fri 29/03/2024

Judi Dench

Live from the National Theatre: 50 Years on Stage, BBC Two

These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right...

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Philomena

In 1998, Judi Dench slayed audiences on the London stage in Filumena, playing a former prostitute who learns belatedly to cry. The tears come more quickly - both for Britain's best-loved acting Dame and her public - in the comparably titled...

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Peter and Alice, Noël Coward Theatre

What becomes of children “born out of sadness and loneliness”, exiled from Wonderland or Neverland, longing for remembered golden afternoons, but forced to confront the chilly twilight of adulthood? This new play by John Logan brings Alice Liddell...

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Skyfall

It's Bond number 23, and if you were to suggest to me that it was the best of the lot, I might very well agree with you. This is a terrific James Bond movie, thoughtfully written, shrewdly cast and taking stock of everything that the 50-year-old...

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DVD: Jane Eyre

In many respects it's hard to fault director Cary Fukunaga's take on the Charlotte Brontë classic. Fast-rising Australian actress Mia Wasikowska brings appropriate strength and moral clarity to the title role, while Michael Fassbender makes a...

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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Travel, health permitting, knows few age barriers (if it did, there would be no Elderhostel), nor does charm, so there are two reasons up front why The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel fully deserves to win over the so-called "grey pound" market and much...

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The Many Faces of Dame Judi Dench, BBC Two

It's interesting to consider at what point in someone's career does he or she become a national treasure - as Alan Bennett once so scathingly remarked, “If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel...

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Jane Eyre

As fresh and enchanting as the first flushes of spring, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s imaginative retelling of Charlotte Brontë’s 19th-century proto-feminist novel captures the thrill of attraction with rare perception, sweep and tenderness. It foregrounds...

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Bah Humbug: Judi Dench - the greatest stage actor ever?

Seems we’re living through a silly season. There are rumours afoot that our PM’s Big Society is nothing other than a fig leaf for a chaos theory of how to run society, ie let the devil take the hindmost. And in the arts we’ve got theatre’s esteemed...

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A Midsummer Night's Dream, Rose Theatre

It’s the pretext that reunites Judi Dench and Peter Hall to collaborate on Shakespeare’s comedy nearly five decades after they first ventured into the Athenian woods together at the RSC. But the conceit of conflating the fairy queen Titania with...

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TV Gallery: Cranford's Bonnets

It's sometimes referred to, just a bit dismissively, as bonnet drama. Whenever television visits the 19th century, the headwear of the female characters does indeed play its part. Of no adaptation of Victorian fiction is that truer than Cranford....

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