“All the news that’s fit to print” and often stories that are not fit to print but make people buy the newspaper anyway. Danny Boyle is back again (after 28 Years Later) with another feature film to enjoy – his latest is titled Ink. It’s the story of the British tabloid newspaper The Sun and the beginning of the era of salacious, sensational, immoral news. Adapted by James Graham from his own 2017 stage play of the same name, the film is a The Wolf of Wall Street-esque rip-roaring thriller about the madman (or, really, madmen) who took over the newspaper in the 1970s and started to run whatever random stories they could in order to sell more newspapers than any other publisher in the UK at the time. Their main competition was The Daily Mirror, which is where Larry Lamb had worked before running The Sun and setting the stage for the next decades to come and where we are now with fake news galore. Boyle does make this connection – by the end he ties it all together to show that this kind of news sensationalism is what lead us right to this idiotic hellscape the world is in now. It’s great to see Boyle return to his more grungy, gritty filmmaking, especially for this story.
Written by James Graham and directed by Danny Boyle, Ink is focused on the 3 main people involved in The Sun. It begins in the late 1960s and continues right through the 1970s. Boyle’s grungy, gritty style isn’t just about the story, it’s also with the look and feel of everything in the frame – most of this story takes place in the grimy offices of The Sun on Fleet Street and inside of the inky, dark caverns where the massive printing press machines churn out millions of newspaper every day. There’s a few other conversations that happen elsewhere, but most of the film involves newsmakers arguing about what is and what isn’t fit to print. Jack O’Connell stars as the suave Larry Lamb, the Yorkshire-born editor who takes over and runs the paper his way – in opposition to The Mirror and other British press. Guy Pearce co-stars as Rupert Murdoch, the Australian businessman & newspaper magnate who becomes The Sun’s new owner. He’s never portrayed in a negative way, which is a bit odd. His focus is mainly on selling papers, making money, and increasing the numbers – there’s a few hints at his desire to control the news but not much. Finally, there’s Claire Foy as Jules Davies, a reporter for The Sun representing the few female reporters that worked for the papers then.
Ink is a rip-roaring thriller about sensationalizing newspapers and reporting the “news”, while working hard to serve up the dumbest stories to regular folk – whatever it takes to sell more and more copies of the paper. It’s Nightcrawler (the terrific 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal thriller about TV news) by way of Trainspotting & 28 Years Later. Grungy, grimy Danny Boyle is back with a tale of British tabloid madness. As entertaining as it is to watch, with a rockin’ soundtrack of classic 1970s songs and even some punk rock, it’s not exactly enjoyable to watch this film because of precisely what it is showing us. As fun as it is overall, due to Boyle’s stylistic choices, it’s a bit of a depressing look at how the drive to sell, sell, sell (and undermine competitors) ended up creating a society addicted to the most baseless “news”. It’s not even about politics, it’s just about getting society addicted to the sensational stories of nothing – gossip, crime, sports nonsense, and anything that scares them. Boyle makes it entertaining working in a number of amusing scenes where even the layout guy starts crackin’ jokes and falling in line with making these useless stories look nice on the page. My main complaint about the film is that it’s not that critical of anything it’s depicting – like The Wolf of Wall Street, it’s almost gleeful showing audiences how there’s no consequences for what the guys are getting away with.
That old saying goes “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” And that’s exactly how I felt by the end of this film. They started this, it’s now everywhere, it’s even worse than before, what do we do? How do we stop it? Is it even possible to stop it now? Ultimately the film is just a story of how all of this news mania happened – a damn good film that will leave you with plenty to consider about how news machines operate.
Alex’s Venice 2026 Rating: 8 out of 10
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