseille - cf. the Rue d'Aubagne house collapses - that people power matters www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/j...

With Venezuela, Trump has achieved his dream of making his own 80s action movie Given his rise during the ego joyride of the 1980s, it’s no shock that Trump’s foreign policy is to emulate that decade’s belligerent cinema

My two cents' worth on how Trump may have been getting foreign policy tips from Mssrs Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Van Damme bit.ly/4qJUfq6

‘I wanted that Raiders of the Lost Ark excitement – you could die any minute’: how we made hit video game Prince of Persia ‘There was no animation software in those days. So I videotaped my brother David running, jumping and climbing in a car park’

Nice article in The Guardian about the story behind Prince of Persia's first making in 1989! 💾 A treat for me to see Broderbund co-founder Doug Carlston interviewed here- he's a great guy and was one of my first mentors.
www.theguardian.com/culture/2026...

‘I wanted that Raiders of the Lost Ark excitement – you could die any minute’: how we made hit video game Prince of Persia ‘There was no animation software in those days. So I videotaped my brother David running, jumping and climbing in a car park’

I spoke to Jordan Mechner (who's also a fellow Montpellier boy) about his wondrous and beautiful videogame classic PRINCE OF PERSIA bit.ly/3NtCEUM

A lot of this resonates, Chris (and I can't say I've published any books!) But I hope doing great work writing about games/art that matter is also a powerful motivator (what I keep telling myself re: film)

Great stuff from @bilgeebiri.bsky.social - though I believe Wes Anderson is just as influential

More than ever, I'm struck by how varying this year's Best Of film lists are. The consensus is gone, our tastes are completely fractured.

So many disparate small films, a lot of which I haven't seen (though I'm often distracted by covering the streaming tier)

Best films of 2025 in the UK: No 4 – The Ice Tower Lucile Hadžihalilović’s kaleidoscopic fable, starring Marion Cotillard as a haughty, damaged diva, is a cautionary tale about the perils of fantasy

I was beguiled when I saw Lucile Hadžihalilović’s INNOCENCE back in 2004, and she had me enthralled with this year's THE ICE TOWER www.theguardian.com/film/2025/de...

One hundred percent here for Josh O'Connor in a new Spielberg aliens joint. You know in your bones he's right for this. You know it.

It's been a year filled for me with so much arbitrary deterioration and death that I found SIRAT's notching up of casualties did a number on my head. And I definitely identify with its metaphysical urge to reach the other side

Magic from Elsewhere | Geoffrey O’Brien The best of British postwar cinema portrays a country in the aftermath of catastrophe and uncertain about its future.

"There was a period, in the decade after World War II, when British films achieved without fanfare a broad viewership among Americans." Geoffrey O'Brien on the terrific Locarno retrospective of postwar British cinema in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

One enduring modern mystery is movies not from the 1990s appearing in both Netflix and Amazon's 90s categories. I assume this is deliberate - but why? Or is that some process of algorithmic divination has sniffed out ineffable 90s qualities in them?

Tatsuya Nakadai obituary One of the greatest actors of Japanese cinema best known for Ran, the 1985 film adaptation of King Lear

My obituary of Tatsuya Nakadai, who started off dirt-poor in the postwar wreckage of Tokyo, but became the country's deputy head movie samurai (behind Toshiro Mifune) bit.ly/4ricZOC

I've only read one thing with him. But reading it, I didn't feel like the M-word was being insistently spotlighted. More so in ALL THAT MAN IS (the clue's in the title, I guess)

I'm not sure about post-Booker attempts to zeitgeist FLESH as "about" masculinity. Seems to me that, if it is, it's only inadvertently so - because the protagonist is a man. Materiality, the physical world, feels more like its principal theme

Can't believe how good the Fassbender-Cotillard-Kurzel MACBETH is. Flew by like a 90-minute thriller – even though some of the speaking is hard to make out

I wish I'd known this when I did my Netflix investigation

Yeah, I found it a bit under-detailed and evasive in real-world terms. Easy to put the finger on the North Koreans, of course. The most interesting section for me was the security advisor's phone call with the Russian official. Felt an accurate portrayal of realpolitik with proper stakes

Yeah. It really adds a sense of reality, not to mention rejuvenates the star roster. But the streaming era has reinforced lazy commercial paradigms

Not to knock his performance, but Idris Elba's casting was a false step for A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE. Felt over-familiar and unhelpfully reassuring for a drama supposedly dragging us into the unknown

The Last Sacrifice review – how a gruesome rural murder embedded folk-horror in the British psyche Rupert Russell’s fascinating documentary is a sophisticated analysis of how real life and fiction merged in post-empire Britain in the 1960s and 70s

My second five-starrer in a year – getting soft in my old age (but anything uniting pitchfork murders and the Teletubbies stands a good chance with me) www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oc...