“Fleet Flick From Fleet Street!” That could be the Sun headline for Danny Boyle’s boisterous adaptation of James Graham’s 2017 play about the transformation of the stodgy British newspaper into a tabloid sensation. Tabloid Thrills! Fast-Paced Action! Eye-Popping Pictures! These elements, present in pretty much any Boyle film (Trainspotting! Slumdog Millionaire! 28 Days Later!), find a perfect fit in Ink. Set in a vividly detailed late-1960s London, the film recreates the lightning-in-a-bottle moment in 1969 when two outsiders in the newspaper world, Australian ex-pat publisher Rupert Murdoch and rogue editor Larry Lamb, teamed up to create a lively daily paper that broke boundaries and, along with its American counterpart The New York Post, catered to a working-class readership to help shape and stoke the contemporary British and American conservative movements.
Ink opened on stage in London in 2017, barely a year after Brexit, and on Broadway in 2019, deep into the presidency of a real-estate tycoon whose rise was hypercharged by his masterful control of the tabloids (Trump’s affair with Marla Maples gave The Post one of its legendary headlines, “Best Sex I Ever Had”). New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley wrote in 2019 that the play “foretells the age of populist media in which we now live and squirm.” Ink seemed then, as it does even more during Trump 2.0, to speak to the current moment.
Like the big, flashy stage productions that preceded it, Boyle’s film is a mechanical wonder. It draws stylistically from the pulsing, percussive rhythms of the heavy metal machinery, like clanging typewriters and rumbling printing presses, that filled the pre-digital newspaper offices of yore. With its abundance of sharply tailored, stylish clothing, Boyle’s Ink is a celebration of Savile Row as much as of Fleet Street. And propelled by its banger needle drops and thrumming score by Daniel Pemberton, it’s as visceral as the hard-copy tabloid papers sold by the millions in newsstands’ heyday.
Guy Pearce plays Murdoch as a keenly ambitious, tightly wound businessman torn between the rectitude and propriety that comes with a desire to fit in and be part of the club, and the mercilessness of a spurned suitor who wants to crush his competition. But Ink’s pulsing heart is actually the ruthless, resourceful editor Larry Lamb, whom Murdoch hires to reinvent The Sun. Lamb’s relentless drive, and ultimately his hubris, are thrillingly embodied by Jack O’Connell, who oozes charm as he rounds up his samurai staff of reporters with Toshiro Mifune-like focus. O’Connell first made his mark as a manic teen delinquent in the British TV drama Skins (2009-10), and Angelina Jolie deserves credit for giving him his first leading film role in Unbroken (2014). Building on the sinuous charm of his Irish-American vampire in Sinners (2025) and cult-like gang leader in this year’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Ink should function to propel him to major stardom.
It is irresistible fun to watch Lamb and his band of misfits brainstorm the Sun toward its punchy new identity: snappy headlines, horoscopes, page-two weather reports, a women’s section with a keen focus on sex (including a serialization of The Sensuous Woman), and a steady flow of shocking crime stories. Standing out among Lamb’s dream team is Jules Davis (Claire Foy), who makes the most out of a somewhat conflicted role as Lamb’s mistress and the paper’s spokesperson for women’s independence. In a film that draws on the fast-talking brio of classic newspaper films like His Girl Friday (1940), Davis is a somewhat subservient version of Hildy Johnson.
Boyle also understands that for the film to work, it must walk a tightrope. One can’t help but root for the Sun’s scrappy staff and celebrate the paper’s soaring circulation. Charismatic as they are, however, Lamb and Murdoch are antiheroes whose legacies and success are built on questionable ethics and a coarsening of public discourse. All the President’s Men this is not. The film’s ominous final section focuses on two troubling episodes in the Sun’s history. First, there is the kidnapping of Muriel McKay, who was mistaken by the perpetrators as Murdoch’s wife but was, in fact, the wife of a top Sun editor. By cashing in on the case’s sordid personal details, one has to wonder what harm the paper also contributed. And second is the introduction of the “Page Three Girls,” a vulgar attempt by Lamb to test both the censors and Murdoch’s own sense of propriety through photographs of topless women.
A too-tidy montage at the end of Ink rushes to connect The Sun’s reckless, attention-grabbing strategies to the pernicious fake populism of Fox News and the click-bait frenzy of today’s entire social media environment. But as we watch the circulation numbers for The Sun soar, there’s also no denying that just under Ink’s rollicking surface is a sober understanding of the way that populist media grew to become a behemoth that ultimately serves the interests of the wealthy.
Published as part of TIFF 2026 — Dispatch 5.
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