Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Henry Hathaway's 1969 version of True Grit famously won John Wayne his solitary Oscar for Best Actor. Jeff Bridges, remaking the role of battered, boozing, one-eyed lawman Rooster Cogburn in the Coen brothers' new incarnation, is nominated for the second year running after last year's triumph with Crazy Heart. Look out Colin Firth, because Bridges is in such barnstorming form that we could conceivably see him roaring off into the Hollywood night clutching another statuette, swigging moonshine and firing his six-gun in the air.But despite its services to the Duke, Hathaway's film also raised Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A whiff of excrement hangs around DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little. It’s a novel that likes to get right up into the crevices of society and then inhale deeply. Written in an anarchic, freewheeling American patois, it’s the inner voice of Vernon himself (and Pierre’s brutal way with a simile) that plays shock and awe with the reader, delighting many and appalling more. The loss of narrative voice would seem enough to deter any would-be theatrical adaptor, but in 2007 Tanya Ronder and the Young Vic took up the challenge. The result (newly revised) now makes a return – Read more ...
Veronica Lee
At first sight, “Afghanistan cricket team” might be labled along with “The kosher guide to cooking pork” or “How to keep your promises, by N Clegg”. But in 2008, Taj Malik, an Afghan player passionate about the game, decided to try to take his national team into the world’s elite level and this film (part of the Storyville strand), by three young film-makers, Tim Albone, Leslie Knott and Lucy Martens, followed their efforts over two years.As you might expect, Malik and co were not starting from a level playing field. As the gentle, ever-smiling coach (who rather touchingly believed the answer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They've remade everything else, so what took them so long to get around to Hawaii Five-0? Maybe the exotic Hawaiian locations of JJ Abrams's Lost helped to trigger flashbacks of Steve McGarrett & co, which would explain why Abrams's henchmen Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are co-producers of the new Five-0. And why Daniel Dae Kim, who played Jin in Lost, reappears here as Chin Ho Kelly.The refreshing thing about Five-0 (revisited) is that while it has been given a brisk 21st-century spring clean, with international terrorism, people-smuggling and a blast of ultra-modern spook Read more ...
josh.spero
Aptly for a programme whose title invokes a show which is all style, no substance, the subject of Ronald Reagan: American Idol is image. What was Reagan really like? How much of his career as a Hollywood star did he carry into office? And why have certain images of Reagan endured? The first question, alas, is the one neither the film nor his biographers nor his family and friends have come close to answering.The film, directed by Eugene Jarecki and shown to coincide with Reagan's centenary, opens with an ancient clip of Reagan talking about the fictionality of what follows. This tactic Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Joan Wasser, who operates under the name of Joan As Police Woman, has probably seen all sorts in her time, having played with Antony Hegarty and Rufus Wainwright and dated the late Jeff Buckley. But even she was thrown by an inappropriate comment from the stalls at the Barbican last night. "Show us your tits" is the sort of thing female comedians in working men’s clubs, not soulful, passionate musicians in concert halls, have to put up with.As well as that unexpected heckle worthy of the Frankie Boyle brigade, there were a number of issues at this gig which nearly derailed it. There were Read more ...
mark.kidel
Theatre, particularly tragedy, can pack a terrific punch when things are kept simple – even if the themes evoked are enfolded in layer upon layer of complexity. Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, a play with three characters, each of whom takes to the stage alone, explores in a multifaceted way the life of an itinerant Irish healer who plies his trade along the backroads of the Celtic fringes of Britain.It is as much a meditation on the business of moving the spirit and effecting spiritual and physical change in an audience as it is a complex exploration of the shifting borderline between fiction Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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. Students of the Primates on Film sub-genre will fondly recall Clyde, the orang-utan who hung out with Clint Eastwood so winningly in Every Which Way But Loose (1978) that the studio gave him another shot at the big time in Any Which Way You Can (1980). But unless there are gaps in my knowledge of this area (for which apologies), Nénette is probably Read more ...
Graham Fuller
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? That’s because the assailant is the eponymous pugilist’s girlfriend and her victim one of his seven sisters, who have arrived on her porch with their mother one morning to wrest him away from the siren’s clutches.It’s the fate of Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg, who nurtured the project and has a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Emlyn Williams may have been dubbed the “Welsh Noël Coward” and the action of his long-neglected Accolade may take place in a drawing room, but there’s little of the smiling social comedy to be found here. Trading sparkling cocktails and repartee for whisky and unpalatable truths, Williams’s play exposes the pinstriped hypocrisy of 1950s society – a society that will press its powdered cheek to all manner of sordidness in the name of Art, while recoiling from even a passing acquaintance with the workaday squalor of its members. Frank, and more than a little apt, the result is a stylish Read more ...
Matt Wolf
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. And so we have Nicole Kidman Oscar-nominated for her turn as the grieving mum in a part that won Cynthia Nixon New York's Tony Award five years ago. Don't be misled, though, by the rather overemphatic talk of this comparatively below-the-radar venture as merely a comeback vehicle for Kidman; the virtues of the movie, modest though they are, extend without question to Read more ...
howard.male
A young girl runs in slow motion through the woods, the cameraman in hot pursuit: this is only the opening seconds of ITV1’s new drama series, and already I was wondering to what degree this new five-parter was going to test my cliché tolerance level. But fortunately Marchlands pulled itself together and settled down to spend most of its first hour just letting us get to know the three families who had lived in the Marchlands house over the four previous decades.Via a series of inventive dissolves we were moved with seamless ease from 1968 to 1987 to 2010, and quickly made aware that the Read more ...