Film
Django UnchainedThursday, 17 January 2013
With its exuberant blood-spray, rambunctious dialogue and generous running time, Django Unchained is writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s first full foray into Westerns. Although it’s not a remake, it pays tribute to Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Spaghetti... Read more... |
V/H/SWednesday, 16 January 2013
V/H/S is the first film to convincingly update EC comics’ Fifties horror anthologies, which gleefully corrupted the kids of Eisenhower’s America. They also inspired British films such as Tales from the Crypt (the 1972 anthology with Peter Cushing as... Read more... |
Opinion: How soon is too soon for plot spoilers?Tuesday, 15 January 2013
Last November, for the 25,000th time on the stage, the actor playing Sergeant Trotter in The Mousetrap stepped forward during the curtain call and asked members of the audience not to reveal the play's surprise ending to others. To do so would, by... Read more... |
DVD: The Titfield ThunderboltTuesday, 15 January 2013
Like the Will Hay classic Oh! Mr. Porter and the droll BBC miniseries Love on a Branch Line, Charles Crichton’s 1953 Ealing comedy, the first shot in Technicolor, celebrates the English love of rural railways run by unworldly eccentrics in... Read more... |
Ballroom DancerMonday, 14 January 2013
Slavik Kryklyvyy was Jennifer Lopez's tush-shaking partner in Shall We Dance?, getting one over on Richard Gere. But that was 2004, and what happened then? Ballroom Dancer is a documentary feature about his year on the edge, 2010, when the former... Read more... |
"Forget it, Marlowe - it's Chinatown"Sunday, 13 January 2013
The movie version of the hardboiled, trenchcoated private eye, who, being “being neither tarnished nor afraid,” puts honour before personal gain in California’s 1940s noir cityscapes, was never as enduring as his literary original.The re-release of... Read more... |
Les MisérablesFriday, 11 January 2013
Les Misérables is revolutionary, but not in a French way. Oscar-winning director Tom (The King's Speech) Hooper’s film of a musical seen by over 60 million people in over 40 countries and in half again as many languages has engaged so much... Read more... |
DVD: Shadow DancerFriday, 11 January 2013
The director James Marsh has made his name as a documentarian who brilliantly blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. Both Man on Wire and Project Nim seamlessly wove together archive and reconstruction. Although Shadow Dancer, an IRA... Read more... |
Oscars 2013: Lives of Lincoln and Pi lead the nomineesThursday, 10 January 2013
Sure, Les Miserables got eight nominations, including the expected acting nods for Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, and Daniel Day-Lewis is poised to make history as the first-ever three-time winner of the Best Actor Oscar, this time for a... Read more... |
Gangster SquadThursday, 10 January 2013
Jean-Luc Godard once said, "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl". Aside from upping the ante to include a formidable arsenal of the former, Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad hangs its fedora on that wisdom. It might however have aimed a... Read more... |
10 Questions for James MarshThursday, 10 January 2013
Five years ago James Marsh won an Academy Award for the documentary Man on Wire. It thrillingly told the story of Philippe Petit’s audacious walk on a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Marsh stayed on in the 1970s... Read more... |
Midnight SonWednesday, 09 January 2013
“It’s like you’re a vampire,” whey-faced LA security guard Jacob is told. He gives a dawning, diffident look of recognition. Back in the cramped apartment he’s stopped leaving by day, he places a crucifix on his face, not quite expecting it to... Read more... |
