Ink film dazzles as Boyle charts the birth of tabloid mania

Ink film: Boyle’s return to form

When Danny Boyle steps back behind the camera, the result is a kinetic portrait of 1969 Fleet Street, where a young Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) and the audacious Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell) gamble on a dying newspaper. Within the opening minutes the film drops the audience onto the rumble of printing presses, a visual metaphor that fuels the narrative’s relentless pace. Ink film captures the moment the British tabloid turned its eye to sensationalism, birthing the infamous Page 3 and a sales surge of ↑ 12%.

“They were selling stories, not news,”

a fictional editor remarks, echoing contemporary analyses from Reuters. The first act follows Lamb’s crew – a veteran deputy, a weary sports editor, and Jules (Claire Foy), a fire‑brand journalist who pushes feminist content onto the “women’s page.” Their formula mixes sports, weather and, crucially, television listings, a gap the paper exploits to climb ahead of the Daily Mirror.

Ink film’s second half turns gritty

as a real‑life murder case infiltrates the newsroom, forcing Lamb to decide between sensational headlines and journalistic duty. Boyle layers the thriller with controlled bursts of energy, never letting the story lose momentum. Pearce’s Murdoch is charismatic, never a caricature, while O’Connell’s Lamb is simultaneously disreputable and principled – a man who prefers being right over being right. Ink film ends on a sober note, hinting that the appetite for scandal set the stage for today’s click‑driven media economy, a trend that recent Bloomberg reports shows a ↓ 5% decline in traditional newspaper circulation.

Analysis by: Donovan Trent

Global Sports Analytics Director