Film
Kieron Tyler
Although tinged throughout with blue, the Norwegian drama King of Devil’s Island is so grim it might as well be grey. Basing it on real events pitches the film as a cautionary tale, but the message is hard to determine. Everything shies away from explanation. Norwegians might have the context, but the rest of us need to fill in the gaps.Although filmed in Estonia, King of Devil’s Island (Kongen av Bastøy) is set on the island of Bastøy, at the seaward end of the Oslo fjord. Currently, the mile-square island is in use as a prison held as a model of humane rehabilitation. In 1915 it was a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Anyone familiar with the 1915 spy thriller The 39 Steps and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1935 adaptation – fleet, déclassé, and oneiric – knows the movie is a superior piece of entertainment to John Buchan’s coincidence-laden potboiler, which as a gentleman's adventure is smugly establishmentarian. In its depiction of a pre-war Britain mired in political complacency yet socially discontent, the film better caught the tenor of the times.Passive everyman Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is accosted by an exotic spy (Lucy Mannheim) as he pushes through a panicked mob in a London music hall and brings Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk has been voted Specialist Journalism Site of 2012 at the Online Media Awards. In a celebratory dinner at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium recognising "the best and boldest of online news-based creativity and also the most original", The Guardian were the major winners with five awards, but even their new Data Store section was outgunned in the Specialist Journalism category by The Arts Desk.In a category contested by 11 nominees, The Arts Desk's prize was the first of two given by the judges acclaiming two specialist sites "for very different reasons" - the other went to The Economist Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can your BFF also be the father (or mother) of your child, not to mention the lover with whom you share both body and bed once all platonic constraints have been cast aside? It's in the DNA of the Hollywood romcom to contrive suspense out of so many foregone conclusions, and I doubt anyone watching Friends with Kids will be in any way surprised at the outcome. What filmgoers should respond to are the wisdom and wit that writer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt gently imparts along the way to a finish that may make even the most child-phobic start to choke up. As unpredictable in its details as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Thirty years ago the British were coming. So cried Colin Welland rallyingly from the stage of the Academy Awards, having just accepted an Oscar for best screenplay. And now Chariots of Fire is coming again, twice. An energetic stage reincarnation has sprinted round the block at Hampstead Theatre and now jogs along to the Gielgud, where it will continue to leave barely a dry eye in the house. And then there is the film itself, out shortly for another turn on the red carpet in this Olympic season.Hugh Hudson (b 1936), debut director of the film, wizened producer of the play, has another Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Claude François doesn’t have the hipster cachet of Serge Gainsbourg, but he did lead an extraordinary life and died young. He also wrote “Comme d’habitude” which was Anglicised to become “My Way”. His live shows were spectacular, the women he married, dated and flirted with were striking, he had tax debts, a father who rejected him and his chosen career, and a mother addicted to gambling. It’s more than enough to fuel this two-and-a-half hour biopic.But Cloclo isn’t going to lead to an Anglophone embracing of François – universally known by the nickname Cloclo. However strong the image, his Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Fully retitling a foreign-language film for international release is a risky business. But it works very well with Russian director Alexei Fedorchenko’s melancholic drama Silent Souls.The original Russian title was Ovsyanki, the name of a bird that is here translated as bunting, though yellowhammer would work as well. I had to look up on the RSPB site to learn details of either species, and for the latter I learnt, “often seen perched on top of a hedge or bush, singing”. Silent Souls does indeed sing, never noisily, with incremental effect as it moves on to its tragic - but finally not tragic Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Young Adult is the category of fiction that teenagers read, and it’s where Charlize Theron’s extremely damaged character in this odd film has made her well-rewarded living (albeit as the ghost behind the name on a popular series of “young adult” fiction). In that literary genre teenagers’ love of contorted, messy living and big questions whose answer is likely to be “whatever” makes for frequent critical debates about what’s right, or what matters, and Jason Reitman’s film homes in a prime example of a not-that-young adult who’s never grown up and can't answer any of that.Mavis Gary is Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
At his studio near White City in West London (he did say it was Notting Hill) Ilan Eshkeri’s is adding a scratchy cello to a key moment in Ralph Fiennes film of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. It’s the moment the inhabitants of Rome realise that Coriolanus, an exile, is about to attack them. It is, he says of the suitably ominous sound, “bent out of tune, weird – I’m getting into the sounds of breathing, I like a lot of dirt.” In the studio is his producer Steve McLaughlin, and there are a couple of assistants bustling around.Although not (yet, anyway) a household name, it’s a fair bet that you Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Stephen Frears is one of a trio of great old British lags who’ve been knocking out films for the past four decades. But while you know where you are with Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, with their deadly serious careers as auteurs, Frears is a more elusive figure. A directorial pragmatist, he has always unfussily followed the scent of a good story.And it’s a feature of his career that he often comes back for a second sniff, triumphantly with The Queen, which revisited the Tony Blair he and Michael Sheen first put on screen in The Deal. But sometimes the scent runs dry. After My Beautiful Laundrette Read more ...
fisun.guner
Fresh from the final Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe plays a grieving widower with a four-year-old son in this truly spine-tingling adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 gothic horror novel. Produced by the newly resurrected Hammer Films, written by Jane Goldman and ably directly by James Watkins, the film dispenses with the framing narrative device familiar to the genre, in which the story is related some time after the event. Instead we plunge straight in with our encounter with Arthur Kipps, the young solicitor sent up from London to a bleak coastal town to sort out the affairs of the recently Read more ...