The Odyssey is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
Tuesday, 21 July 2026
Dude, where's my boat?: "The Odyssey"
Monday, 20 July 2026
The past: "Nostalgia"
The result is one of those movies over which critics and laypersons will eternally come to blows. With my critic's hat on, I can admire the framing, the sinuous camera movement, the bold choices with colour; there are two or three mid-scene lighting changes that are genuinely revelatory. The one aspect that no-one can refute, and which may provide Nostalgia's saving grace as a viewing experience: its imagemaking is consistently remarkable. You also need to be aware, however, that there are long pauses to soak up the atmosphere - and the atmosphere is often that of a wet Wednesday afternoon in a two-star hotel room. Yes, Tarkovsky succeeds in bringing us within touching distance of the emotion enshrined in the title, but even with that same critic's hat on, Nostalgia can feel a cold, rather bloodless, predominantly technical achievement, much like one mid-movie cut from a man setting himself alight to a candle being being lit. By this point, Peter Greenaway was entering this field with films that explored similar ideas and themes with wit, cheek and narrative verve, and characters who were too damn fleshy to ever feel like the free-floating cyphers we encounter here. Tarkovsky had one more movie in him - 1986's apocalyptic The Sacrifice, returning to UK screens next week, which took the Josephson character here and ran for the hills with him - but the world and its cinema was rapidly moving on.
Nostalgia returns to selected cinemas from Friday.
Sunday, 19 July 2026
For what it's worth...
UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 10-12, 2026):
1 (new) Moana (PG)
3 (2) Minions & Monsters (U)
4 (new) Evil Dead Burn (18)
7 (4) Supergirl (12A)
9 (7) Jackass: Best and Last (18)
10 (new) Dhamaal 4 (12A)
(source: BFI)
My top five:
2. The Invite
4. The Furious
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten:
1 (1) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12)
3 (9) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)
4 (2) Michael (12)
5 (11) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)
7 (re) They Will Kill You (15)
8 (6) Mortal Kombat II (15)
9 (14) Lee Cronin's The Mummy (18)
10 (new) The Evil Dead (18) ***
My top five:
1. Hoppers
2. Blue Moon
5. The Good Boy
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Full Monty [above] (Sunday, BBC One, 11.25pm)
2. Diego Maradona (Sunday, Channel 4, 12 midnight)
3. Calamity Jane (Saturday, BBC Two, 4.20pm)
4. Polite Society (Friday, Channel 4, 12.05am)
5. The Hurt Locker (Wednesday, BBC One, 10.40pm)
Friday, 17 July 2026
Shortcuts: "A Close Shave" and "A Matter of Loaf and Death"
To the earlier shorts' escaped prisoners and frame-ups, 2006's A Matter of Loaf and Death adds a serial killer, bumping off bakers just as Wallace and Gromit have decided to get into yeast in a big way. This is the short that tends to be forgotten about, somewhat unfairly: our heroes' house has never before seemed so cavernous (and those exterior sails must have called for some planning permission); getting Wallace up and out of bed becomes an entire setpiece, not just a throwaway gag; and we get much more detail about these characters' personal lives. (Wallace's hamfisted attempts at courtship prompt a Ghost homage that makes the inspired connection between dough and the plasticine this franchise was fashioned from.) The series can do cute - see Gromit's affectionate bond with the killer's poodle Fluffles, which may have legs to go walkies as we leave it - but it's never been sentimental in the Paddington vein, partly because the central relationship is one-way traffic: Wallace gives no more of a hoot about Gromit than James Stewart's Scottie does about Midge in Vertigo. Partly, it's because Park can no more resist a sight gag than Wallace can a big hunk of cheddar. It's not enough that Gromit should feel obliged to install a metal detector in the pair's hallway, he also requires a cap with "SECURITY" on the front of it; similarly, when a cake turns out to have a bomb in it, it's one of those cartoon bombs with the word "BOMB" written on the side. Everyone here was more than ready for a full feature: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit returns to our screens in two weeks' time.
A Close Shave and A Matter of Loaf and Death return to cinemas nationwide today.
Tuesday, 14 July 2026
In memoriam: Sam Neill (Telegraph 13/07/26)
Whether pursued by a T-Rex in Jurassic Park (1993) or jilted on a rainswept shore in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), he insisted he was only ever going where the work was; a run of menial jobs as a teenager had taught him “you have to bloody work to make a bloody quid”. And as he once noted, with not untypical self-deprecation, “the pathetic thing about actors is that they don’t feel valid unless they’re acting.”
He got his big break by chance, in an industry taking its first stumbling steps towards wider recognition. He made a fleeting screen debut, long-haired and bearded, as a bohemian in the low-budget TV drama The City of No (1971), but his first major role came with Roger Donaldson’s thriller Sleeping Dogs (1977), which starred Neill as a loner obliged to pick sides in a New Zealand reimagined as a police state.
“I really had no idea what I was doing,” Neill told one interviewer. “In fact, none of us did. Apart from [cinematographer] Michael Seresin, who shot it, no-one on that production had ever made a feature film before. In fact, there hadn’t been a feature film made in New Zealand for something like 17 years.” Nevertheless, boosted by the Hollywood-bound Donaldson’s emergent widescreen nous, it became the most successful Kiwi film of all time and the first to play theatrically in the United States.
Its success carried Neill across the Tasman Sea, although his progress wasn’t wholly smooth: the only journalist who turned up for Sleeping Dogs’ Melbourne press junket was a sports reporter who’d made a mistake (“We abandoned the idea altogether, and he and I got half-cut at the bar”). Nevertheless, Neill soon booked a 40-episode run as the philandering Ben Dawson on daytime soap The Sullivans (1979-80), before demonstrating a tender side as Harry Beecham, the reserved admirer of Judy Davis’s Sybylla, in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979).
Davis went on to win the BAFTA, but the project proved just as significant for Neill: “I’d done Sleeping Dogs, and I thought, ‘That was a one-off, I’ll never do another film.’ […] But I did get cast in Brilliant Career, I kind of understood a little bit more about what was necessary, and it was a great opportunity for me. That film transformed me into an actor, rather than just a part-time thespian.”
It also brought him to the attention of James Mason, a childhood favourite of Neill’s, who called him out of the blue one day: “I picked up the phone, very puzzled, and a strangely familiar voice said, ‘Hello, this is James Mason. You don’t know me, but my wife and I watched your film My Brilliant Career, and we think you’re good. And what is more, we think you should be working beyond Australia. So I’m sending you an air ticket. We would like you to come and stay with us in Switzerland, and then go on to England and meet my agent. What do you say?’”
He said yes, and suddenly found himself in demand globally. In 1981, he served early notice of his flexibility, heading to Taiwan with the up-and-coming Mel Gibson for the gung-ho Attack Force Z; to Cold War Berlin, for Andrzej Żuławski’s gutsy, still-jawdropping marital psychodrama Possession; and to the UK, to play Damien, spawn of Satan, in Omen III: The Final Conflict (“not the greatest film in the history of cinema, but I gave it a bash”). That year’s roster could have been more varied yet: he had also been considered for the role of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
He made steady progress as the decade went on, turning heads as the debonair hero of TV’s Reilly, Ace of Spies (1983), and briefly being considered as 007 before The Living Daylights (1987); he overcame thespian nerves to work with Meryl Streep on two Fred Schepisi films, the David Hare adaptation Plenty (1985) and the true-life drama A Cry in the Dark (1988), where he was quietly dignified as Lindy Chamberlain’s husband Michael.
He lost out on the Alan Rickman role in Die Hard (1988), but his beefed-up part as Nicole Kidman’s husband in yachting thriller Dead Calm (1989) had personal and professional benefits. He met make-up artist Noriko Watanabe during filming – the pair married that year – and Steven Spielberg later admitted it was this role that persuaded him to consider Neill for Jurassic Park. The actor aced another Hollywood audition in submarine drama The Hunt for Red October (1990), before showing up in the mordant Aussie comedy Death in Brunswick (1990) and Wim Wenders’ sprawling futuristic folly Until the End of the World (1991).
The role of cranky paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic had originally been earmarked for longtime Spielberg favourite Harrison Ford, but Neill made it his own, riffing off flesh-and-blood co-stars Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, and bringing softening paternal notes to a character who might otherwise have seemed as hard as flint. The movie was an event that became a phenomenon, and then the most successful film of all time; for decades to come, children and complete strangers would stop Neill on the street and greet him as “Dr. Grant”. (Neill maintained this was preferable to being mistaken for his Australian near-lookalike Hugo Weaving.)
Yet that same year Neill played a very different role – the uptight landowner Stewart, fall guy in the agonised love triangle at the heart of Jane Campion’s muddily romantic melodrama The Piano. This proved as much an arthouse sensation as Jurassic Park had been in the multiplexes, and as tough a shoot: both sets were lashed by tropical storms, while Neill’s off-camera bonhomie had little effect on Method co-stars Harvey Keitel and Holly Hunter.
Yet Neill quietly busied himself, burrowing under the character’s fragile masculinity: “His faults are manifest. But, of course, it’s the other dimensions you can bring to a character that give them depth and interest and, with luck, some humanity… I felt [that] instead of the usual six or seven layers of skin, he only has two. He is raw, tender and vulnerable. And there is pathos to be found in someone like that. That pathetic quality has a comic dimension as well.”
Boosted by Hunter’s Oscar win, the film made $140m off a $7m budget; it also won the Cannes Palme d’Or, making Campion the first woman ever to win the prize. For Neill, it was a pinnacle: “It sits on my funny old CV like a medal on my chest… I was there in an important feminist film. I was there on the front line in an important New Zealand film. Neither of these labels does the film justice. It’s a work of art. And look, that tiny little figure in the fabric — see down there on the right — that’s me. It’s a film that will always have a place in cinema history. And I served in it.”
He was born Nigel John Dermot Neill in Omagh on September 14, 1947, the second of three children for Dermot Neill, a Kiwi then stationed with the Royal Irish Fusiliers, and his English-born wife Priscilla (née Ingham). The family would relocate to Christchurch in 1954, where young Nigel, a stammerer from birth, renamed himself Sam on the grounds his birthname was “a little too effete for a New Zealand playground… it saved me a lifetime of pain”.
After attending boarding school at Christ’s College, Neill studied English literature at university in Canterbury and Victoria, developing an interest in politics and New Zealand’s emerging theatre scene. Yet his first gig upon graduation was behind the camera, directing and editing short films for the New Zealand Film Unit on such subjects as the architect Ian Athfield. (Athfield later designed Neill’s home in Queenstown.) Subsequent directorial gigs were few and far between, although Neill oversaw Cinema of Unease (1995), a fine history of New Zealand cinema, and made-for-TV comic noir The Brush-Off (2004), starring David Wenham.
In the post-Jurassic period, Neill received the accolade of voicing a character on The Simpsons: “I’m playing a cat burglar. I’ve made it. This is the high point of my career. I’m really chuffed.” He was roguish as the painter Norman Lindsay, surrounded by illustrious female flesh (and a blushing Hugh Grant) in John Duigan’s Sirens (1994); he was committed in both senses, albeit to no great end, as the unravelling insurance investigator in John Carpenter’s no less fraying In the Mouth of Madness (1994).
Neill’s name recurred in the Bond conversation ahead of GoldenEye (1995), but industry consensus seemed to have been that the effects were the real star of Jurassic Park: indeed, Neill was deemed surplus to requirements for Spielberg’s solid sequel The Lost World (1997). Embracing middle age, Neill settled happily into supporting roles: scheming as King Charles II in Restoration (1995), meeting a sorry end in Event Horizon (1997), losing Kristin Scott Thomas to Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer (1998), having fun back home in fond Aussie comedy The Dish (2000).
The new millennium found Neill repeating himself, some indication of the direction Hollywood was now heading in. A schedule clash forced him to turn down an unspecified part in Peter Jackson’s long-gestating Lord of the Rings adaptation to appear as Alan Grant in Jurassic Park III (2001); the character later reunited with Dern and Goldblum in Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), an altogether weary instalment of a profitable but creatively redundant franchise reboot.
Yet he stretched himself, too, mastering iambic pentameter for Sally Potter’s Yes (2004), and playing a priest wrestling with his former life as a dog in Toa Fraser’s oddly charming Dean Spanley (2008). He supported emerging directors, bolstering François Ozon’s acidic period drama Angel (2007), the Spierig brothers’ Daybreakers (2009), Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) and Warwick Thornton’s jolting reverse-angle Outback Western Sweet Country (2017).
There was the odd dud – he was handsomely rewarded for his part (as a villainous João Havelange) in the notorious FIFA-backed counterhistory United Passions (2014) – but he was wise enough not to log too many. Instead, he filled gaps in his schedule with blue-chip TV work: Thomas Wolsey on The Tudors (2007), nefarious Ulsterman Chief Inspector Campbell on Peaky Blinders (2013-14), General MacArthur in the BBC’s And Then There Were None (2015).
By then, he’d developed prominent outside interests, having returned to New Zealand in 1993 to launch a wine label, Two Paddocks, specialising in organically cultivated pinot noir. “I’d like the vineyard to support me, but I’m afraid it is the other way round,” Neill confessed. “It is not a very economic business. It is a ridiculously time- and money-consuming business. I would not do it if it was not so satisfying and fun – and it gets me pissed once in a while.”
He received the OBE in 1991, the DCNZM in 2007, and the New Zealand knighthood in 2022. That same year, he received a diagnosis of blood cancer; he spent his chemo treatment writing a memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, published in March 2023. In it, Neill reflected on past blessings: “Now that I’m out of action for at least a few months, it throws into sharp relief that deep need I have to act, how much I need to go to work. I love being on a film set… I love being with other actors: how stimulating, how funny, how sad, how vulnerable they can be. They are the best company I know. I love doing what I know how to do. It’s a good job. I fit in.”
His marriage to Watanabe ended in 2015. He is survived by four children: two sons, a daughter, and an adopted stepdaughter from Watanabe’s first marriage.
Sam Neill, born 14 September 1947, died 13 July 2026.
Sunday, 12 July 2026
On demand: "Rangeela"
The central love triangle yields a modern Cinderella story (Munna sports a Buttons-like cap, while his best pal collects his conquests' slippers) and a snapshot of a newly confident film industry that is also, in itself, a product of a newly confident film industry. Yet Varma also views that industry as its own fairytale, complete with heroes, heroines, monsters and magic, with stories that become lore. (Among this script's real-life referents: the success and provenance of the previous year's Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!, the backstory of Amitabh Bachchan, the films of Coppola and Spielberg.) The Munna-Mili-Raj affair, in this context, assumes the air of a much-discussed blind item, torn from the tabloids' gossip pages and now splashed in vivid Technicolor across the big screen; it's scuttlebutt writ large. As that suggests, this is no small exercise in style, rather a movie movie that, in its extravagance and excess, indirectly explains how its director ended up overseeing erotic thrillers. Every sequence in Rangeela is its own dream, a fantasy defined by a prevailing lushness of image and this camera's essentially democratic gaze. Varma's scenes of everyday Bombay life are every bit as seductive as those involving the film set: everything is movie, if you know where to put the lights and which filters to use. A.R. Rahman's songs similarly avoid the conventional beats: by mid-Nineties Bollywood's radio-friendly standards, they're practically avant-garde, their strangeness only exacerbated by Varma's experimental shot compositions. Why are Mili and Munna flying on a bright yellow sofa-taxi over the New York skyline to the strains of what sounds like a Kate Bush B-side? Then again: why shouldn't they be? This is a movie, after all. The film's disparate energies and personalities would break up and travel in very different directions in the years that followed - an RGV biography, at this point, would be a hell of a read - but what they imprinted here counts as thrilling proof of how adventurous and voracious the Hindi mainstream of the 1990s was in its pursuit of the new and vital, of fresh takes on the old familiar stories. Thirty years later, Rangeela remains as fresh, tart and tantalising as the best gelato: popular film art you may feel an urge to lick.
Rangeela is currently streaming via Prime Video; as part of this year's London Indian Film Festival, I'll be in conversation with Aamir Khan at the BFI Southbank this Thursday (the 16th) at 6pm - further details here.
Friday, 10 July 2026
For what it's worth...
UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 3-5, 2026):
1 (1) Toy Story 5 (PG) **
2 (new) Minions & Monsters (U)
3 (new) The Invite (15) ****
4 (2) Supergirl (12A)
7 (4) Jackass: Best and Last (18)
8 (8) Backrooms (15)
9 (new) Alpha (15)
10 (6) Scary Movie (15)
(source: BFI)
My top five:
3. The Invite
5. The Furious
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten:
1 (new) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12)
2 (1) Michael (12)
3 (new) Obsession (18) *
5 (7) Superman (12)
6 (6) Mortal Kombat II (15)
8 (new) The Descent (15) ***
9 (8) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)
10 (new) Mortal Kombat 2 Film Collection (15)
My top five:
1. Hoppers
2. Blue Moon
5. The Good Boy
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. North by North-West (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.15pm)
2. Vertigo (Saturday, BBC Two, 4.25pm)
3. Insomnia [above] (Friday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)
4. Grease (Sunday, ITV1, 6.50pm)
5. Oppenheimer (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)
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