Ink

Danny Boyle brings his customary energy to James Graham’s adaptation of his own stage play, which flies along quicker than paper through a printing press. Beginning in 1969, Ink charts Rupert Murdoch’s recruitment of Albert “Larry” Lamb, a Yorkshireman who at the time was working at the Daily Mail’s northern outpost in Manchester. Lamb (given sharp intensity by Jack O’Connell) sees the opportunity to craft something different, with Murdoch (Guy Pearce) essentially giving him free rein even despite his own reservations, so long as the circulation figures are heading in the right direction.

When Lamb came to the helm, The Sun was considered a failed title, selling “only” 650,000 copies, a reminder of just how newspapers have declined since, as the best-selling UK paper as of January 2026 – the Daily Mail – shifted about 620,000. Given a healthy salary and a Jaguar, Lamb has virtually no time to recruit, but assembles a band of excellent journalists who are finding they’ve climbed as high as they can at their current outlets. One of the interesting elements of Ink is that it is not just money that talks, although there’s no doubt that is a factor, but also the opportunity to be top dog in a business that remained riven with sexism and classism.

Among those he recruits are his deputy Bernard Shrimsley (Patrick Kennedy), photographer Beverley Goodway (Angus Imrie) and Jules Davies (Claire Foy) – a rather underwritten fictionalised composite character but who is at least partially a nod to real-life women’s editor Joyce Hopkirk – with whom he is having an affair. Although initially taking its lead from the then-best-selling Mirror, run by editor-in-chief Hugh Cudlipp (Bertie Carvel), Lamb is soon trying to tap more into what he and his “ship of undesirables" believe the people of Britain want. All this is spurred on by disdain from Murdoch and resentment for Cudlipp, who Lamb had previously worked for as a sub before his stint on the Mail.

It’s out with the international news and in with the telly features and horoscopes, with sensationalism, including italics and exclamation marks (or “dogs’ cocks” as they are known in industry jargon – one of several bits of terminology neatly stitched into the script). Every time the words “win”, “free” or “love” make it on to the front page, everyone gets a bonus. Boyle turns Lamb and his team into outsiders you want to root for, using Dutch angles and quick fire cutaways from Fin Oates in the early scenes to smooth over places where the script gets ‘talky’.

Given that the Sun became known as much for its visuals – particularly the installation of the controversial Page 3 girl, which is covered, or uncovered, here – it’s a perfect match for the kinetic, splashy and adventurous style adopted by Boyle and cinematographer Alwin H Küchler (whose CV includes Ratcatcher, Sunshine and Morvern Callar). Ink shows how addictive the numbers game can be, even as the stakes get high and the stories close to home with a heinous crime that affects Sun executive and Murdoch’s friend Alick Mackay (Jonathan Hyde) and his wife (Lucy Russell). It also captures the hedonism that was often present in paper offices of the time, where late night shifts often led to sex, drugs and, in particular, alcohol.

The paper world recreated is generally authentic, including the very separate realms occupied by the printers who ran the presses and the journalists, who would meet at publication time over what was known as “the stone”, where the pages were laid out (newspapers to this day still have “off stone” times). There’s a nod to the Wapping dispute that ultimately broke the printers’ union’s huge influence on Fleet Street up to that time although Boyle’s film is not something that really hangs about for the politics. What it does make you realise is just how seductive Lamb’s style was, not just for him but for his readers, and it might surprise some viewers to find themselves with a modicum of sympathy of Murdoch’s less sensationalist position in all of this. That could be a sticking point as while Murdoch may not have been part of the establishment he sought to disrupt at the time, he has gone on to have a huge newspaper baron and later TV mogul effect, even if you don’t believe, as the paper itself put it that “it was the Sun wot won it” for the Conservatives John Major.

Ink does show, however, that sensationalism can have consequences, leading us by the hand from Lamb to what would become Kelvin MacKenzie’s arguably even more tawdry approach to tabloids and, from there, to the modern age of influencers and fake news. It’s sting in the tail is that it urges us to remember that journalists serve up what the public wants and that perhaps we should be careful of what we wish for.

Ink was reviewed out of San Sebastian Film Festival, where it was the Surprise Film.

Reviewed on: 25 Sep 2026