Hollywood
CleopatraMonday, 08 July 2013
If Mae West was once described as a plumber’s idea of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor, clad in gold and covered in real diamonds, is Hollywood’s ideal in Cleopatra (1963). Sumptuously restored to 2K DCPs and rereleased on the big screen, Taylor’s beauty... Read more... |
DVD: TabuTuesday, 25 June 2013
With its story of youthful love entrapped by fate, Tabu relishes the glorious primal energy of the South Seas, which was where German director FW Murnau, best known now for his expressionist Nosferatu, but then recently established in Hollywood and... Read more... |
Thatcher: We are an impersonatorTuesday, 09 April 2013
Mrs Thatcher famously presided over a huge rise in unemployment, but down the years she kept a large sorority of impersonators (and one male one) off the dole. She was lucky with her mimics, who included some of the great actresses of the age, and... Read more... |
Ben Affleck: from Bennifer to Renaissance ManMonday, 04 March 2013
"There are no second acts in American lives," said F Scott Fitzgerald, but he had failed to include Ben Affleck in his calculations. "This is a second act for me," announced Affleck, as he collected the Best Director award for his work on Argo... Read more... |
Oscars 2013: Best Picture/Foreign Language Film/Animated FilmFriday, 22 February 2013
Time is drawing nigh to mark those Oscar ballots, but what movie should one vote for as the year's best? While odds-makers have been busily touting one title over another, the less-vaunted fact about this year's shortlist is that relatively few... Read more... |
MamaThursday, 21 February 2013
You don't have to be highly impressionable to get a shriek or two out of Mama, but it would help, and I suppose there are filmgoers who may never look at walls in quite the same way again. Elegantly shot and boasting Oscar hopeful Jessica Chastain... Read more... |
Side by SideTuesday, 12 February 2013
Does it matter if film dies? Keanu Reeves, always cannier than his limited acting style suggests, produces and presents this even-handed documentary on analogue’s apparently fatal decline in the face of a very recent digital onslaught. His contact... Read more... |
HitchcockThursday, 07 February 2013
A pedestrian talent hitches a ride on genius in Hitchcock, director Sacha Gervasi's often cringemakingly banal look at the filmmaker in the run-up to the mother of all horror movies, Psycho. One can only imagine what the Great Man himself would... Read more... |
Hollywood’s Lost Screen Goddess: Clara Bow, BBC FourMonday, 31 December 2012
“Knowing Clara Bow brought you down socially”. Although one of the biggest and most bankable film stars of the Twenties, luminous fan-favourite Clara Bow wasn’t so treasured by the Hollywood elite. She didn’t hide her affairs. She turned up for... Read more... |
CD: John Travolta & Olivia Newton John - This ChristmasThursday, 13 December 2012
It would be a fool who came to any Christmas album sternly expecting radicalism and the pushing of sonic frontiers, and an even bigger fool if they expected the same from one by John Travolta and Olivia Newton John. Christmas albums revel, for the... Read more... |
The Bodyguard, Adelphi TheatreThursday, 06 December 2012
It's Academy Award season within the showbiz-centric world of The Bodyguard, but even the greatest of Oscar obsessives - count me among them - would be hard-pressed to toss many a trophy in the direction of the 1992 film or toward the largely... Read more... |
Merrily We Roll Along, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 29 November 2012
On Broadway, Merrily We Roll Along remains forever scarred as the Stephen Sondheim musical that ground to an abrupt halt, closing after two weeks in 1981. But New York's theatrical failures often exist to be discovered anew across the Atlantic, and... Read more... |
