There’s a lovely moment in Danny Boyle’s new film Ink when Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) and Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell) crouch down to touch the pavement on London’s Fleet Street to feel the monstrous rumble of the printing presses below. The Australian proto-disruptor is fresh off the boat and has just poached Lamb from The Mirror, selling his Faustian bargain on the promise of a blank check and an even blanker canvas at The Sun. The movie—a rip-roaring adaptation of James Graham’s award-winning play—follows the swashbuckling years that preceded that fateful night as it draws a convincing line from Lamb’s early successes with the red-top newspaper to the 24-hour sensation cycle that we find ourselves adrift in today.
As didactic and broad-strokes as that might sound, Ink is a good time at the movies—the kind of thing that could easily have been titled The Wolf of Fleet Street (though with “Lamb” also in the mix, I suspect one of the tabloid’s famed copy editors could have come up with something sharper). The screenplay was adapted by Graham himself, and Boyle brings it to life with much of the same verve and energy (and janky camera moves) that made 28 Years Later such a great reminder of his abilities, not to mention one of 2025’s best films.
What Ink doesn’t have is Alex Garland, a writer whose taste for audacious flourishes has always chimed well with Boyle’s Gen X idiosyncrasies. This is a filmmaker who delivered a delirious opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics only to reject knighthood a few months later, and that skepticism of the ruling classes is “inked” all over his latest. The film is at its best when it examines how Lamb—the working-class son of a respected union man—could fall so far from the tree in his attempts to first beat, and later be accepted by, the Fleet Street establishment. (Lamb, of course, would eventually accept his own knighthood in 1980—a moment Boyle treats with admirable disdain and a perfectly calibrated jump-scare.)
That “death of the self by a thousand cuts” has provided the narrative backbone of mogul movies since Citizen Kane, but an even closer comp for Ink would be The Sweet Smell of Success, the cautionary tale in which Tony Curtis played the lapdog to Burt Lancaster’s influential theater critic and ended up selling his soul. You could even line it up as a double feature with Boyle’s own Steve Jobs, an Aaron Sorkin-scripted hagiography that took three bites at Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple guru and turned them into a gripping tale of relentless progress that barely stopped to consider where it might all lead. Jobs, who died in 2011, had the foresight to leave the stage before his industry became the villain, which also meant Boyle was saved from his unfortunate tendency to plateau in the third act.
For all the brio of the opening exchanges and dizzying rise (although, if given the option, I’d keep the Sprints tune and churning machinery and get rid of the Guy Ritchie-style title cards), Ink becomes a more moralizing and recognizable kind of movie as soon as Lamb decides to use a tragedy to the paper’s benefit—an act that almost costs him his job before an uptick in sales proves him right, at least commercially. If the film has a key image, it is one of Lamb’s hand moving The Sun’s logo above its competitors as the world he is creating in real-time starts to burn around him. The play first came to life on the West End in 2017, making it a product of those early Trump years and notable precursor to Succession, a show that constructed its own version of Murdoch in the form of Logan Roy—a character who, in terms of psychological profile, might go down as the defining pop examination of the man.
In Ink, Murdoch is less the focus than the initially reluctant enabler of Lamb’s worst tendencies. When Pearce (a wonderfully coiled performance) is onscreen, we see no major meltdown or shady dealings, only an outsider with a considerable chip on his shoulder and an inability to hit the brakes while his figures are on the rise. Graham traces the roots of their obsession to a press awards gala in 1969, when Lamb was laughed out of the room by Hugh Cudlipp (a great Bertie Carvel, who won a Tony for playing Murdoch in the stage play), his pompous former editor at The Mirror—a scene with portentous shades of Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
For all that, the most surprising thing about Ink is how optimistic it is in its early moments, when the slate was clean and the outsiders (mostly working-class men and women) were finally given a seat at the table. This is evidenced in the introduction of Claire Foy’s Jules Davis, a composite character representing the few female journalists working on Fleet Street at the time. For a brief, clear-skied moment, it all looks like fun and games until one or two decisions let the genie out of the bottle. The closing rush of images—which includes the faces of Andrew Tate, Bonnie Blue, and Elon Musk, along with references to The Sun’s most unforgivable headlines (“Gotcha,” “The Truth”)—offers a sobering confirmation that we can never put it back.
Ink premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will be released in theaters on December 11 and arrive on Netlflix on January 8.
The post Venice Review: Danny Boyle’s Ink Is a Rip-Roaring Look at the Rise of Sensationalism first appeared on The Film Stage.
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