Film
theartsdesk
Two films with a East European flavour, Katalin Varga and Tales from the Golden Age, are among our March selection, which also includes the lovely, bittersweet Irish drama Kisses. Our US release (available worldwide, of course, by mail-order) is Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas with succulent extras. Alastair Sim stars in Guy Hamilton's 1954 film of An Inspector Calls, while the late Edward Woodward lives on in the Callan box-set. The footballer-producers Ashley Cole and Rio Ferdinand score a resplendent own goal in our stinker, Dead Man Running.Films we have covered previously, including Fantastic Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The opening scene of Martin Scorsese's new film - a storm-tossed ferry buffeting its way to an isolated island off America's East Coast - bears an unmissable resemblance to that of Roman Polanski's The Ghost. So too does its premise, of a vulnerable young man who falls under the sway of a powerful, indefinably sinister older one. Both are by senior directors who have bounced back from crises, professional and personal; both derive from popular thrillers (Scorsese's is based on a bestseller by Dennis Lehane) that twist and turn their way towards thumping third-act revelations. Yet could any Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems both Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass felt it was time to leave the Bourne franchise on the shelf for a while, fearing they would corner themselves into making The Bourne Redundancy. Instead, they have transposed their working partnership into this Iraq war saga. The result is a fast-moving conspiracy thriller, but with an underpinning of actualité in the way Greengrass alludes to a war waged on a false premise, and spotlights the criminal ignorance and stupidity of American attempts to rebuild Iraq. These latter aspects of Brian Helgeland’s screenplay derive from the book Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is this a good idea? It has been announced that Ralph Fiennes is to begin work as a director. Not that he is forsaking his more familiar job description in the mean time. For his debut behind the camera, he will also be in front of the camera in the modest, unchallenging part of Coriolanus. Yes, Fiennes is returning to a role that he first played on stage 10 years ago.That was when the Almeida Theatre was in an expansionist phase and had moved into the derelict Gainsborough Studios in Shoreditch. Where Hitchcock had once filmed, in recent years carpets had been stored. The Almeida took it on Read more ...
josh.spero
Variety, the most venerable entertainment trade journal in America, is sacking its chief film and theatre critics, including the man for whose film reviews many people read the magazine, Todd McCarthy.According to a leaked internal memo from editor Tim Gray to editorial staff, “It doesn’t make economic sense to have full-time reviewers, but Todd [McCarthy, chief film critic], Derek [Elley, senior film critic] and Rooney [David Rooney, chief theatre critic] have been asked to continue as freelancers.” The memo prefaces this by saying: “Today’s changes won’t be noticed by readers,” which Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When roused, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the sullen, leather-clad, metal-pierced heroine ofThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is as ferocious as the panther her physical presence evokes. Forced to perform oral sex on her legal guardian, then raped by him, she returns to his apartment, fells him with a stun gun, binds him naked, makes him scream with a dildo, plays him an incriminating “candid camera” video of his attack on her, and tattoos “I am a sadist pig and a rapist” on his chest. Well, you may conclude, he had it coming.It’ll be curious to see if the planned Hollywood version Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For scalpel-sharp dissection of the most vapid parts of Hollywood/LA life, told with low-budget digital flexibility that itself critiques studio indulgences, British director Bernard Rose is your man. He hit the note most viscerally in Ivansxtc a decade ago with a story of the drug-induced implosion of one of the city’s top agenting talents. As parallels with a real-life career melt-down were all too obvious to the in-crowd, sourcing to the Tolstoy story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” may have crept in as a cover-up.Rose is back with Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata, as well as Ivansxtc lead Danny Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's appropriate, given that the Oscars remain the mother of all awards shows, that Sunday night's ceremony made a point of honouring both a mother from hell (Mo'Nique in Precious) and another from Inspirational Movie heaven (Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side). But it was clear there was one thespian earth-mother who reigned supreme as a long ceremony went on. And on. And on. That, of course, is Meryl Streep, now the most-nominated actress in Oscar history and a touchstone of sorts throughout the evening. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin may have been the night's nominal hosts, but Streep Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Kathryn Bigelow made Hollywood history last night at the 82nd Academy Awards by becoming the first woman to be named Best Director for The Hurt Locker, which also won for Best Picture. Her brilliant, low-budget Iraq war drama was the big winner at the ceremony, bagging six statuettes as against three Oscars for the co-favourite, Avatar, the sci-fi extravaganza directed by Bigelow's ex-husband James Cameron. The four acting awards were utterly unsurprising and it was a lean night indeed for the Brits, although the respected costume designer Sandy Powell - previously a laureate for Shakespeare Read more ...
sheila.johnston
High summer in Paris. Jazz plays on the soundtrack, the boulevards are bright, leafy and humming and Grégoire, a good-looking man in his mid-forties, scuttles along the street, mobile phone glued to ear. He's troubleshooting on a truly international scale: the Koreans are arriving mob-handed, the Georgians are so demanding and that nutty Swedish director's budget is spiralling out of control. Grégoire is a movie producer, and Father of My Children starts out as a light-hearted, slightly madcap addition to the capacious genre of films about film-making. Slowly, though, it shades into something Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Neil Jordan’s smaller films have often betrayed a fascination with wispy visitants from the borderlands of gender. In The Crying Game the beautiful young call girl turns out, in one of cinema’s more jawdropping reveals, to be somewhat less she than he. Breakfast on Pluto found Cillian Murphy’s girly boy swishing around working-class Dublin in frocks and furs. And now comes Ondine, Jordan’s reimagining of the watery fable transplanted to the rugged shores of Cork. In this mystic Celtic wilderness a creature with wavy tresses spun as if from luxuriant silk wanders lost among the secret coves. Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Must rush, have to hurry: like the fretful White Rabbit with his pocket watch, fans have been eagerly anticipating the arrival of Tim Burton's Alice, which finally arrives in cinemas this week, albeit for a limited period following the controversial decision to push the film out quickly on DVD. Mindful of this, I hastened to the IMAX, Waterloo to catch it in 3D, larger than life and twice as natural, on the very biggest screen available. 30,000 people have already pre-booked tickets for Alice at the London IMAX. Is it worth the wait?The action is set within a framing story. Alice, now aged 19 Read more ...