An ethereally self-aware comedy genius: the loss of Diane Keaton is devastating

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 had toughness, charisma and sensual allure.

 

Claudia Cardinale had toughness, charisma and sensual allure. Yet Hollywood just couldn’t do her justice

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 24 September 2025

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.

Michael Madsen’s brooding charisma needed Tarantino to unlock

 

Michael Madsen

Michael Madsen’s brooding charisma needed Tarantino to unlock it

The Reservoir Dogs and Donnie Brasco actor had a rare, sometimes scary power, as well as a winning self-awareness and levity

Peter Bradshaw

Thu 3 Jul 2025 22.43 

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.

 

Gary Oldman

Review

Bram Stoker’s Dracula review – Gary Oldman is Pierrot from hell in blood-red 90s take

This article is more than 2 years old

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 all-star retelling features an outstanding performance from Oldman as the tormented count

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 5 October 2024

Francis Ford Coppola’s vampire tale is now revived in cinemas for its 30th anniversary, with Gary Oldman the fierce and anguished count who hundreds of years ago renounced God and embraced an eternity of parasitic horror in his rage at the unjust death of his countess (played by Winona Ryder). Dressed like the Pierrot from hell in his vast Transylvanian castle, Dracula then buys property in Victorian London, and appears there in the style of a sinister young dandy, on the scent of a woman who looks exactly like his late wife: the winsome Mina (Ryder again), fiancee to the equally demure young lawyer who journeyed to Romania to draw up Dracula’s contracts: Jonathan, played by Keanu Reeves.

The Room Next Door review – Almodóvar’s English-language debut is extravagant and engrossing

Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton give luxuriously self-aware performances as two old friends who are reunited in a doggedly mysterious drama

Peter Bradshaw

Wed 23 Oct 2024 07.00 BST

When this film won the Golden Lion for Pedro Almodóvar at the Venice film festival this summer, there were three kinds of surprised critic. Some were surprised to learn that this was Almodóvar’s first ever major European festival award; others that this should be the film to finally bag it … and then there were those who were politely surprised that it should have won anything at all. I myself found it as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything he has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and an undertow of darkness often overlooked by yeasayers and naysayers.

Venice film festival 2024

Review

The Brutalist review – epic Adrien Brody postwar architectural drama stuns and electrifies

Peter Bradshaw
Thursday 5 September 2024

Brady Corbet’s amazing and engrossing epic The Brutalist is about the design of postwar America and what was mixed into its foundations at the building stage. It asks us to decide if and how the brutalism of the title applies to something other than architecture, and wonders about the future ruin of what we all imagine at the drawing board of youth: an American Ozymandias.

 

Daniel Craig

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

Review

Queer review – Daniel Craig is needy, horny and mesmeric in Guadagnino’s erotic drama

Craig plays an American expat living indolently in Mexico City in this sometimes uproarious adaptation of William Burroughs’ autobiographical novel

Peter Bradshaw
Tuesdady 3 September 2024

Queer is a story of lost love and last love and mad-about-the-boy obsession, featuring an excellent performance from Daniel Craig – needy, horny, moody, like his Knives Out detective Benoit Blanc on steroids and with something of his portrayal of Ted Hughes from 2003’s Sylvia.

 

Venice film festival 2024

Review

Joker: Folie à Deux review – Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga musical spirals out of tune

There’s a great supporting cast and a barnstorming first act but Todd Phillips’s much-hyped Gotham sequel proves claustrophobic and repetitive

Peter Bradshaw

Wednesday 4 September 2014

Five years ago, Todd Phillips released his much-acclaimed take on the DC Comics supervillain, Joker, with Joaquin Phoenix wearing the clown makeup as the bananas Pagliacci Arthur Fleck in an odd pastiche Scorsese thriller with Joker as both Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin – and granted the unearned honour of killing a character played by Robert De Niro.

 

Shelley Duvall

Shelley Duvall was a sublime and subversive screen presence

The unique and often misunderstood actor, who has died at the age of 75, was frequently at her best with Robert Altman and memorably terrorised by Stanley Kubrick

Peter Bradshaw

Thursday 11 July 2024

It was Shelley Duvall’s destiny to become most widely known for a single film or maybe for a single poster image from it, shockingly and cartoonishly explicit. The image certainly did justice to her intensity and capacity for utterly unselfconscious performance, but said nothing about the subtlety, strength, wit and unfakable superstar quality that otherwise marked her work.

Review

Control review - Kevin Spacey’s sarky GPS wants to kill the home secretary for sleeping with the PM

Spacey’s first film since he was cleared of sexual assault makes effective use of his silken voice, but that’s not enough to rescue this wooden and occasionally deranged sci-fi thriller

Peter Bradshaw

Tuesday 14 November 2023

Kevin Spacey’s redemptive journey of uncancelling steps another millimetre forwards, or sideways, with his somewhat bizarre new role in this low-budget British indie in which, as a disembodied voice, he plays the implacable punisher of other people’s sexual misdemeanours.

Donald Sutherland was an irreplaceable aristocrat of cinema

 

Donald Shuterland

Donald Sutherland was an irreplaceable aristocrat of cinema

The late actor was a commanding and versatile presence on the big screen, perfecting everything from villainy to sensuality in films such as Don’t Look Now and Klute

Peter Bradshaw

Thursday 20 June 2024

Donald Sutherland was an utterly unique actor and irreplaceable star: possessed of a distinctive leonine handsomeness that the white beard of his latter years only made more majestic: watchful, cerebral, charismatic, with a refinement to his screen acting technique comparable perhaps only to Paul Scofield and his Canadian background (together with his early stage training and experience in England and Scotland) gave his American roles a certain touch of Anglo-international class. Sutherland was commanding and exacting, he gave each of his roles and films something special: he addressed his co-stars and the camera itself from a position of strength.

More than a contender: Marlon Brando’s greatest performances – ranked!

 

Brando in The Wild One, 1953. Photograph: Michael Ochs 

More than a contender: Marlon Brando’s greatest performances – ranked!

Lovers, fighters … and gangsters? On the centenary of the actor’s birth, we pick out his greatest roles

by Peter Bradshaw

4 April 2024

20. A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)

A minor picture with curiosity value: Charlie Chaplin’s final film as a director, starring Brando and Sophia Loren, a comedy in the style of the Hollywood Golden Age, based on the tall tales of a real-life Russian singer and in fact originally conceived by Chaplin in the 30s for Paulette Goddard. Brando plays an American diplomat who is astonished to find that the Russian countess (Loren) he was charmed by in Hong Kong has stowed away in his cabin on the voyage home. Brando does his best and this method legend was sufficiently in awe of Chaplin to submit to his old-fashioned way of working: acting out for Brando the required line-readings and movements. (Oh, to have had fly-on-the-wall location footage of these moments.) Certainly, Brando would never again be so submissive with a director.