3D
Veronica Lee
Through a haunted forest and entered by a secret doorway is Dracula's castle - but this isn't where virgins are deflowered by the Transylvanian count; rather it's where he, a widower, dotes on his daughter and runs a hotel for his his monster mates. Hotel Transylvania is where Frankenstein's Monster and his wife Eunice, Wayne and Wanda Werewolf, the Invisible Man and all manner of ghouls and ghosties go for their holidays to take refuge from those nasty humans outside.It's a neat set-up in a screenplay written by Peter Baynham (who wrote the Arthur remake and has worked with Steve Coogan, Read more ...
simon.broughton
During an orchestral rehearsal, it’s tense in a TV scanner at the best of times. A scanner is one of the huge vans parked outside the Royal Albert Hall with a wall of screens showing the shots from the cameras within. There’s a large huddle of BBC radio and television vans for the whole season. But there was another outside broadcast encampment on Saturday for the Last Night of the Proms, which was being broadcast in 3D for the first time. This is where all of us in the truck – members of the production team, technical experts, BBC executives - were wearing dark glasses to see the 3D image Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Animated 11th-century Scotland is a great place to live for a girl with a bow and arrow, until your mum decides to marry you off to any young numpty who wins a clan tournament. No wonder the female audience comes predisposed to love Merida, the star of Disney Pixar’s Brave. She’s a snappy, arrow-shooting, red-haired Scottish princess who’ll do anything not to end up like her mum. Who wouldn’t love a feature-length 3D animated film shining with the vocal talents of Kelly Macdonald, Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson, Billy Connolly and half-Glaswegian Emma Thompson and five propriety software Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A boy alone in his vast white bedroom has a recurrent haunting dream, frightening yet somehow comforting - a swan invades his mind, simultaneously menacing him with its power and wildness, and yet wrapping its great wings around him to shield him, with some ambiguous kind of love. It's the opening scene of Matthew Bourne's tremendous modern version of Swan Lake, and that resonant image and the tale he unfolds from it has made it a classic of modern theatre, marvelled at around the world. But why it works is the emotion generated by the palpably strange and authoritative physicality of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Matthew Bourne, creator of the famous male swans of his modern reinvention of Swan Lake, is to launch the nationwide screening of a spectacular new 3D film of his creation, along with a live Q&A - and we have free tickets to be won for this exclusive event. UPDATE: Competition now expired.Swan Lake will be given its premiere 3D screening on Monday 14 May, followed by the Q&A session with Bourne, the film's director Ross McGibbon and the producer Fiona Morris. The session, held at the Curzon Soho, 99 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 5DY, will be chaired by theartsdesk's Ismene Brown.The Read more ...
mark.kidel
In a year of mounting turmoil and uncertainty, it was easy to fall back on safe bets and comfort-zone reassurance. Addictive TV series offered a welcome haven from the angst of financial meltdown: Sarah Lund’s melancholy airs in The Killing offered a homeopathic cure for the gloom of double-dip recession. Breaking Bad, the saga of the cancer-struck physics teacher who takes to a life of crime was dark, funny and endlessly surprising. Downton Abbey, by way of a contrast, was well made and watchable, in a warmly soporific kind of way.TV continued to thrive on the cult of celebrity, spewing out Read more ...
Ismene Brown
No more is dance the preserve of the few sitting in the theatre - larger companies are leaping hungrily for TV and now cinema screens, having found various ways around the longstanding obstacle of copyright. The BBC is experimenting with live 3D cinema for Saturday's Strictly Come Dancing final, the Royal Ballet is beaming Thursday's performance of The Sleeping Beauty live to the world's cinemas. And if anyone has been yearning in vain for a live Nutcracker this winter (unlikely, with half a dozen productions up and down Britain), they can buy a movie ticket next week to watch a "live" Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The Shrek series is resurrected once again for this amiable, action-packed - if less than purr-fect - 3D spin-off, featuring everyone’s favourite diminutive swashbuckler. If the franchise was a feline it would be running out of lives (and good will) fast, but fortunately this prequel leaves the magical land of Far Far Away, well, far, far away - instead setting its story amidst the red dust and diabolical double-crossing of a spaghetti western.After his summer stint as a maniacal plastic surgeon (in Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In), Antonio Banderas is back voicing the titular cat, wielding a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's tempting to say that Martin Scorsese's first so-called "family film" works like clockwork, except that the movie possesses considerably more soul than that statement suggests. What's more, it would help to be a clan of thoroughgoing cinéastes to tap entirely into its charms, as a director steeped in the history of his chosen medium takes us backwards in time towards the very origins of the art form he so reveres. Kids may love the sweep and scope of the visuals, many of them involving timepieces that whir and tick and hum, but Hugo at heart is an extended act of homage toward the miracle Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been a long time coming, and an extremely nervous wait for millions of fans who grew up on the boy reporter and his alliterating whisky-soaked maritime sidekick. Steven Spielberg first acquired the cinematic rights to The Adventures of Tintin in 1982, the year ET came out. In the interim he’s gone off on tangents featuring war and genocide, dinosaurs and sci-fi. They’ve all been thrillingly different, but all clearly bearing Spielberg’s kitemark. Spielberg may always be faithful to himself, but has a director only now making a habit of adapting from known sources (coming soon: War Horse Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The clips as you load the DVD show women in extremis - women tied to the end of a rope, women being assaulted by mass male groping, women dancing on pointe with bleeding chunks of meat stuffed into their ballet shoes. Pina Bausch’s commentaries on women make her ballets disquieting viewing. Wim Wenders’ film, released as a 3D version in cinemas earlier this year, takes you into those deep, confused questions that Bausch’s dance works put.He had planned to make this film with Bausch, but her sudden death left him bereft. This film therefore became an elegy to her and her company, Tanztheater Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s perhaps best to start this review by stating that I miss Horrid Henry's target demographic by about, ooh, a decade or three. But it’s also right and proper to say that while I wouldn’t recommend it for grown-ups, those youngsters whose opinions I canvassed after the screening I attended gave it a huge thumbs-up.It’s not difficult to see why, as there are plenty of fart and bogey gags (the latter really quite disgusting when viewed in 3D) and adults are the butt of all the jokes. Theo Stevenson as the titular character is lovely, too (and not at all horrid, but that’s the story’s weakness Read more ...