Film Reviews
Nixon in China, Metropolitan Opera HD LiveSunday, 13 February 2011
Metcentric New Yorkers tend to think an opera hasn’t achieved classic status until it arrives at their vast inner sanctum. Whereas other cities worldwide know that the inimitable Peter Sellars production of grand opera’s last masterpiece (to date) has become a virtual brand since its 1987 Houston premiere. John Adams's first, and biggest, opera was an obvious here-to-stay triumph at the Edinburgh Festival the following year, and its strengths become more apparent with the passing of time. Read more...
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Never Let Me GoThursday, 10 February 2011
“The problem is that you’ve been told and not told.” While Ishiguro and his discerning fans would never indulge in anything so crass as hype, there have been whisperings in North London wine bars, over the coffee-morning brews of Home Counties ladies, on terraces of rented villas on the Amalfi Coast. Yes, Never Let Me Go is the one about human cloning, whose characters are living organ farms, existing solely for harvest. Read more... |
Son of BabylonWednesday, 09 February 2011
We’ve heard a lot about the American experience of Iraq: the internecine politicking in Green Zone, the deadly combat of The Hurt Locker, the tedium of camp life in Jarhead. In the cinematic reproduction of tumult in Iraq, one thing you never see a lot of is Iraqis. Read more... |
True GritTuesday, 08 February 2011
Henry Hathaway's 1969 version of True Grit famously won John Wayne his solitary Oscar for Best Actor. Read more... |
NénetteSaturday, 05 February 2011
This is not the first starring role in cinema history for an orang-utan. That honour belongs to King Louie, the banana-clad jungle VIP in Disney’s 1967 version of Kipling’s The Jungle Book. It’s not actually the second either, or even the third. Read more... |
The FighterSaturday, 05 February 2011
A paean to working-class bellicosity set (and shot) in the rundown industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts, David O’Russell’s boxing film The Fighter relishes its brawls. In one inspired scene, a character is unceremoniously slammed to the ground and punched repeatedly in the face. Not Queensberry Rules? Read more... |
Rabbit HoleFriday, 04 February 2011
So many stage shows (musicals, mostly) are these days fashioned from films that the arrival of Rabbit Hole reminds us of the time-honored habit of plundering yesteryear's Broadway hit for this movie season's trophy-minded bait. Read more... |
Antonioni Project, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 02 February 2011
Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached... Read more... |
Brighton RockMonday, 31 January 2011
Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause an uproar. A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you, he had read some hostile comments on the internet. “Well ought to have been left alone,” he decreed. Read more... |
Men on the BridgeThursday, 27 January 2011
As a child I lived for a while near the footings in Ortaköy of the Bosphorus Bridge, which was being constructed over the breathtaking straits of Istanbul. Our life as oil expatriates was many worlds away from the skinny hawkers, whistling traffic cops and sweating construction workers whom our car passed every day. Four decades later this magnificent bridge has brought a global political metaphor, an entire little commercial ecosystem, and a raft of deeply affecting human existences. Read more... |
HereafterThursday, 27 January 2011
The depiction of a tsunami roaring up the beach and surging down the main street of an Indonesian seaside resort makes an enthralling opening to Clint Eastwood's latest creation. It's a terrifyingly visceral sequence that grabs you by the throat and forces you to confront the polarities of a comfortable life interrupted by sudden death. Read more... |
How Do You KnowTuesday, 25 January 2011
Just to fill in that blank left by the title, how do you know when you’re in love? It’s the question posed by every romantic comedy ever made, satisfactorily answered only by the good ones. Read more... |
Barney's VersionTuesday, 25 January 2011
Canadian writer Mordecai Richler’s eclectic contribution to film includes uncredited work on Room at the Top, the screenplay for Fun with Dick and Jane and the original book behind Richard Dreyfuss’s early success The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Like that 1959 novel, his final tome, Barney’s Version, dealt with the colourful history of a Montreal Jew. Read more... |
BiutifulSunday, 23 January 2011
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s stunning, painfully sincere - if somewhat laborious - latest is a heartfelt paean to fatherhood, built around an agonising escalation of misery. It is bolstered by a mesmerising performance from Javier Bardem as a terminally ill man experiencing physical deterioration alongside spiritual elevation, who bridges the gap between this life and the next. Read more... |
NEDSFriday, 21 January 2011
Actor/director Peter Mullan describes NEDS, his third film as director (after Orphans and The Magdalene Sisters), as “personal but not autobiographical”, although it undoubtedly draws heavily on his working-class upbringing in 1970s Glasgow. Read more... |
Black SwanThursday, 20 January 2011
They’re calling Black Swan BS on some of the dance websites, and while they’re right about the dancing, this is a whale of an enjoyable outing to the flicks: lush, Gothic, psycho and flavoursomely OTT. I don’t much care that Natalie Portman can’t dance for toffee - Tobey Maguire probably didn’t satisfy jockeys with his style in Seabiscuit, or Hilary Swank the boxing clubs in Million Dollar Baby. Read more... |
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