Film
Jasper Rees
It’s always the second-rate fiction which makes first-rate films, because there’s nothing to lose but plot. Midnight’s Children, lest anyone be allowed to forget, is first-rate fiction. It has won the Booker, the Booker of Bookers and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes and is listed somewhere or other as one of the Great Books of the 20th Century. That year you missed the broadcast it probably won Miss World. The novel has been sitting around on the runway awaiting adaptation since the late 1990s, when production in Sri Lanka was pulled at the last minute. To help it along this time round, it Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Berberian Sound Studio has the quirky flavour of an academic treatise on shlock horror with lively slide illustrations. Peter Strickland’s claustrophobic homage to the Italian giallo – in which diabolical dismemberings are perpetrated upon female innocents - would seem an odd leap from Katalin Varga, his brooding revenge drama set in rural Romania. But both films bring an outsider’s all but ethnographic eye to the rituals of Euro-barbarity. The game changer is that Berberian Sound Studio is also funny.A meek British sound engineer called, improbably, Gilderoy is hired by an Italian film Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fans of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels are spitting feathers that their fictional hero is being played by Tom Cruise. This is not least because in the books, Reacher is a hulking fellow built like a giant redwood with fists the size of dustbins (he's six foot five and 250 pounds). And probably not a Scientologist. Tom is 5'7" and weighs practically nothing.But as ever, the obsessive Cruise has gone into the project with beady-eyed gung-ho-ness, and if he doesn't measure up to anyone's ideal of Reacherhood, there's no doubting his energy and commitment. At 50, he's been putting in Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Thanks first to a David Holmes cover version then to some recent reissues of his records, I knew the approximate story of Detroit singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez. Roughly speaking: intelligent but borderline down-and-out Detroit musician is discovered, makes two amazing albums in the early 1970s, fails to sell anything, and turns his back on the industry to find steady work and raise a family.Meanwhile his records become the centre of a cult among white liberals in South Africa and symbol of the struggle against Apartheid. South Africans assume he's dead, and thanks to some industry Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Cinemagoers with an aversion to musicals need not fear, as in Pitch Perfect most of the singing is in a sane context, rather than its characters breaking into lavish routines in the street. After the fun but exhaustingly naff Rock of Ages, this comes as something of a relief. And if its chart pop mash-ups and campus antics seem squarely targeted at the teenage and twenty-something market, Pitch Perfect broadens its appeal shrewdly with some cross-generational acerbic and offbeat humour.The first thing Pitch Perfect gets right is its cast. Oscar and Tony nominated actress Anna Kendrick ( Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Blessed with the finest (and most infuriatingly catchy) soundtrack of any Christmas film, Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 movie-musical Meet Me in St Louis is a festive classic of a simpler, happier time. Small girls roam the streets in safety getting up to all kinds of wholesome mischief, bigger girls sing songs around the piano and fall for the boy next door. As a cinematic metaphor for the virtues of the small-town life it’s enough to make any commuter swap their season ticket for picket-fence.“We don’t have to come here on a train or stay in a hotel, it’s right in our own home town, right here Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A film for those who see the festive period as a never-ending trudge from bar to bed via a shedload of booze, Terry Zwigoff’s delightfully deviant offering from 2003 gives us a trash-talking, beer-slugging Father Christmas, unimprovably played by Billy Bob Thornton. This chaotic Santa becomes the unlikely guardian of a troubled child. Wildly funny and oddly cheering, Bad Santa puts the crass in Christmas.Bad Santa is brazenly drunken from start to finish, it even begins in a bar. Willie (Thornton) is a misanthropic, alcohol-dependent, suicidal safe-cracker. For the past seven Christmases he’s Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s not a real tiger, is it? Well, sometimes, actually, it is. In director Ang Lee’s long-awaited adaptation of Yan Martel’s feel-good parable of 2001, The Life of Pi, we learn that real tigers are good swimmers and even the best CG programme in the world would find it hard, now anyway, to digitally reproduce a big, wet, muscular cat that wants to eat the hero.Beginning with the elder Pi Patel – played by Irrfan Khan, a man blessed with a face that seems to know more than your face – an amazing story of magic and hope is told to bedazzled Canadian pre-novelist (Rafe Spall). As a youth, Pi Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Thanks to its unalloyed Dickensianism and Alastair Sim’s wondrous Ebenezer, 1951’s Scrooge is the definitive adaptation of A Christmas Carol – so richly atmospheric it has rendered all other versions irrelevant. Forcefully presenting Boz’s themes – the spirit of Christian charity should be universally embraced at Christmas and it’s never too late for a humbugging old misanthrope to change his attitudes – Brian Desmond Hurst’s movie may seem unsophisticated alongside The Magnificent Ambersons and It’s a Wonderful Life, but it is, undoubtedly, the best British Yuletide movie.Noel Langley (who Read more ...
graeme.thomson
David Bowie already had a bit of previous with Christmas, of course, after pa-rum-pa-pumpum-ing through the tinsel with Bing back in 1977. He plays a very different kind of drummer boy in Nagisa Oshima’s uneven but oddly haunting 1983 film, in which he stars alongside Tom Conti (last seen in Miranda, of all things) and Ryuichi Sakamoto.Bowie is Major Jack Celliers, one of four military men, each one trapped in very different ways, in a Japanese POW camp on Java in 1942. While Conti's John Lawrence is the film's moral compass, his rancour laced with decency and respect as he clashes with Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You don’t need to know that Bernard Rose’s Boxing Day is an adaptation of the Tolstoy story Master and Man, but it does help - somewhat. You may well know it anyway, given that it’s the third film in a loose series that Rose started just more than a decade ago with Ivansxtc, a dark satire on Hollywood’s agenting world and human burnout based on the writer’s lacerating The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The Kreutzer Sonata followed (less successfully, I thought) from Tolstoy’s story of the same name about the corrosion that jealousy brings to a relationship. All have Danny Huston in the lead role.They Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the early years of the talkies, they sure did a lot of talking, and no actor mastered the tricky art of gabbling on screen quite like the young James Stewart. The Shop Around the Corner (1940) was a perfect vehicle for the versatile but somehow always gawky all-American everyman who had starred most recently as Frank Capra’s leading man in You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939).And it's all talk here. Ernst Lubitsch took a frothy 1937 stage play by Hungarian-born naturalised American Miklós László, known in English as Parfumerie, and turned it into a Read more ...