Film
Karen Krizanovich
Delve into the personal life of Charles Dickens and she emerges, revealing another side of an author whose stories seem so wholesome. According to The Invisible Woman author Claire Tomalin, Ralph Fiennes’ film about Charles Dickens’ secret mistress is very different from the book upon which it is based. Scripted by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady and Shame), The Invisible Woman, in which Fiennes stars and well as directs, gives us a more complex view of Dickens-as-man, albeit through a dark lens, literally and metaphorically.Ellen Lawless Ternan (Felicity Jones) lived from 1839 to 1914, yet almost Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Extreme physical transformation is a double-edged sword for actors. Setting aside the metabolic repercussions of shedding huge amounts of weight from an already lean frame, as Matthew McConaughey did for the role of rodeo cowboy and accidental AIDS activist Ron Woodroof, there’s a risk that the aesthetic will distract from the work.This is a performance for which McConaughey is almost guaranteed to net the Best Actor Oscar next month, composing the highest peak yet in what has been one of the most efficient and absolute career turnarounds ever witnessed in Hollywood. It’s a full-blooded Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Le Week-End is the third film written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell to probe late-flowering lust. So empathetically do the duo depict Anne Reid's character in The Mother (2003), Peter O'Toole's in Venus (2006), and now those played by Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent that the unofficial trilogy constitutes a revolt against the cultural hegemony of teen movies.Nick (Broadbent) is a lecturer just fired by his Birmingham poly for making a racist remark to a female student. Initially unaware of his crisis, his wife Meg (Duncan) yearns to quit her job as a secondary school Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The tally of Charles Dickens’s biographers grows ever closer to 100. The English language’s most celebrated novelist repays repeated study, of course, because both his life and his work are so remarkably copious: the novels, the journals, the letters, the readings; the charitable works, the endless walks; the awful childhood, the army of children, the abruptly terminated marriage, the puzzling relationship with two sisters-in-law, the long and clandestine affair.Vanishingly few of those biographers have been women. One of the many virtues of Claire Tomalin’s compact life of Dickens – it just Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A woman tramps the streets of Paris looking for a man. It’s night. It’s raining. She pops into bars asking for him. Everyone knows who he is. He’s been seen, but not recently. Earlier, early in the evening, she was supposed to meet him but he hadn’t turned up. She doesn’t know it, but he’s stuck in the lift of an office block. He thought he’d be in and out of the building in moments. While trapped, the car he’d parked across the street has been taken by a leather-jacketed young tough who brings his girlfriend from a florist’s along for the joyride.Lift to the Scaffold has three strands, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The news that Philip Seymour Hoffman has died at the age of only 46 robs cinema of - almost unarguably - the greatest screen actor of the age, and certainly its outstanding character actor. Where once there was Charles Laughton, or Ernest Borgnine, for the past two decades there has been Philip Seymour Hoffman. They are all great film actors whom fate has fashioned in doughy clumps of misshapen flesh. The matinee idols got the looks and the girls: the character actors got the meatiest roles and the longevity. His death deprives all lovers of cinema of a longer career that would undoubtedly Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The history of motor racing films is littered with detritus. While the sport itself, particularly back in the Sixties and Seventies, undoubtedly pitted man and machine against each other in circumstances where the smallest wrong-headed twitch could be fatal, Hollywood’s response has mostly been turgid: either po-faced, petrol-head fare such as Le Mans, Grand Prix and the Tony Scott/Tom Cruise turkey, Days of Thunder, or affable slapstick gibberish such as The Cannonball Run and Monte Carlo or Bust. This lame record, combined with director Ron Howard’s record of stirring unnecessary added Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Lance Armstrong is a Hollywood villain who just happens to be real. He bullies, lies, manipulates, cheats and destroys lives until righteous crusaders hunt him down and drive a stake through his heart. And that, more or less, will be the plot of the movie Stephen Frears is working on now. Popcorn munchers demand nothing less than a comeuppance for the bad guy. To cite Oscar Wilde, the good end happily, the bad unhappily: that’s what fiction means. It’s not quite what happens in The Armstrong Lie.Alex Gibney, who has made uncompromising films about Enron and WikiLeaks, was the ideal director Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After his outsized triumph as conman Irving Rosenfeld in American Hustle, Christian Bale is gaunt and stringy again (Jennifer Lawrence will be happy to hear) in this minor-keyed, intensely atmospheric story of two brothers in an America that time forgot. It's set in North Braddock, Pennsylvania, a ghost town all but abandoned by its devastated steel industry. "Born down in a dead man's town", as the Boss put it in "Born in the USA". As the camera roams over its poor, pinched houses in the rain, you know nothing good is about to happen here.Bale plays Russell Baze, still clinging to his job at Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Just what kind of beast is Peter Berg's Lone Survivor? A jingoist justification for the continuing conflict in Afghanistan? A cautionary tale questioning the rules of engagement? War porn? An intense vehicle for its talented stars? Or, in fact, a critique of the American war machine which sends young men out to be slaughtered and provides them with scant support? Seemingly improbably, Lone Survivor can be viewed in all of these ways and thus looks set to divide audiences, perhaps along national lines, perhaps along political ones. Only one thing is for certain: it's a film that will get Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The DVD release of this devastating film brings its impact even closer. Watching it at home is a squirm-inducing experience which brings moments where it’s hard to fight the urge to leave the room or put your hands in front of your face. The overpowering effect stems from more than the discomfort of watching the young boys Arbor and Swifty attempting to navigate through a world which is against them, out to exploit them and, ultimately, probably going to exclude them despite the integrity of their friendship.The Selfish Giant hinges on the extraordinary, magnetic presences of Connor Chapman Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who'd have thought that buried deep within the bromance antics of That Awkward Moment, the latest essay in celluloid dude-dom to confirm the notion that guys will be guys, would lurk a Shakespeare comedy? But forsooth, writer-director Tom Gormican's feel-good essay in three lads larking about in New York takes as its inspiration none other than Love's Labour's Lost, that Bardic study in the limits of celibacy and high spirits dampened down near the final curtain by death.Not that it will make a farthing of difference if you don't know your Shakespeare comedies and just want some frat-house, Read more ...