Carey Mulligan
Jasper Rees
Chocolat, a film about chocolate addiction, was extremely sweet. Trainspotting, a film about drug addiction, was wired and hip. Shame, a film about sex addiction, assaults you with wave upon wave of tristesse.When Sarah Kent reviewed the theatrical release for theartsdesk, she found in it a stereotypical joyride secretly in love with the thing it deplores. Those aren’t the colours this male reviewer takes away from the fractured relationship between sex addict Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a pump-action Adonis running on emptiness, and his sister Sissy, a brittle, wandering chanteuse (Carey Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Nicolas Winding Refn says that his LA heist fable Drive was inspired by Grimm's Fairy Tales, but viewers unfamiliar with the perverse labyrinth of Refn's imagination are more likely to detect echoes of Bullitt, Walter Hill's The Driver and Clint Eastwood at his most taciturn. Ryan Gosling plays The Driver, auto-wrangling movie stuntman by day and getaway wheel-man by night. A pre-credits sequence follows him as he ferries two anonymous clients away from a robbery, mixing raw speed with calculating guile as he eludes police pursuit with icy efficiency.Despite being solitary and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, Steve McQueen’s second film, Shame, got rave reviews from male critics. Michael Fassbender (who played Bobby Sands in McQueen’s splendid debut feature, Hunger) is brilliant as Brandon, a successful thirtysomething New Yorker. His screen presence is so appealing that one could ogle him for hours and if, indeed, that is his body sauntering naked past the camera, he is well hung as well as handsome. Like Hunger, Shame explores bondage, but of a different kind: Bobby Sands was in prison, while Brandon is free but imprisoned by his Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Irene (Carey Mulligan) realises just how much the Driver (Ryan Gosling) loves her as his boot caves in a man’s face on the floor of her apartment building lift. They have just kissed for the first time, and she tumbles from him, shaken and repelled. But she can’t stay away, and neither can he, in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Cannes prize-winning tragic action romance.As its nameless hero, Gosling doesn’t speak for Drive’s first 10 minutes, and is so still in one early scene he looks plastic, only a flick of a finger confirming he breathes, let alone sweats. We see him move smoothly between three Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
This year’s Venice Film Festival has been awash with great directors from what one might call the old guard: David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, Aleksander Sokurov, Philippe Garrel. But when the jury presents its prizes tonight, I hope that it honours some of the new, young film-makers who have been the ones to set this festival alight.Chief amongst those has been a Brit, Steve McQueen, who follows his extraordinary debut, Hunger, with a second film that has shaken and stirred the critics here. The focus of Shame is Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a successful New Yorker whose Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“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. It is neither a twist nor a secret (and to treat it as such is to misunderstand Ishiguro’s withholding narrative), so when director Mark Romanek lays it out on the (operating Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The long-delayed sequel has earned no more than a small, insignificant footnote in movie history. Psycho II, Gregory’s Two Girls and Texasville, to name only three disparate examples, were all superfluous post-scriptums to much venerated, much earlier films. There is at least a pretext for another trip to Wall Street. Since Gordon Gekko last blew the fumes of his fat Havana in your face, money has learnt to talk louder than ever. But there’s another reason why, 22 years on, Oliver Stone’s sequel to his portrait of Reaganomics in action counts as much less of a despoliation: the original was Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Sam Shepard and, in a tiny role, Carey Mulligan: yes, yet again the stars are lining up to live through the agony of America's presence in Iraq and (here) Afghanistan. Closely based on Brødre, by the Danish director Susanne Bier, Jim Sheridan's remake tells of the sibling rivalry between a decorated Marine and his feckless jailbird brother. Bier's lo-fi film - not an official Dogme production but marked by its make-do-and-mend aesthetic - has been Hollywoodised into a sleek melodrama stuffed with grandstanding actors and angling openly (if, Read more ...
sheila.johnston
London, 1961. Duffle coats are the ne plus ultra in hipster cool, everybody smokes like fury and black people are known as negroes in enlightened society (and even enlightened society wouldn't want them moving in next door). In the congenial, shiny-surfaced world of this coming-of-age comedy, the Beatles' first LP is still two years away, and so is sexual intercourse, but not for Jenny. For Jenny, 1961 is an annus mirabilis, the year in which this skittish 16-year-old schoolgirl acquires a wealthy, worldly older admirer. And, being a deal more beautiful than Philip Larkin, she doesn't have to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“You’ve no idea how boring everything was before I met you.” As written by Nick Hornby and spoken by Carey Mulligan in An Education, these words of gratitude come after a moment of stillness in which Jenny, Mulligan’s character, reflects on her experience as a 16-year-old schoolgirl taken on a social joyride by a 35-ish hustler, David (Peter Sarsgaard). It’s Twickenham in the early Sixties, the age of austerity's not yet over, and they’re sitting in his Bristol outside her house at night. She tells him she sometimes thinks he’s the only person who’s done anything in “this whole stupid Read more ...