Gemma Arterton
alexandra.coghlan
If Cold Comfort Farm and Hot Fuzz got chatting down their local one night, the conversation might go something along the lines of Tamara Drewe. Putting the “sex” in Wessex, Stephen Frears’s latest film loosens the corsets of the Hardy pastoral, pitting town and country against one another in the dirtiest and most gleefully anarchic of fist-fights. Heaving bosoms, brooding farm-hands and a herd of murderous cows all await you in this rural idyll of a comedy, which proves that bucolic nastiness is not always confined to the woodshed.The opening sequence of Tamara Drewe might as well have “A Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The most exciting part of the screening of this absurd new blockbuster was an appearance by producer Jerry Bruckheimer for a pre-show pep talk. You may be familiar with his CV - Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, all the CSIs, Pirates of the Caribbean. Only a little guy, but so was Attila the Hun. He raved dutifully to a theatre-full of British hacks about the flick’s marvellous mostly-English cast (a lot of it having been shot at Pinewood) and schmoozed with its beaming director, Mike “Four Weddings” Newell.I daresay Jerry (and indeed Pinewood Studios) hope that Prince of Persia will kick off Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just don’t say you weren’t warned. "The Legend Begins in 3D," it says outside the Odeon Leicester Square in rather boisterous capitals. This is very much episode one of what the moneybags on Mount Olympus, working out of their Hollywood 91601 address, envisage as an all-whizzing, all-banging trawl through the Greek legends. The formula is as you were. It’s the age-old cinematic derby, yet another epic widescreen face-off between man and special effect.Things have moved on a tad since the last time Clash of the Titans played across our screens. That was in 1981, when visual trickery was in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Tamsin Greig takes her mighty stage chops to a new level in The Little Dog Laughed, a minor Broadway comedy that gets a major star performance from Greig in her first West End role since God of Carnage. Tearing into a role that deservedly won its New York originator, Julie White, a 2007 Tony Award, Greig gives a cyclonic performance in a play that suffers palpable subsidence every time she leaves the stage. Beane's brittle if, at times, fairly banal satire isn't greatly enhanced by opening back-to-back with Six Degrees of Separation, an earlier, far more expansive American play that (for Read more ...