Xan Brooks is a freelance writer and broadcaster specialising in cinema
June 2024
‘I don’t want to take these characters home’: Jesse Plemons on life playing the psychopath next door
‘I’ll never forgive or forget’ – Griffin Dunne on the darkness that overtook his gilded Hollywood upbringing
May 2024
Cannes 2024 week two roundup – scuffles, screwballs and spellbinders
Valeria Golino: ‘I’m not a man-hater. I am a lover of men’
Trump movie The Apprentice: ‘I don’t think it is a movie he would dislike,’ says director
Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice depicts him as a rapist
Breathless goodbye: the race to finish Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, one day before he died
Cannes 2024 week one roundup – the jury’s out, the sun isn’t…
The Surfer review – beach bum Nic Cage surfs a high tide of toxic masculinity
Greta Gerwig: ‘The number of female directors has gotten better. We’re not done yet’
‘You struggled with my film? Fantastic!’ Alice Rohrwacher and her riotous new tomb-raiding tale
April 2024
‘He could create beauty out of horror’: the extraordinary life and photography of Tim Hetherington
Book of the day
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan review – state-of-the-nation burlesque
March 2024
‘My father buried his friends in minus-40 Siberia’: director Hirokazu Kore-eda on trauma and childhood
The maker of Shoplifters and I Wish talks about Monster, his dark new film about our dangerously fragmented world – and the movie he’s planning about his dad, who endured horrors as a PoW in Russia
February 2024
Ours by Phillip B Williams review – a fragile utopia for those escaping slavery
Hidden and enchanted, the town of Ours – founded by a woman called Saint – reflects wider truths about US black history
‘If God is in everything, that includes toilets’: Kōji Yakusho on cleaning high-art loos in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days
The star of Tampopo, Babel and The Eel reveals how it felt to share the screen with 17 stunning Tokyo lavatories in this joyously strange, Oscar-tipped film about a cleaner
‘Destroying your home town is quite satisfying’: inside Michael Sheen’s explosive Welsh revolution thriller
New TV series The Way sees Sheen team up with documentary legend Adam Curtis and Sherwood writer James Graham – to start a rebellion. The team talk dirt, destruction and civil war
January 2024
‘If no one flies, they won’t give you the money’: Alexander Payne on Marvel, misfits and making movies
The director’s latest picture, The Holdovers, is a bittersweet evocation of 70s cinema. He reflects on how Hollywood has changed, how he dealt with a box office flop – and the meaning of success
October 2023
‘Rejecting hatred and fear’: why Powell and Pressburger’s weird, confounding films are perfect for our times
Book of the day
Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford review – fabulously rich noir
