Will Paul Thomas Anderson’s ICE age conspiracy thriller sweep the board, or will Sinners and Hamnet share some glory? Our critic places his bets
Peter Bradshaw
Sunday 22 February 2026
From his steely self-effacing consigliere in The Godfather to his surf-crazed Wagner enthusiast in Apocalypse Now, just to see him on screen made me smile
Peter BradshawRobert Duval was a foghorn-voiced bull of pure American Robert DuvaAmerican virility, and he put energy and heart into the movies for more than 60 years. Just to see him on screen was enough to make me smile. That handsome face and head gave him the look of a Roman emperor from Waxahachie, Texas or a three-star general playing the country music circuit. Duvall was famously bald (the rare roles needing hairpieces always looked artificial on him) and so he looked the same age almost all his acting life: forever in his vigorous fortysomething prime – though often playing figures complicated with tenderness and woundedness.
Coogler’s vampire thriller swept the Oscar nominations over Chloé Zhao’s tearjerker and Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture thriller. This genre-defying drama about the black experience could now rule awards season
Agree with them or not, these Oscar nominations deliver a pert slap to the accepted assumptions of awards season. The industry had been expecting landslides for classy upmarket fare such as Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and also for Josh Safdie’s delirious comedy Marty Supreme. And that’s what they got
The Oscar-winning actor’s autobiography combines vulnerability with bloody-mindedness and belligerence
Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 12 November 2025
FBI rookie Clarice Starling must walk along the row of cells until she reaches Dr Lecter’s reinforced glass tank, where the man himself is simply standing, his face a living skull of satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting blue prison jumpsuit – immobile, that is, until such time as he launches himself against the glass, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A billion true-crime documentaries have since revealed that actual serial killers are very boring, with nothing like Anthony Hopkins’s screen presence.
The actor doesn’t move much but brings off the Parisian copper’s air of worldly, tolerant bemusement
Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 30 August 2023
Maybe it’s a surprise that Gérard Depardieu has not before now taken on the one fictional character of comparable French iconic status to himself: Georges Simenon’s Parisian police commissaire Maigret. Well, it’s now Depardieu’s turn to put on the detective’s trademark overcoat, hat, pipe, and wintry half-smile of detached amusement at human nature and the criminal mind.
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| Gerard Depardieu |
This film, directed and co-written by Patrice Leconte, is based on the 1954 novel Maigret and the Dead Girl; it feels like a feature-length Sunday-night TV drama, and at 74 Depardieu is surely a couple of decades older than the usual Maigret. He is also a rather stately and well-nourished figure – when his doctor asks him if he feels tired in the medical checkup scene at the beginning of this film, Maigret actually answers: “Sometimes … when running for a bus.” Running for a bus? Any film that actually had a scene of Depardieu running for a bus would deserve every special effects award going: in fact, Depardieu contrives to take a good many of his scenes sitting down.
But Depardieu brings his natural charisma and watchful presence to the role, and he can bring off Maigret’s air of worldly, tolerant bemusement and distaste at the transparently guilty people he comes across. The discovery of a horribly stabbed dead young woman in an expensive ballgown in a Paris street brings out Maigret’s pity and fatherly concern for what appears to have been a naive country girl who was in over her head in some creepy sexual menage. He recruits another transient to impersonate the girl so that he can get inside her mind, and this is to culminate in an ingeniously Shakespearean method for trapping the culprit. A little gamey, this movie, like the “pressed duck” that Maigret agrees to eat in one scene – but reasonably tasty.
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| Brigitte Bardot |
Bardot titillated the world for five decades, but the controversy and voyeurism surrounding her shouldn’t overshadow an intriguing film career
Bardot … there was a time when it couldn’t be pronounced without a knowing pout on the second syllable. French headline-writers loved calling the world’s most desirable film star by her initials: “BB”, that is: bébé, a bit of weirdly infantilised tabloid pillow-talk. When Brigitte Bardot retired from the movies in the mid-70s, taking up the cause of animal rights and a ban on the import of baby seals, the French press took to calling her BB-phoque, a homophone of the French for “baby seal” with a nasty hint of an Anglo pun. But France’s love affair with Bardot was to curdle, despite her fierce patriotism and admiration for Charles de Gaulle (the feeling was reciprocated). As her animal rights campaigning morphed in the 21st century into an attack on halal meat, and then into shrill attacks on the alleged “Islamicisation” of France, her relations with the modern world curdled even more.
Lawrence excels as a woman whose bipolar disorder is exacerbated by husband Robert Pattinson’s infidelity, with super-strength direction from Lynne Ramsay
Lynne Ramsay brings the Gothic-realist steam heat, some violent shocks and deafening music slams to this movie, adapted by her with co-writers Alice Birch and Enda Walsh from the 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz. It’s a ferociously intense study of a lonely, passionate woman and her descent into bipolar disorder as she is left alone all day with a new baby in a rambling Montana house originally belonging to her husband’s uncle, who took his own life in a gruesome way that we are not permitted to discover until some way into the movie.
America’s sweetheart was so much more than that: an actor of astonishing singularity and freshness who starred in the very best films of the past century
Peter Bradshaw
Saturday 11 October 2025
The millpond calm of her face, its beauty, its gentleness, its openness and unworldliness became even more heart stopping when she laughed or cried – and generations of moviegoers felt their own crush on Diane Keaton escalate into something more. She was more than America’s sweetheart: Keaton was the sophisticated, sweet-natured, unaffectedly sensual woman with whom America was unrequitedly in love. Diane Keaton was out of America’s league.
Claudia Cardinale was part of the great wave of Italian movie stars whose postwar career took them from Europe to Hollywood; these included Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Monica Vitti, who the American film industry prized not merely for their beauty but also for their mystery: an exotic feline allure and sense of toughness and survival, and even tragedy. But Cardinale perhaps had something her contemporaries didn’t: a kind of simplicity and frankness to go with the sensual allure. She often played opposite Alain Delon, whose own beauty complemented – almost merged with – hers.
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| Michael Madsen |
The Reservoir Dogs and Donnie Brasco actor had a rare, sometimes scary power, as well as a winning self-awareness and levity
Until 1992, when people heard Stuck in the Middle With You by Stealers Wheel on the radio, they might smile and nod and sing along to its catchy soft-rock tune and goofy Dylan-esque lyrics. But after 1992, with the release of Quentin Tarantino’s sensationally tense and violent crime movie Reservoir Dogs, the feelgood mood around that song forever darkened. That was down to an unforgettably scary performance by Michael Madsen, who has died at the age of 67.
