Steven Spielberg
Adam Sweeting
Take cover! The Pacific is the new 10-part World War Two epic from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, a follow-up to their 2001 series Band of Brothers. It was commissioned by HBO, who will premiere it in the States on March 14, and comes to Sky Movies HD in the UK over Easter.Shot in Australia at a cost of $200m, it follows the war across the Pacific theatre through the experiences of three US Marines, Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello), Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), and John Basilone (Jon Seda). “There was a very strong, desaturated quality to Band of Brothers,” said Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The career of Andy Serkis tends to point in one direction: darkness visible. Onstage, more recently on screen, he has inhabited a series of characters for whom violence is second nature. His Bill Sikes was utterly deranged, though a pussycat next to his Ian Brady in Longford (pictured below), whose ghastly charisma he seemed intuitively to understand. Serkis’s performance-captured Gollum gave global audiences the creeps. And that was him somewhere under the computer-generated fur as the ultimate unreconstructed he-man Kong. Whence it is but a small step to Ian Dury. In sex&drugs&rock Read more ...