SEAN PENN

Ben Stiller's Walter Mitty of 2013 has a passing resemblance to Danny Kaye's of 1947, and none at all to James Thurber's original creation (in which a hen-pecked husband, who inhabits a short story about five pages long, is sent out to buy…

Photoshopped Somebody up there at Warner Bros. must have realised that Gangster Squad, a cops-and-crooks story set in Los Angeles in the late Forties, is a terrible movie, despite its stellar cast. So they've released it in Hollywood's…

When Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad was first announced, with its stellar A-List cast, The Untouchables style plot and neo-noir aesthetic, one could be forgiven for expecting a gritty and brutal crime drama. The end result is anything but…

Avenging the father This Must Be the Place is the first film made outside Italy by the director Paolo Sorrentino, whose work is droll and stylized. His films tend to unroll in a series of vividly realized set pieces, and this one is…

Director Paolo Sorrentino's much-anticipated English language debut is a comic, charmingly oddball road movie. Starring two time Academy Award winner Sean Penn as Cheyenne, a middle-aged wealthy former Goth rock star now bored and jaded in…

This film will divide opinions. If you're impatient or impervious to the charms of Sean Penn, you'll be unamused. On the other hand the cast also boasts Frances McDormand, Harry Dean Stanton, Judd Hirsch and a trifecta of performances (live…

Robert Smith, Nazi Hunter was, I hope, the working title for Paolo Sorrentino's sensational English language debut, an eccentric little dramedy which finds Sean Penn channeling The Cure's frizzy-haired frontman for a cross-country odyssey…

A new film by Terrence Malick is an event in itself, and once again the uncompromising visionary has created a cinematic experience unlike most you are ever likely to see. However, while there is much to admire about his latest experiment,…

Having made five films now in his forty years as a filmmaker, we can’t get enough of Terrence Malick who, with the evidence of his first three films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line), is best described as a perfectionist. Whilst…

An extraordinary "Space Odyssey" of family dysfunction   The way Terrence Mallick’s ambitious, long-planned, long-awaited The Tree of Life sweeps from cosmography to tough father-son relations, it seems like the 2001: A Space Odyssey of…