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Times
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
This Oscar winner is so much more than a biopic
It may be titled simply Amadeus but this hugely fun 1980s classic didn't win eight Oscars for being a straight-up biopic. What made it an enduring cultural touchstone is the framing. Lavishly shot on location in Prague using candlelit 18th-century architecture and extravagant costumes, Milos Forman's opulent epic retells the life of the musical wunderkind Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce, up until then best known for National Lampoon's Animal House) through the tormented eyes of his older, less-talented rival, Antonio Salieri (F Murray Abraham). Where the religious Salieri is ascetic and disciplined, Amadeus is hedonistic and childish, his genius seemingly a gift from God. After years spent consumed by jealousy, the embittered Salieri becomes obsessed with plotting Mozart's downfall. • Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews An adaptation of Peter Shaffer's elegantly constructed play, the narrative probes the agony of unfulfilled ambition. That Abraham's on-screen career subsequently eclipsed Hulce's is a pleasing dramatic irony.★★★★★ PG, 153min Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit to find out more. Which films have you enjoyed at the cinema recently? Let us know in the comments and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Times
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Bad Guys 2 review — praise be for this breezy sequel
Praise be for this breezy animated sequel, which provides a get-out-of-jail-free card for parents during the holidays and won't be a chore for them to watch with their kids. It continues the misadventures of Mr Wolf and his gang of reformed villains, who have also got out of jail and abandoned their lives of crime in favour of — well, job interviews. Mr Wolf — voiced again by Sam Rockwell, shamelessly channelling George Clooney in Ocean's Eleven — is going for a position at a bank, until his interviewer points out that he has robbed them three times. 'Some of my best memories are in banks,' Wolf says wistfully. A flashback to the naughty days accentuates the contrast in glamour as Messrs Wolf, Snake, Shark and Piranha and Ms Tarantula insouciantly pull off a heist in Cairo involving a parachute, a crane and a breakneck escape in a sports car. Back in the present day Wolf is driving a spluttering old banger … • Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews The lure of reoffending is strong, then, which is just as well because these films, like the Despicable Me franchise, hinge on the subversive thrill of rooting for the morally compromised. Adapted from the graphic novels by Aaron Blabey and directed, like the first film, by the Frenchman Pierre Perifel, this is another feast of angular animation and insouciant one-liners with a ghetto-fabulous score from Daniel Pemberton. The twist-filled story somehow finds room for Mexican wrestlers, a metal called McGuffinite (tee-hee) and a sequence in which our antiheroes board a moon rocket that makes Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible look like Compo in Last of the Summer Wine trundling down a hill in a bath. If that sounds a bit busy, it's all done with a light and knowing touch. A third film is planned and that doesn't feel like overkill.★★★★☆ PG, 104min In cinemas Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit to find out more. Which films have you enjoyed at the cinema recently? Let us know in the comments and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
