Benedict Cumberbatch

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: Avengers: Endgame is a fitting tribute to Earth's mightiest franchise

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 25th April 2019

    Fan or sceptic, hardened critic or casual movie-watcher, there is no denying that Marvel Studios has changed the face of cinema. These past 20-odd Marvel movies – for all the good and bad, for all the shawarmas and dramas, the Lady Sifs and Malekiths, the Jotunheims and Ed Norton times – have been a historic undertaking and seen record-breaking success. And Avengers: Endgame knows it. Not only does this film reach the narrative culmination of the Avengers to date, but it’s simultaneously a beautiful send-off, a greatest hits tour and a lap of honour. This is Marvel celebrating Marvel, and it is thoroughly deserved.

  • Doctor Strange

    Movie Review | Ali Gray | 3rd November 2016

    Considering the X-Men movies can't even stay consistent one movie to the next, it's a minor miracle the Marvel Cinematic Universe remains a cohesive whole, 8 years and 14 movies after Nick Fury first asked Tony Stark to join his professional LinkedIn network. We've had men of technology, beasts of rage, Gods from other realms and soldiers forged in war, all now reading from the same script. The latest recruit to the MCU is Doctor Strange, who heralds the arrival of the world of magic, but - like Arrested Development's Gob Bluth and his Alliance of Magicians - demands to be taken seriously. Disbelief is being suspended at a comfortable level by now: if you're cool with purple space tyrants and talking raccoons, chances are the addition of sorcerers, supreme or otherwise, isn't going to upset the apple cart.

  • Black Mass

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 4th December 2015

    There are a couple of premises on which Black Mass relies in lieu of a unique selling point. One is the idea, mainly established by marketing over the years, that a radical physical transformation for a role equals a daring and probably great performance. The other is that the audience's familiarity with the structure of the real-life gangster movie is enough to justify doing it all over again. Both are fallacies, and neither is enough to make it sparkle.

  • Cumberbatch to seek less innuendo-friendly stage role

    TV News | Ed Williamson | 11th August 2015

    Benedict Cumberbatch has today announced that the potential for innuendo around his Hamlet has made the role untenable.

  • Sherlock sits like this because Sherlock is clever

    TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 9th July 2015

    This method of sitting and style of leather armchair is in the public domain and thus no iteration of Sherlock Holmes can claim it as its sole intellectual property. They only didn't use it in Mr Holmes because Ian McKellen is like ninety and he couldn't manage it without his knees cracking.

    (NB no, Google Images doesn't have any pictures of Robert Downey Jr's Holmes sitting like this. My point still stands.)

  • Sherlock: The Sign of Three

    TV Review | Ed Williamson | 5th January 2014

    The marked increase in comic touches in the New Year's Day episode pointed the way and tonight we got it: a flat-out Sherlock comedy. A wedding comedy, no less, with a bungling best man to boot. I enjoyed it a lot, but I couldn't help thinking it's hard to get away with this sort of thing when you're only doing three episodes every two years.

  • The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug

    Movie Review | Neil Alcock | 11th December 2013

    First things first: there are no songs, no washing up scenes and no fucking eagles in The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, which immediately makes it a better film than its predecessor. The eyeball-molesting increased frame rate of An Unexpected Journey has also been, if not dropped, then less loudly trumpeted for this film, which is another blessed relief. You'd almost be fooled into thinking that Peter Jackson has been listening to his critics, were it not for the fact that Desolation is still an obscenely long, slightly dull, inferior version of a Lord Of The Rings film.

  • What we've learnt from these Sherlock series three pictures

    TV Feature | Rob Young | 6th December 2013

    Sherlock and his scarf return to our screens on January 1st. And it's been a long time coming. Seriously, it was bloody ages ago when we all watched him lob himself off that building. Ahead of his return the BBC have teased and tantalised us with a whole host of pictures. But what do they mean?

  • Please explain the benefits of a man doing motion-capture for a dragon

    Movie Feature | Ali Gray | 23rd October 2013

    Presumably by now you'll all have seen the photos of Benedict Cumberbatch covered in mini ping pong balls, contorting his face like a trooper in order to provide motion-capture for Smaug, the dragon in The Hobbit. Now I don't mean to be a killjoy, but... this is a wind-up, right?

  • The Fifth Estate

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 10th October 2013

    You are the Fifth Estate, it says on the poster. That's right, you. Not me: I'm busy with other stuff, but I'll cover for you when you're on holiday if you like. What this means is that, in the digital age (*spits*), beyond the realm of the news media, all of us have a voice and so all of us are responsible for holding institutions and elected officials to account. Shit, and all we've been using it for is highlighting the fact that Russell Crowe has a wang on his hat.