London film festival
McKellen and Allam reprise their roles for the film version of Ben Weatherill’s play in a star-filled bittersweet comedy about finding love later in life

There is a tender sweetness to this silver-years romance of new experiences and new ideas – and also some sugary sentimentality, an autumnal woodwind score telling us how to feel, and a bit of sitcom-cartoony characterisation in the all-star gallery of supporting turns. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. But the movie’s easy-going good nature wins out – and there’s a terrific contribution from Joanna Lumley, playing Belinda, an elegant woman poignantly suffering from early onset dementia. Screenwriter Martin Sherman adapts the two-hander stage-play by Ben Weatherill in which Roger Allam and Ian McKellen originally starred. They return here for the expanded movie version and Sean Mathias once again directs.

Allam plays Frank, a retired history teacher whose wife died of cancer a few short years ago (Belinda is his sister-in-law) and who now likes to walk his dog Toffee on Hampstead Heath. McKellen is Percy, an academic sociologist and climate scientist who can be found there too, with his dog Bruno. Percy is rather acrimoniously separated from his now ex-partner, a waspish and querulously self-pitying figure gamely played by Stephen Fry.

The fantasy epic based on CS Lewis’s classic stars Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep

The first look at Greta Gerwig’s vision for Narnia has been revealed.

Today, Netflix is giving a first look at her vision for CS Lewis’s magical world in the trailer for The Magician’s Nephew, the first chronological book in the beloved series.

He cut his teeth playing rock stars and pretty posh boys. Speaking from his LA home, the actor talks about landing his first blockbuster lead in the grisly DC horror. Will it be too shocking for comic book fans?

Exactly 13 years ago this month, Tom Rhys Harries was hanging by his ankles from a meat hook every night. Playing a teenage rock’n’roll idol abducted by gangsters in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s Mojo, Harries was fresh out of drama school and the only unknown in a cast led by Ben Whishaw and Rupert Grint. The Guardian’s Michael Billington likened him to “an embryonic Elvis”.

Now the 36-year-old Cardiff-born actor has the title role in Clayface, a violent DC Comics supervillain blockbuster set in Batman’s stomping ground, Gotham City. This puts him in the company of fellow Brits in the comic-book universe, such as Tom Holland (Spider-Man), Robert Pattinson (Batman) and David Jonsson, recently announced as the new Black Panther. “I felt ready to do this,” says Harries. “Had I been younger, I’d have been suffocated by the insecurity of wanting to do a good job but not having that quiet trust in getting there.”

Ralph Macchio and Tiffany Haddish feature in a ropey and implausible manhunt thriller as cops search for the missing twin of a murdered teenager

This small-town police thriller sets its stall out intriguingly, with a murder that seems actively begging to be solved. The perp chose to dump his victim – the 14-year-old daughter of a local political bigwig – into a part of the Mississippi River where she was likely to resurface, and from a highly visible bridge. When veteran detective Alan Kramer (Devon Sawa) and rookie forensic psychologist Amelia Pembrock (Maggie Grace) show up to investigate, they are immediately alerted to a gun in the bushes just yards away. As a colleague observes: “This isn’t a clean-up. It’s a message.”

But Brando Benetton’s debut film sadly fails to capitalise on the misdirection at play in this open-goal crime scene. Instead of using it to pry open community secrets, he gives us a ropey and implausible manhunt. As Kramer and Pembrock race to locate the girl’s twin, who is presumably still in the killer’s clutches, they zero in on local butcher Boris (Darron Dunbar). He has a sex-pest rap sheet and lives with his mother – which apparently ticks all the boxes for a profiling genius such as Pembrock. Kramer pulls her up for being unbothered by the lack of actual prosecutable evidence. But carping is about the only investigative contribution this seasoned criminologist makes here (and what’s a criminologist – a crime sociologist – doing out in the field anyway?).

I watched the filming of the first jazz-hands epic. Two decades on, its sparkle hasn’t faded – and now it’s back on the London stage

Whenever I watch basketball, I come away disappointed that the players’ shoe squeaks didn’t jumpstart a choreographed dance number, just like in High School Musical. Whether it was a lunch break turning into a confession of closeted passions or a pep rally evolving into a flashmob, the 2006 Disney Channel movie proved that teen drama can always be solved through song.

Quality entertainment? Meh. The corniest of lines? Oh, for sure. But the cheesiness was the point. Its 98 minutes became a deliciously enduring slice of pop culture not despite the cringe, but because the film embraced it so wholeheartedly.

Rachel Chang is a journalist and author specialising in travel and pop culture. Her book Unforgettable Walks: 52 Places to Stroll Around the World is published next year

A rediscovered collection of drawings and on-set photos finally reveals the intricate on-set mysteries of one of early cinema’s most gifted pioneers

FW Murnau was one of the greatest of all silent film-makers, with a rare genius for making beautiful images on screen. His peers liked to say he “had a camera instead of a head”. The director of such stunning films as vampire tale Nosferatu (1922) and marital romance Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) died at the age of 42 in 1931, meaning that his career barely scraped into the talkie era. Still, Murnau’s tremendous run of silent pictures included some beautiful, often disturbing classics, in which he sent his camera roaming through changing vistas of shadows and light, and plumbed the depths of the human soul. Nowhere more so than in his tour-de-force Faust, released 100 years ago this month, based on Goethe’s play about a deal with the devil. And the making of Faust is depicted in a stunning new book, which is both a document of, and in a sense an artefact from, the production of this classic film.

Murnau was also one of the most mysterious of directors: secretive about his methods, with an intense devotion to his work. Early collaborator Edgar G Ulmer called him “a great purist who worked under a sort of hypnosis”. Murnau banned producers from his sets, and executives from watching his rushes. Bar a few exceptions, he did not allow on-set photography to reveal the secrets of his camerawork and special effects. This mystique created room for speculation as to whether Murnau, or his talented crew, were responsible for the success of his films. The Faust Bible: The Making of FW Murnau’s Masterpiece publishes unseen images from the shoot of one of his best films, and gives a rare insight into the collaborative way it was made.

Eamon Ryan is shown to be principled, likable and hard working in a glowing portrait, filmed while serving in the country’s coalition government

This fly-on-the-wall documentary about the former Irish Green party leader and cabinet minister Eamon Ryan reminded me of the political satire The Thick of It – but without the cynical gags and hapless self-serving politicians. Even after you factor in the skewing effect of it being a favourable portrait, showing him in the best possible light, Ryan comes across as one of the good guys: principled, likable and extremely hard working. The film follows his final 18 months serving in Ireland’s coalition government as minister for the environment and transport before stepping down in 2025.

The title is something that Ryan’s 25-year-old son Tommy repeats over and over. “Forever … forever … forever.” Tommy is autistic and requires full-time care. When Ryan resigns from government, one of his reasons is to spend more time with Tommy. We see the pair of them at the allotment picking raspberries and walking the dog. But other than a quick glimpse of his wife, Victoria, the rest of Ryan’s family life is kept firmly behind closed doors.

Aaron Sorkin’s attempt to return to the success of The Social Network is a strangely dated and incomplete look at a world that needs a sharper eye

In retrospect, David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network was a landmark for a quiet, even counterintuitive reason. Before the film was released, some questioned whether Aaron Sorkin, a writer not exactly known for his mastery of, nevermind obsession with, the technical sphere, was the right man to tell the origin story of Facebook. And while Sorkin may well have converted Mark Zuckerberg into terms he could better understand – namely, a motormouthed wiseass who deep down wants to impress a smart, serious-minded girl – he and Fincher also made one of the first internet-centric movies to treat online life as a natural extension of IRL dynamics, rather than the otherworldly tech portal seen in so many 90s internet movies.

Granted, that’s the whole deal with Facebook: its viral spread of social networking, something so simple and addictive that aunts, grandpas and coworkers everywhere could understand it. Yet understanding its simultaneous extension and distortion of the real world wasn’t a given; four years later, for example, 2014’s Men, Women and Children was widely derided for taking an alarmist approach to the internet as a haven for adults seeking an affair, teenagers nursing porn addictions and fame-hungry strivers of all ages. The Social Network, on the other hand, is remarkably nonjudgmental about the basic mechanics of Facebook, rooting its nascent flaws in the human weaknesses that birthed it. In retrospect, the movie only feels outdated to the extent that it underestimates Zuckerberg’s grasping for power and the potential for grim carelessness that his online kingdom was built on.

What happens when a forest loses its birdsong? Following clues hidden in the sounds birds make while asleep, Argentinian physicist Gabriel Mindlin uncovers a hidden extinction – not of species, but of memory – and sets out to revive vanished melodies before they disappear forever. Part detective story, part cutting-edge science, Mindlin’s mission leads him to the dusty 1960s archives of Buenos Aires naturalist, confirming that some songs no longer echo in the biosphere. So he deploys “robot tutors” to see whether young birds can learn and spread the old songs once again.

Read more on this topic: Trill seekers: can scientists use AI and tutors to help birds remember lost songs?

As the Oscar-winning Stasi surveillance film hits the stage, Knightley and co-star Luke Thompson talk about the paranoia at its heart, the cost of theatre tickets nowadays – and their fury at ringtones in the stalls

Unpacking assorted tubs of carrot sticks and salad, Keira Knightley winces apologetically. “I just realised I’ve got very crunchy food,” she says. How apropos that she should consider the impact that her lunch might have on my audio recording when we are here to discuss The Lives of Others, a new play in which the characters are divided between the spies and the spied-upon.

Based on the Oscar-winning 2006 film and set in East Berlin in 1984, the play stars Knightley as Christa-Maria, a theatre actor in a relationship with a playwright, Georg, played by Luke Thompson. Earwigging on them is Wiesler (Stephen Dillane), the Stasi officer whose principles are gradually challenged and weakened by his round-the-clock exposure to this cultured couple.