Danny Boyle’s Ink

Ink “compresses The Sun’s rise into a frenzied joyride of biblical proportions,” writes Beatrice Loayza in the New York Times. “It also has a healthy dose of good old-fashioned British self-deprecation, and a snappy, chaotic style with unsettling flashback sequences and energetic bits of grainy archival footage.”

“Goddamn it, Danny Boyle is so good at this,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. Boyle “takes a tale steeped in the minutiae of the English newspaper business and turns it into something anthemic and fearsome: Citizen Kane by way of Trainspotting. The music churns, the camera flies, flashes of the past and the future intrude alongside visions of events that may or may not be real. We feel the excitement of these characters, but we also sense that they’re gleefully opening the gates to hell.”

Time’s Stephanie Zacharek introduces us to the key players: “What, exactly, were working-class Londoners interested in reading about, Lamb would ask his assembled staff, including a starchily old-school deputy editor imported from Liverpool (Patrick Kennedy), a possibly over-the-hill sports editor (Christopher Fulford), and, most notably, the crackerjack newswoman Jules (Claire Foy, fierce as a firecracker), who’s been sleeping with the married Lamb for years in an arrangement that suits them both . . . If you’d prefer to think of Murdoch as an individual wholly devoid of sex appeal, Pearce’s performance might rattle you; his Murdoch is shrewd but not inhuman—even monsters were young once . . . And still, O’Connell’s Larry Lamb is a guy you want to root for, even if, as a modern person with a reasonable awareness of what’s happened to the news media in the internet age, you can see he’s making the snowball that starts the avalanche.”

Arriving in theaters on December 11 and streaming on Netflix from January 8, Ink “in many ways is a rise-and-fall story, played with aggressive self-determination but not monomaniacal monstrousness by O’Connell,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “The movie is also a chronicle of the degradation of what passes for news reporting; Sun staffers are told that every murder, rape, or theft has to be written up like a thriller. And for anyone with affection for the bygone newsroom, it’s a rich evocation of a milieu now on life support.” Ultimately, Ink is “a solid demonstration that if you want to give talky material pulse-pounding urgency, give it to Danny Boyle.”

“Boyle’s film is riveting and needling and leaves you feeling pretty awful, right up to a closing montage that connects Lamb’s and Murdoch’s legacy to the unregulated cacophony of today’s media and social media scenes, from Fox News to Facebook,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge. “A final flourish that makes explicit what was already implicit is not subtle, but it lands with impact. Larry Lamb would approve.”