Hollywood
CD: Mary Poppins Returns - Original Motion Picture SoundtrackTuesday, 11 December 2018
This is a soundtrack with vast shoes to fill. Frozen, The Lion King and Aladdin may be the best-selling Disney soundtracks but, alongside The Jungle Book, the original 1964 Mary Poppins has the most beloved array of songs. It takes chutzpah to try... Read more... |
The Old Man & the Gun review - sundown on SundanceFriday, 07 December 2018
Despite having enjoyed a prolific few years in which he has appeared in (among others) All Is Lost, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Truth and Our Souls at Night, Robert Redford has said that The Old Man & the Gun will be his last film role... Read more... |
Blu-ray: My Man GodfreyFriday, 14 September 2018
Life has sped up so, so much in the 82 years since My Man Godfrey appeared. The narrative pacing of many Hollywood films from that era seems painfully slow to modern viewers. My Man Godfrey, on the other hand, watched here in the company of a 15-... Read more... |
The King review - the myth behind the manSaturday, 25 August 2018
The most famous face in musical history, and perhaps the instigator of modern culture as we know it; he truly was the King. But for a documentary focused on such an icon, The King touches very little on Elvis Presley the man. This is not another... Read more... |
Box office poison? Joan Crawford at BFI SouthbankMonday, 30 July 2018
What’s that? Joan Crawford had no sense of humour? Well, take a look at It's A Great Feeling. It’s a pretty bizarre (and pretty bad) 1949 musical with Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan playing themselves running round the Warner Brothers lot... Read more... |
Get Shorty, Sky Atlantic review - Elmore Leonard meets TarantinoThursday, 14 June 2018
Emma Daly (Carolyn Dodd) tells her estranged husband Miles (Chris O’Dowd): “There is always an angle, a shakedown.” Of course there is: Davey Holmes’s Get Shorty is “partly based on” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name (“inspired by”... Read more... |
Kathleen Turner: Finding My Voice, The Other Palace review - a familiar name in freshly exciting formWednesday, 25 April 2018
A one-time Martha and Maggie the Cat in the theatre, and a screen siren of the sort they don't make any more, might not be the first person you expect to see swaggering on to a London stage in a dark pantsuit ready to offer up two hours of song and... Read more... |
Score review - breathless dash through music and filmThursday, 05 April 2018
The crucial yet almost indefinable role of music in film – it’s a subject ripe for exploration and celebration, from the musicological technicalities of leitmotifs and ostinatos, through to the colourful characters working to bring directors’... Read more... |
Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words, BBC One review - emotional nomad with a fragile gift for joyTuesday, 27 March 2018
Ever nursed an immoderate fondness for Ingrid Bergman? In Her Own Words, a bio-documentary released in the cinema then on DVD in 2016 and shown last night on BBC One as part of the Imagine... strand, was an entrancing, melancholy memoir in letters,... Read more... |
Oscars 2018: The shape of a snoozefestMonday, 05 March 2018
Is #MeSnooze a hashtag? It could well be for those who sat through the 90th annual Academy Awards, an Oscar night so reined in by the current climate in Hollywood that it was as if all the fun and frolics had been leached out of a ceremony always at... Read more... |
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story review - Hollywood's brainiest beautyMonday, 05 March 2018
Hedy Lamarr really ought to be the poster girl for the Time's Up movement. “Any girl can look glamorous," she once said. "All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was the model for Catwoman and Disney's Snow White. It's less well known... Read more... |
Black Panther review - more meh than marvellousFriday, 16 February 2018
Black Panther arrives with all the critics displaying superhero-sized goodwill for its very existence. It’s a big budget mainstream Marvel movie that not only features a nearly all-black cast, but it also has an African-American writer director (... Read more... |
