Peter Bradshaw

Riefenstahl review – nauseating yet gripping story of Nazi poster woman

The only important woman in the Nazi movement entranced Hitler, directed Triumph of the Will – and spent the rest of her life alternately fearful and defiant

Andres Veiel’s sombre documentary tells the gripping, incrementally nauseating story of Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl, the brilliant and pioneering German film-maker of the 20th century who isn’t getting her name on a Girls on Tops T-shirt any time soon.

Riefenstahl was a dancer and actor in prewar movies by Arnold Fanck and GW Pabst, whose performance in 1932 in The Blue Light, her own Aryan romantic fantasy as director-star, entranced the Führer and secured her two historic directing commissions: Triumph of the Will in 1935, a monumentally euphoric and grandiose account of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, and Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Games, with whose undoubtedly stunning images and choreography Riefenstahl effectively invented the modern-day Olympics with its opening and closing ceremonies and media coverage.

Trump’s talk of film tariffs makes no sense, but it’s already doing damage – to Hollywood | Peter Bradshaw

The US president’s bizarre talk of 100% levies on films from ‘foreign lands’ combines trolling with a hazy grasp of facts

Another day, another bizarre, mischievous, headline-hogging pronouncement from the US president.

Steve Bannon famously advised him to flood the zone with shit – a Maga-Maoist permanent revolution of provocative, toxic nonsense. Trump is flooding the zone with tariffs, then he pauses, walks back and climbs down on tariffs, and then adds more tariffs. The latest is his bizarre plan to hit movies made in “foreign lands” with 100% tariffs. He has solemnly announced his grave concern that Hollywood was “dying” at the hands of foreigners like the UK, who give tax breaks to multinationals.

Cloud review – bizarre internet action thriller descends into hail of bullets

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s baffling crime farrago follows a cyber fraudster pursued by an angry gang of disappointed shoppers

Here to prove once again that movies about internet crime can so easily unravel into implausible silliness is that otherwise estimable Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has written and directed a bizarre, baffling action thriller based on the (initially interesting) idea of an online retail entrepreneur ripping off his customers and suppliers – who then seek revenge.