'Ink' Gives the Tabloid an Origin Story, and Danny Boyle a Loud One

London, 1969. Fleet Street is a mile of printing presses and pubs, and the papers that come off it are run by men who went to the same schools and lunch at the same clubs. An Australian buys a broadsheet nobody wants, a failing title called The Sun, and hands it to an editor the establishment has never taken seriously. His orders are simple: make people buy it. So the editor reaches for crime, royals and skin, and the men at the clubs stop laughing about a year too late.

That's the true story under "Ink," Danny Boyle's adaptation of James Graham's 2017 play, and the film has the cast to carry it. Guy Pearce, who spent "Memento" (2000) tattooing notes onto himself and "The Brutalist" (2024) bankrolling an architect, plays Rupert Murdoch. Jack O'Connell, the coiled center of "Starred Up" (2013) and one of the best things in "Sinners" (2025), plays Larry Lamb, the editor who did the work. Claire Foy, who wore the crown for two seasons of "The Crown," plays Jules Davies, a composite of the women reporters who worked at The Sun at the time. Graham wrote the screenplay himself.

The trailer has the energy of a newsroom on deadline and one bullet-time shot that TheWrap likened to Boyle's own "28 Years Later" (2025). This is the man who opened "Trainspotting" (1996) at a full sprint down Princes Street, a director who never met a quiet scene he couldn't speed up, and a story about selling newspapers to people who didn't think they wanted one suits him. Alwin H. Küchler shot it; Daniel Pemberton, who scored Boyle's "Steve Jobs," wrote the music.

It's had a good festival run.

"Ink" opened the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in competition, then played Telluride, London and Toronto, and New York magazine's Bilge Ebiri called it "Boyle's best film in decades." That's a big claim for the man with an Oscar for "Slumdog Millionaire" (2008). It's also the kind of headline the film's hero would have loved.

The real history gives the third act its weight. Within a year of Murdoch's purchase, The Sun was running a topless model on Page 3, and by 1978 it was the bestselling daily in Britain. The tabloid habits we live with now, the celebrity scoop and the royal leak, have a birth certificate, and this film knows where it's filed. It's a sharp companion to Netflix's other period bet, the eight-hour "The Age of Innocence," and a far louder one than Almodóvar's quiet Christmas film opening this month.