From the archive: "The Rolling Stones: Live At The Max"

Dating from the early days of IMAX (1991, to be precise), The Rolling Stones: Live at the Max is a 90-minute concert film, co-directed by Julien Temple, which sees its subjects - even then, a pretty seasoned five-piece, with Bill Wyman still in tow - take to the stage of the old Wembley for the London leg of their 1990 Steel Wheels tour, another stop on the trajectory by which this group transitioned from chart-troubling hitmakers to hard-travelling heritage act. They were, at this point, some twenty-odd years on from Altamont and everything that came with it; the songs now a mix of the classics the crowd had come to hear and the new material the band were here to promote, the set part-rollercoaster, part-steampunk pirate ship, with just the merest hint of Pat Sharp's Fun House. The rickety old rock 'n' roll circus was being converted, year by year, tour by tour, into a giant theme park offering (expensive) glee for all the family. (Keith was a decade or so from becoming a walking punchline in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie.) This stage, criss-crossed by dolly tracks that resemble some toytown narrow-gauge railway, was a playground on which these now fiftysomething rockers could rejuvenate, like sexually suggestive Doctor Whos, in order to recreate certain glories of their shared youth. (Not least when two inflatable Amazonians unfurl from the rigging during "Honky Tonk Woman", one of whom has the audacity to mess up Mick's hair with her foot.) Here is a rare concert movie that also functions as a form of music journalism: without resorting to dull backstage interviews, it explains why the Stones have kept on touring, it explains why people keep paying through the nose to see them, and it also explains, in passing, why Mick Jagger has remained as slender as he has. (His step count for this one night alone must have been astronomical.)

What Live at the Max also demonstrated along the way was that IMAX as a format is good for two (and maybe only two) things. First: large-scale portraits of personalities. It's Mick, clad in a succession of doubtless designer dress coats, visibly desperate - even after all these years - to prove that he's more than just a one-trick pony: here he is picking up and plucking at a guitar, here he is tossing his maracas into the wings in a demonstration of rockstar noblesse oblige. It's Keef stepping forward from time to time, either to sing when Mick nips off for a mid-set pee (the bladders aren't what they used to be) or to duet and duel with a perma-smoking Ronnie Wood (different times). Through it all, Charlie is keeping time at the back, vaguely self-conscious whenever this camera peers in through his kit for a close-up, but also quietly delighted, visibly touched by the audience's response after all this time. Bill, being Bill, appears utterly unfussed and unfazed by any of it, which is its own definition of cool. Second: the format invites immersivity. Around a quarter (and maybe even a third) of the screen is filled with raised and clapping hands during "You Can't Always Get What You Want", and we're almost certainly hearing a better sound mix in this format that we would have heard on the night at the Wembley of 1990. Nothing, neither song nor chant nor cheer, is lost; we're at the max, yes, but we're also right there in the thick of it. Floating around the band here is an early inkling of just how vast such gigs were going to get in the 21st century: coming soon, a whole spectacle, a whole infrastructure, a whole rotating ecosystem, because shows like these were going to be the only way for musicians to make any money going forwards. What Live at the Max chiefly confirms is that the Stones were always legendary showmen; they were the Beatles who figured out how to play live before a screaming audience. Sometimes you pander to them, as Mick does; sometimes you ignore them entirely, as Keef and Bill do, and play as if no-one else is listening, as you did in your teenage bedroom. But soon all gigs would be this maximal, even for acts who don't have this deathless a back catalogue.

(December 2025)

The Rolling Stones: Live at the Max airs on Sky Arts tomorrow night (Fri 23) at 9pm.

Tangled: "Wildwood"

It's felt like some time since we last saw anything from stopmotion specialists Laika: 2019's fun Yeti saga Missing Link was such a crushing commercial flop (budget: $100m, take: $27m) it put paid to a major studio distribution deal. It turns out the company has spent some of this spell in the wilderness working on the most magnum of opuses. At 132 minutes, Wildwood will likely be the longest of the animated features pitched into awards battle this year; it also seems certain to be the most detailed and the most involved. This is, recognisably, the work of a studio determining to go its own way, stretching both its limbs and its resources to the max. (Again, the budget is reported as in the region of $100m.) A 2011 novel by Colin Maloy - hitherto best known as the frontman of hipster faves The Decemberists - allows director (and Laika honcho) Travis Knight to commingle the real and the fantastical in the form of two adjacent kingdoms. After a brisk and charming snapshot of a stopmotion Portland - hipster coffee shops, hipster parents, vaguely resentful-seeming offspring - the narrative suddenly yanks us into a nearby woodland known as The Impassable Wilderness, a fairytale land ruled over by a Romanov-style dynasty yet populated chiefly by talking animals. Either Maloy or Knight appears to have a soft spot for Labyrinth, a film now forty years young: our bipedal teenage heroine Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) heads deep into the woods to rescue her baby brother, snatched away from a Portland playground by a murder of crows operating by royal command. By chance, Pru drags along a younger contemporary, Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), who's soon recruited by the tyrannical regime as a potential soldier boy (or mere cannon fodder) and sent out on a grim whistlestop tour of this mirror world's mud-and-blood-smeared battlefields. We're not just getting one fairytale, then; at various points in Wildwood, it seems as though we're getting a whole compendium of them.

If there's a lot of it, there's also much to like, beyond the ambient sensation we're getting our money's worth. Wildwood is undeniably ambitious in its scope and often beautiful with it: we find this wilderness in autumn, which grants every frame an extra visual dynamism. Knight's animators are masters of shades and lighting, while their character modelling grew on me: these faces aren't Disney-perfect - they have lines and wrinkles, gaps in their teeth - but they're all the more distinctive and expressive for that. It's reassuring to encounter a modern mass-market animation that isn't perpetually winking at us, that wants its every narrative beat to land and count; it's also that rarity, a multiplex animation that knows how to make its (spectacular) setpieces count, that isn't just busy for the sake of being busy. There's only one problem, and it's a big one: Wildwood is clogged up with story, and some of these beats are so elaborate there are places where you sense the movie struggling to move forwards at all. (Worse: every now and again, it has the drab feel of homework, like something we're going to be tested on.) Knight has determined to give us so much fairytale he loses the simplicity of the best fairytales; like the ivy that blights the Impassable Wilderness, this script needed pruning. (And maybe a few more jokes? It feels like Laika laid off their gagwriters in the wake of Missing Link's failure.) I wonder whether Wildwood will be to Laika what Princess Mononoke or The Tale of the Princess Kaguya were to Studio Ghibli: animation that heads adore, but which struggles to cross over to the mass audience in the way the lighter, simpler Spirited Away and Ponyo did. (And I worry, given the time and money spent on Knight's film, and Laika's recent commercial track record.) Granted, you could argue any Western animation that inspires comparison with Ghibli has to be doing something right, and in an age where we've grown complacent about the miracle of animation - and the miracle of stopmotion in particular - Wildwood will at least inspire you to wonder anew how on earth these animators did that. It's just that the sleight-of-hand it sets before us proves altogether too convoluted to be as dazzling as one had hoped.

Wildwood opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.

From the archive: "Jailer"

Jailer finds the venerable Tamil superstar Rajinikanth embracing his Liam Neeson period in playing Pandian, a "dinosaur" retiree whose efforts to make YouTube videos with a precocious grandson are interrupted by news the kid's father, an upstanding police officer, has gone missing while on assignment. As Pandian ventures back into an underworld he once ruled over as a no-nonsense prison warden - and starts beating seven bells out of a network smuggling religious idols - we are once more reminded of this leading man's ability to organise not just an entire film, but whole scenes around himself; he's the real idol being showcased and worshipped here. Now 72, Rajinikanth remains nothing much to look at, with his (stick-on) Noel Edmonds beard and chunky NHS specs. But that may just be his secret weapon: he is at heart a character actor who broke through in an industry just small enough for a character actor with real screen smarts to make it big, a man who appears in complete control of almost every situation into which he steps. (Jailer's first half is dependent on Pandian charming both a taxi driver and a psychiatrist into doing his bidding and covering his tracks.) Such overbearing gravitational pull poses a slight problem for the movie - or would pose a problem if it had been conceived as anything more substantial than fan art. From the moment Pandian reveals he's overpowered the (much younger) thugs who've bundled him into the back of his car, we're left in no doubt that this man will come through and save the day. As star vehicles go, it's altogether plain sailing; safe to say Rajinikanth isn't unduly exerted in the execution of these tasks, and you might argue he's worked long and hard enough not to have to put his back into these projects any more.

He's gained a useful ally, however, in the young writer-director Nelson, who allows for no such thing as an entirely uninteresting shot. Faced with a movie star who just wants to play the movie star, Nelson does his most imaginative work here around Pandian's nemeses, principally their cackling chief Varman (Vinayakan, giving exactly what you want for this role), whose chosen method of flushing out rats in his organisation involves suspending them over vats of acid and interrogating them before a hooting audience of ne'er-do-wells. (These sequences have the air of a nefarious game show: Squeal or No Squeal.) Whether filming these villains breaking into a communal dance after phoning in a threat or staging - hands down, heads off - the decapitation of the year, Nelson has taken it upon himself to disrupt the inevitability of this outcome wherever possible, or at least to make it a fun ride for the most part, each shot a wink to his intended audience. You and I both know where this is going, he's saying, but that doesn't mean we can't get up to some middling-to-expert mischief along the way. It's the wonky smirk Rajnikanth breaks into once he knows he has the drop on a foe; it's the wacko pre-intermission scene that encourages us to cheer even louder for our hero as he grandly announces his plan to lapse into outright sociopathy for the duration of the second half. (So grab yourself a Kia-Ora and be back in your seats in ten.) The movie gets away with it only because that second half is so deranged that even attempting to synopsise its contents could well see you sectioned: all I can recall, from this distance, is that to steal the artefact he needs to get his son back, Pandian has to navigate a truly bizarre love triangle involving a preening, bewigged film star, his patsy proxy and the former's leading lady. From Taken, in other words, the movie bounds into Elmore Leonard territory, the only rationale being that the film business is the one milieu more cutthroat than organised crime. (The Internet has its theories on who these new characters represent, and whether this is one superstar taking a swipe at another.) Too haphazard to qualify as first-rank Rajnikanth, it often seems as though the star is the only organising principle in play here, surrounded as he is by wild spitballs and flagrant non-sequiturs. Yet it's nevertheless one of the livelier examples of dadsploitation fired our way of late. In the unlikely event his algorithm led him here, Liam Neeson would probably kill for some of this energy and verve.

(November 2023)

Jailer is now streaming via Prime Video; a sequel, Jailer 2, is now showing in cinemas nationwide and shall be reviewed here in the coming days.

In memoriam: Frank Mancuso Sr. (Telegraph 18/10/26)

Frank Mancuso Sr., who has died aged 93, was a studio chief whose spell at the helm of Paramount Pictures became the stuff of industry legend; between 1984 and 1991, he oversaw a run of major commercial hits, notably Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Top Gun (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987) and Ghost (1990).

A softly spoken figure dubbed “Gentleman Frank”, Mancuso joined the studio’s Buffalo office in 1962 as a film booker. After establishing himself in sales, he was appointed VP of domestic distribution in 1977, overseeing publicity for Saturday Night Fever (1977). That epochal hit taught Mancuso the importance of regular radio airplay for tie-in tunes that became inseparable from a movie’s images: An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Flashdance (1983) and Top Gun would all benefit.

In 1980, Mancuso took over distribution, launching Robert Redford’s Ordinary People to Best Picture glory. Appointed president of Paramount’s motion-picture division in 1983, he was similarly instrumental to the success of James L. Brooks’s Terms of Endearment, insisting the comedy-drama should open at Thanksgiving; the decision paid off with excellent box office and a second Best Picture triumph.

Upon Paramount chief Barry Diller’s departure for Fox in 1984, Mancuso was appointed chairman and CEO, beating out future Disney head Michael Eisner; he quickly reinforced his team, appointing the keen-eyed Ned Tanen to head the motion-picture division, and cutting exclusivity deals with such talent as Flashdance producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer and comic-turned-star Eddie Murphy, whose Beverly Hills Cop had just been a summer blockbuster.

The Mancuso regime began bumpily, with an abortive (and costly) 1985 attempt to film The Two Jakes, Robert Towne’s long-nurtured sequel to Chinatown (1974); the studio dipped to fourth in that year’s rankings. Yet it regained the top spot in 1986, Simpson/Bruckheimer’s Top Gun the high-flier on a notably varied slate that also included “Crocodile” Dundee, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Children of a Lesser God. 

1987 was even better, with Paramount producing three of the year’s top four films: Beverly Hills Cop II heading talking-point thriller Fatal Attraction and Brian De Palma’s stylish throwback The Untouchables. Further hits followed via Murphy (Coming to America, 1988) and Steven Spielberg (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989). Yet after an exhausted Tanen quit in 1988, the studio found itself newly vulnerable to creative ego and marketplace vagaries.

In 1990, the studio had a huge summer hit with Ghost, but the Tom Cruise vehicle Days of Thunder, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III and the completed The Two Jakes all underperformed. Following squabbles with Paramount’s parent company Gulf + Western, Mancuso walked away, filing a breach-of-contract lawsuit and receiving a $20m settlement. He told reporters: “Most people who know me never mistake my fairness and the calmness in my manner for weakness.”

Frank George Mancuso was born on July 25, 1933 to Buffalo postal worker George Mancuso and his wife Mary (née Scott). He got into film early: at fifteen, he lied about his age to become an usher in his hometown’s Lafayette Theatre. He was promoted to assistant manager while studying optometry at New York State University; after graduating in 1958, he oversaw programming of the same cinema chain’s fifty theatres across New York and Pennsylvania.

In 1993, Mancuso returned to the studio fold, replacing Alan Ladd Jr. as the head of MGM. Once again, he began to work his magic: MGM won awards with Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and had hits with Stargate (1994), Get Shorty (1995) and the revived James Bond series, while a shrewd acquisitions policy swelled MGM’s film library from 1,600 to 3,800 titles. (These were foundational to the $8.5bn deal by which Amazon acquired MGM in 2022.)

He was appointed Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1986; he served as chairman of the Motion Picture and Television fund between 2003 and 2010.

He is survived by Frances “Fay” Mancuso (née Mauro), the childhood sweetheart he married in 1957, and by the couple’s two children, the designer Maria Mancuso Gersh and the producer Frank Mancuso Jr.

Frank Mancuso Sr., born July 25, 1933, died October 1, 2026.

Frantic: "Forgotten Island"

Competition for the latest round of Best Animated Feature gongs is in the process of ratcheting up. Netflix launched its Brad Bird-directed Ray Gunn at last week's London Film Festival; Laika's stopmotion Wildwood lands in cinemas this Friday. In the meantime, we shall have to make do with Forgotten Island, DreamWorks' zappy effort to split the difference between Disney's Moana, their own Trolls franchise and last year's all-conquering Netflix behemoth K-Pop Demon Hunters. From the former, directors Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado take a sherbet colour palette and an honourable yen for greater Pacific island representation: our heroines are schoolgirls in the Philippines of the 1990s - brainiac Raissa (Liza Soberano) and rowdy wildcard (H.E.R.) - whose friendship is founded on a keen sense of adventure. From the latter two, the film takes anime-style cutaways, a hyperonline mode of audience address and a belief in the power of pop music to either change the world or simply capture an emotion - although as the featured songs are Eighties standards by the likes of Journey, Simple Minds and INXS (and as the leads' Ryan Tedder-penned closing-credits duet "BRB" appears to owe some uncredited musical debt to When in Rome's 1987 artefact "The Promise") the primary emotion viewers outside the target demographic will feel being captured is a deep sigh of Christ, I'm old weariness.

Unacknowledged amid the movie's frantic digimated splicing-and-dicing: any real recognition that last year was such an undistinguished year for feature animation that a well-marketed ever-present like Demon Hunters - unavoidable on TV, the radio, the merch shelves or the Internet - was always likely to scoop everything. Forgotten Island, for its part, suggests the limitations of the lol, random storytelling style that has become a feature of so much 21st century family fare. While it's undeniably a progression that the animated feature has moved past Disney's picture-perfect princesses, having a pair of distractible dorks gabble through key scenes of exposition lessens the dramatic stakes and leaves us less than clear as to what's going on. As Jo and Raissa tumble through one such unexplained portal and into the fantasyland of the title - lol, random - the manic gabbiness brings us to some funny lines and cute bits of business: I liked the angry marshmallow warriors, resembling the Terracotta Army as remodelled by Pillsbury. Yet it also seems to speak, at roughly twelve to the dozen, to an underlying creative insecurity: we're being dragged by the seat of our pants through a culture rather than being allowed - as the original Moana allowed us - to sit with and marvel at it. Even as these events unfolded, I would have struggled to tell you the specific cultural significance of the giant parrot, the three-eyed baby, the cat memory demon, the talking dog with the infected chest tattoo or his cerulean gymbuddy with a trident: they're just the colourful filler characters we've all too regularly encountered inside the multiplex. It's a case of mixed blessings, then. Unlike a lot of commercially minded animation, Forgotten Island does have a personality, but it's the overbearing (and extremely loud) kind you tend to back away from at parties; and it does have moments of visual artistry, but - as with the surreal dream house finale - these are freefloating, unmoored from what's around them, and they register for a split-second before Crawford and Mercado scrabble onto the next setpiece. Belatedly, their film arrives at a crystallising image for itself, in the form of a thousand Post-It notes blowing in the wind; it feels like a production that's had to be hastened into cinemas before the animated bar gets decisively raised for another year.

Forgotten Island is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 9-11, 2026):

1 (new) Other Mommy (15)

2 (1) Verity (15)

3 (3) Heart of the Beast (12A) ***

4 (2) Resident Evil (15)

5 (new) The Social Reckoning (15) **

6 (5) Sense and Sensibility (U)

7 (new) The Uprising (15) **

8 (7) Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (U) ****

9 (4) Digger (15)

10 (12) The Odyssey (15) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Others [above]

2. 24 Hour Party People

3. Dracula/Horror of Dracula

4. Arrietty

5. Tenzing

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12) ***

2 (re) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

3 (new) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie (U)

4 (re) Minions & Monsters (U)

5 (new) Insidious: Out of the Further (15)

6 (new) Spider-Man: 4-Movie Collection (12) ***

7 (2) Disclosure Day (12) **

8 (1) The Mandolarian & Grogu (12)

9 (new) Paw Patrol: 3-Movie Collection (U)

10 (13) Michael (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Secret Agent

2. The Invite

3. Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft

4. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

5. Power Ballad

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. North by North-West (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.15pm)

2. Halloween (Friday, BBC Two, 10pm)

3. Selma (Monday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

4. Children of Men (Sunday, BBC One, 11.40pm)

5. Priscilla (Sunday, BBC Two, 10.45pm)

Kelp!: "Whalefall"

Brian Duffield's Whalefall has one of the daffier conceits you will see an American studio movie proceed from in 2026: this is, to some degree, Hollywood taking the Book of Jonah at face value. A year after the mysterious suicide of his diver father at sea, grief-stricken college kid Jay (Austin Abrams) returns to the bay where pop took his final plunge and starts scouring the ocean floor in a bid to retrieve his father's remains. The opening stretch of Duffield's film does much to show off the advances made in underwater photography in recent years: we can discern every passing frond and fish Jay encounters beneath the waves, before the film arrives at a pivotal pause on the brink of an ominous abyss, into which our kid will make a fateful descent of his own. He is, we fear, getting rapidly out of his depth, a suspicion only confirmed after Jay gets snarled up in the backwash of a fight between a giant squid and a passing sperm whale, and - worse still - is swallowed up by the latter. Suddenly the screen floods with picture-book images of which Jules Verne himself might have approved. Here's our guy clinging onto the whale's front incisors for dear life; here he is trying to avoid a clubbing from the creature's heavy, lolling tongue; and now here he is in the whale's stomach, having to rely on the phosphorescence of the whale's largely liquid lunch (parbroiled jellyfish with a sprig of plankton) to help light his way. That's right: it's a Hollywood movie where the hero spends almost the entire running time literally in the belly of the beast. Whatever else Visionary Filmmaker Christopher Nolan™ pulled off with this summer's The Odyssey, he never thought to give us that.

Co-written by Duffield with Daniel Kraus (adapting his own fiction bestseller), the film that results is a curious hybrid, splashing around between a number of genres and never quite making dry land. (Hence the critical bafflement.) Some considerable part of Whalefall steers close to boys'-own adventure territory: Jay is trying to prove himself to the memory of an overbearing father (Josh Brolin, in prologue and semi-regular flashbacks) who once accused his boy of having "weak lungs". At times, something more horrific drifts into view, akin to an Alien movie that aligns us with the perspective of John Hurt's chestburster, or a damper, stickier Cube: Jay has to navigate his host's duodenum, the intestines large and small, each cavity and chamber posing its own challenges. There's even something of the generic prison-break movie sloshing around in here: consider it Jacques Cousteau's The Shawshank Redemption. Whalefall gives good production design (by Ramsey Avery), even if it's not always clear where we are and what Abrams, obliged by circumstance to keep the mouthpiece of his breathing apparatus in place, is trying to articulate. (A prevailing limitation: this is, shall we say, not the most relatable crisis into which a movie has pitched its audience.) Those sporadic, Slumdog-like flashbacks - revealing Jay had the solutions to his problems all along - would seem very rote were it not for Brolin, having an absolute ball as a heavily tatted, highly individualistic old salt. (This is recognisably the Brolin of the actor's recent memoir.) By contrast, Elisabeth Shue and Jane Levy are mostly wasted as our guy's mom and sister: it is, in the end, another all-American dads-and-lads tale, one that falls short of the cosmic, circle-of-life scale Duffield and Kraus are aiming for, instead landing closer to Ad Astra on a budget. My suspicion was that Whalefall might have been tossed out like chum in the January dumping grounds had it not been for the success of the recent, Abrams-starring Resident Evil redo, yet it's the kind of semi-diverting goof you watch with a smile on your face and a chuckle never too far from your lips. (How on earth did anyone sign off on this?) It's not good, exactly, but it might slip down well with a big bucket of salted popcorn; the delicate ecosystem of the multiplex will always feel healthier for a studio taking a modest gamble on a spitball like this, rather than betting the house on a film like Digger.

Whalefall is now showing in cinemas nationwide.