On Helen Mirren’s 80th birthday, Kate Stables hails her extraordinary 2006 metamorphosis into Queen Elizabeth II – “a human submarine with her emotions and personality largely submerged”.

More hidden gems, chosen by critics and filmmakers including Steven Soderbergh, Jane Schoenbrun and Asif Kapadia. Inside: B. Ruby Rich on Sorry, Baby, Peter Sellers at 100, Stephanie Rothman’s ...

The Congolese director blends a bit of Speed (1994) and Saw (2004) for a lightweight but exciting story of two unlucky Americans who wake up in Dakar with bombs strapped to their chests.

Tragedy draws successful German orchestra conductor Tom back to his complicated family in a bleak three-hour saga from Matthias Glasner that finds hope in the darkest of places.

It’s a pleasure to watch the super-charged dynamics of the Fantastic Four, but attempts to fit this retrofuturistic family unit into the wider ‘Marvel cinematic universe’ feel clumsy.

The magic of Charles Laughton's Southern gothic one-off may be in Mitchum's willing flamboyance, argued David Thomson in our April 1999 issue ...

Mohammad Bakri is one of the founding fathers of Palestinian cinema, with four of his sons now actors too. He tells us about growing up with a cinema but no electricity, the burden of playing ...

Censors quibbled some of the adult language in the script, but otherwise passed this boundary-pushing drama starring Julie London and Anthony Steel as a married couple seeking out a fertility clinic.

Cobbled together out of wood, elastic, Meccano and old printer parts, this vintage 1950s device – invented by a preservationist at the BFI National Archive – enabled film archivists to safely make ...

Plus on stage appearances from Ridley Scott, Tim Burton, Neil Tennant, Nadia Fall, Pooja Kaul, David Mitchell, Robert Webb and more.

From the dystopian visions of Brazil and Twelve Monkeys to the surreal odyssey of The Fisher King, Terry Gilliam has spent half a century defying cinematic convention. In this wide-ranging interview, ...

Capturing late-90s Cardiff as a city of clubbing and hedonism, Human Traffic is a cult classic of the Cool Cymru era. Twenty-six years later, how have its locations changed?