Film
graham.rickson
Still disconcertingly dark, Robert Hamer’s 1949 classic receives a handsome remastering for this reissue. It’s still very, very funny, and the bleak tone sets it apart from the other Ealing comedies. Dennis Price oozes cool charm as Louis Mazzini, an Edwardian draper’s assistant plotting macabre, murderous revenge on the aristocratic family who ostracised his mother for marrying below her station. Price is in almost every scene, and his performance is a miracle of refined understatement. Every tiny gesture tells, and his first-person narrative still sounds fresh and innovative, ostensibly a Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Once upon a time - and for a very long time, at that, under its hard-line Marxist leader, Enva Hoxha - world cinema was represented in Albania by Norman Wisdom. Today, 26 years after Hoxha's death and 21 years after the fall of Communism there, Durrës, the country's second largest city, has just hosted an international film festival whose guests included Francis Ford Coppola, Jiří Menzel and Claudia Cardinale. Times are changing, it would seem, and Albania is emerging at last from its wretched isolation into sophisticated cosmopolitan glamour. Though not quite as quickly or smoothly as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On 9 September theartsdesk, Britain's first professional arts journalism site, will be two years old. To celebrate we’re holding a live debate with four leading performers during the Kings Place Festival. An actor, a singer, a dancer and an instrumentalist will share their different experiences of performance. Join us, live or online, for a stellar event.Toby Jones actor | Mara Carlyle singer | Mahan Esfahani harpsichordistBridgett Zehr ballerinaLeading performers in different art forms join us for a live debate and lunchtime reception in the Kings Place Festival.Actor Toby Jones, acclaimed Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I wonder if it’s possible for a film festival to kick off with a bigger bang. For your first three competition films to be directed by one of the world’s biggest movie stars, one of its most celebrated (and controversial) auteurs and arguably the world’s most famous woman, is no mean feat. And two of these films are pretty damn good. Italy’s economy might be down there with the dregs of Europe, but its premier film festival, now in its 68th year, shows no sign of being knocked off its perch.To call George Clooney a movie star does the man an injustice, of course, since he’s well on the path Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Days of Heaven made Terrence Malick’s legend. Released four years after his relatively conventional lovers-on-the-run debut Badlands (1974), it gave a similar story transcendental themes and images of painterly gorgeousness. Then he directed nothing else for 20 years. Choosing not to engage with interviews or celebrity, like Pynchon and Salinger he vanished into mystery and silence. Relative productivity since means this Malick-approved new print is issued in the wake of his fifth film, The Tree of Life. Badlands is the Malick you’re most likely to have seen, a Springsteen-referenced slice of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A master of visual cinema, primus inter pares, Sergei Paradjanov was a law unto himself in Soviet cinema of the 1960-1980s; his body of work from the Caucasus in that period is as visually innovative and brightly colourful as anything in cinema. A “magician in cinema”, indeed. Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates is being reissued with very welcome and full additional commentary.Pomegranates, from 1968, was the second film he made in the region of his birth, and tells the story of Armenian national poet Sayat Nova. Its intertitles are extracts from the poet’s verse, and it loosely follows Read more ...