Fackham Hall review – Downton Abbey spoof is fast, funny and throwaway

Period drama parody has some decent and often smart gags and benefits from a game cast including Damian Lewis and Thomasin McKenzie Perhaps it’s the feeling of end times in the air: after years of inactivity, spoofs are making a comeback . This summer saw the resurgence of the lighthearted genre, which at its best sends up the pretensions of overly serious genre with a barrage of pitched cliches, sight gags and stupid-clever puns. The Naked Gun , starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in a spoof of a buddy-cop spoof, opened to moderate box office success; the hapless rock band dialed it back up to 11 in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues . Reboots of the horror spoof gold-standard Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars rip Spaceballs were greenlit, and there were rumors of a return for international man of mystery Austin Powers. Unserious times, it seems, beget appetite for knowingly unserious, joke-dense, refreshingly shallow fun. The latest of these goofy parodies, which premi...

Mark Kermode on… director Christoper Nolan, a magician of cinema as memory

From Memento to the Golden Globe-winning Oppenheimer, the head-scrambling British-American director has revelled in using cinema as a time machine – and a conjuring trick

Somewhere between the crowd-pleasing spectacle of Hollywood and the esoteric inventions of European cinema lies the work of Christopher Nolan, the London-born writer-director who next month will receive the British Film Institute’s highest honour – the fellowship. Hailed by the BFI as “a blockbuster auteur and champion of cinema”, five-time Academy Award nominee Nolan is tipped for success at last at the forthcoming Oscars with his recent Golden Globe winner Oppenheimer – a frontrunner for, among others, best film, best director and best adapted screenplay.

The fact that this darkly ruminative three-hour epic has become the highest grossing biopic of all time, outselling the poptastically entertaining Bohemian Rhapsody, says much about Nolan’s ability to connect with mainstream audiences. Stranger still, a substantial number of those who furrowed their brows through the existential crises of Oppenheimer went on to double-bill it with Greta Gerwig’s pink-hued Barbie, creating one of cinema’s most unlikely box-office bonanzas – Barbenheimer!

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