Ben Allen

London

Culture Editor @BritishGQ. Dubliner in London. Words for The Guardian, Dazed, Conde Nast Traveller & more. [email protected]

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Articles

Cannes Sealed It: It’s Time to Finally Get Mubi

3 weeks ago | gqmiddleeast.com | Ben Allen |Ben Allen

I’ll be the first to admit that I had little faith in Mubi’s ascendancy until quite recently. When it launched in 2009, it seemed like a sweet little idea – a streaming service for arthouse movie geeks! – that was doomed to obscurity. I thought it would be one for people in their 20s who think they’re more into film than they actually are and would inevitably cancel their membership when they realise Reacher is about to arrive on Amazon Prime Video.
Haim quit caring about that

3 weeks ago | gq-magazine.co.uk | Ben Allen

Walking around California’s San Fernando Valley with the Haim sisters is like touring Compton with Kendrick Lamar, or New Jersey with Bruce Springsteen. Danielle, Este and Alana Haim are the musicians from “the Valley”, and its yellow-hued streets have been the backdrop of their work for their whole career. (“They’re the San Fernando Valley’s house band,” says the director Paul Thomas Anderson, one of their closest collaborators and a fellow Valley native.) So, they’re kinda big dogs around here.
Cannes sealed it: It’s time to finally get Mubi

1 month ago | gq-magazine.co.uk | Ben Allen

I’ll be the first to admit that I had little faith in Mubi’s ascendancy until quite recently. When it launched in 2009, it seemed like a sweet little idea – a streaming service for arthouse movie geeks! – that was doomed to obscurity. I thought it would be one for people in their 20s who think they’re more into film than they actually are and would inevitably cancel their membership when they realise Reacher is about to arrive on Amazon Prime Video.
Kaitlyn Dever: “The harder the job, the more therapeutic it is”

1 month ago | gq-magazine.co.uk | Ben Allen

Three years ago, Kaitlyn Dever came across a YouTube video that would help her through the worst period of her life. It’s a clip from Stephen Colbert’s late-night interview with Andrew Garfield, which stands out from all other late-night interviews because it swaps the usual translucent banter for genuine vulnerability. In it, Colbert asks Garfield how his work helped him deal with the loss of his mother, who had passed away from pancreatic cancer a couple of years prior.
Cannes 2025’s Trophée Chopard winner Finn Bennett on A Knight of Seven Kingdoms and his Warfare tattoo

1 month ago | gq-magazine.co.uk | Ben Allen

Finn Bennett hikes up his suit trousers to show me the words “Call On Me” scrawled just above his knee. The rest of his castmates on Warfare – A24’s bracing war movie which features the strongest collection of young male movie stars in recent history – had gotten the same tattoo somewhere between the film's production and the press tour. But Bennett avoided getting his own inking until 3am on the night of the premiere, when the group happened upon a late-night tattoo parlour.
Ambika Mod on post-One Day career comparisons with Leo Woodall: “There’s a privilege there that I don’t have access to"

1 month ago | gq-magazine.co.uk | Ben Allen

A few minutes before I’m scheduled to speak to Ambika Mod in Cannes, a tweet pops up on my timeline. Leo Woodall, Mod’s co-lead on last year’s supernova One Day, had just been announced as one of the cast members in A24’s Antony Bourdain biopic, Tony. Quote-tweeting the announcement, one user wrote: “it’s quite sad to see that despite being in incredibly popular, high performing shows the poc women are never booked as much as their white counterparts.
The Four Seasons' ending is unnecessarily cruel

1 month ago | gq-magazine.co.uk | Ben Allen

Major spoilers for The Four Seasons to follow. TV has not been very chill lately. Just think about it for a second: all the must-watch shows this year – Adolescence, The Last of Us, Severance – are laden with death and misery. Even the comedies are anxiety-inducing. Take, for example, The Studio, Apple's show about Seth Rogen’s film studio head, who seems to get in an awkward wrestling match with a different A-lister in every single episode while the jazz-drum soundtrack goes off.
What's going on with Mobland's Irish accents?

2 months ago | gq-magazine.co.uk | Ben Allen

Look – I’m not saying that English people have no idea what Irish people – you know, the ones just over the water – sound like. But I’m not not saying that. As a Dub living in the UK for fifteen years, I’ve borne witness to more slaughterings of my homeland’s variously colourful accents that I care to count. It usually goes like this: a correct syllable here or there is drowned out by some mishmash of the vintage durdy-durdy of the north and the old school diddly-eye of the south.
Inside that brutal, heart-shredding The Last of Us death

2 months ago | gq-magazine.co.uk | Ben Allen

Major spoilers for The Last of Us season two episode two to follow. As the team behind The Last of Us prepared to crack the back of season two, a unique challenge presented itself: How do you do justice to the biggest, most devastating death in video game history? When roughly half of your audience is anticipating your next big move, how do you live up to their enormous expectations, while allowing the TV show to be its own distinct thing? Well, for starters, you call Mark Mylod.
Kieran Culkin’s Oscars speech squashed his Jeremy Strong beef (but they bleeped it out)

Mar 3, 2025 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Ben Allen

Kieran Culkin has given so many awards acceptance speeches in the last couple of years that I reckon I could have a good stab at writing one. The beats are straightforward: Sarcastic opener, then a sincere handbrake turn thanking his manager Emily Gerson Saines, ending with an anecdote about his wife Jazz. It’s good, it’s charming, it works. He is mercifully brief, too (two and a half minutes compared to Adrien Brody’s five-minute epic later in the night, which was begging for an intermission).