violence
Veronica Lee
For anyone living in the UK at the time, the Dunblane massacre on 13 March 1996 was an event so seared into their minds that they can remember exactly where they were when the shocking news came through.I was working on The Daily Telegraph's arts pages when, by a horrible coincidence, a film review was accompanied by a picture with a handgun in it; the page was quickly redesigned – as indeed was most of the paper as the awful story unfolded and the enormity of it became clear. In the small town of Dunblane, near Stirling, Thomas Hamilton had walked into Dunblane Primary School, and shot dead Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The city of Boston has been creeping up the charts as a hotbed of cinematic criminality in the last decade. First came Martin Scorsese's Oscar-scooping epic The Departed, then Ben Affleck chipped in with The Town, both movies driven by their portrayal of tightly-knit groups of characters immovably rooted in their native Bostonian soil.You could almost see Scott Cooper's Black Mass as completing a trilogy. Indeed, its two leading characters, Irish mobster James "Whitey" Bulger and FBI agent John Connolly, are the real-life versions of the Jack Nicholson and Matt Damon roles in The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A lot of people are going to be enraged, frustrated, or confused by Evening at The Talk House, and in the authorial world of Wallace Shawn, wasn't it ever thus? This is the playwright who gave pride of place to a softly-spoken fascist in Aunt Dan and Lemon and challenged his audience's complacency directly with The Fever, so if I say that his latest play is of a piece with his earlier ones, that is intended as high praise, indeed. From its opening monologue onwards, Talk House could only be the work of this particular writer, Shawn's singularity of vision as undimmed by time (he's now 72) Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Gangland London has never really worked for British directors. The warped poetry and seedy glamour of the American Mafia were the making of Coppola and Scorsese. You don’t get a lot of that down Bethnal Green way. Just knuckle dusters and glottal stops. But what happens if an American has a go at the Krays instead? Writer-director Brian Helgeland knows his way around screen violence - he scripted LA Confidential – and he has been a tourist in England before: he paid a knockabout visit to the Middle Ages with A Knight’s Tale. The traditional thing to say about foreign directors on such Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till at a convenience store in the fictional Liman, West Virginia. His girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is the competent one who Read more ...
Matt Wolf
London property prices could well plummet, not to mention James Franco's ever-wayward career, if enough people see Good People, a staggeringly inept London-set gorefest that casts James Franco as an expat London property developer and Kate Hudson as his schoolteacher-wife who likes buying major appliances for friends as gifts. But since Danish director Henrik Ruben Genz's English-language feature film debut is likely to sink without a trace, the reputations of all involved should suffer scant permanent damage, and there may even be those who take solace in the news that Hollywood hunks Read more ...
emma.simmonds
People who live in glass houses should be careful who they antagonise. That's the superficial starting point of The Gift, the directorial debut of actor Joel Edgerton, who takes the cuckoo-in-the-nest thriller template – which became ubiquitous in the early '90s with films like Pacific Heights, Unlawful Entry, Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – and, by introducing psychological depth and a streak of social conscience, fashions an intriguing morality tale.Jason Bateman (pictured below right) and Rebecca Hall play Simon and Robyn; prompted by his fancy new information Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Finally reaching its concluding 22nd episode, delayed further by the "mid-season break" fashionable with American shows, Gotham [****] stands tall as a distinctive contribution to the seemingly inexhaustible superhero universe. Instead of relying on gargantuan cartoon characters and a hurricane of computerised effects in Marvel Avengers style, Gotham has used the scope afforded by a prolonged TV series to develop a specific world populated by rounded characters which evolve and move convincingly through time.A Batman prequel rooted in DC Comics mythology, Gotham pieces together a putative Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Boasting one of the most appealingly eclectic casts in recent memory, The Salvation – from Dogme 95 director Kristian Levring – might have hoped to emulate the success of Sergio Leone's Italian-infused approach by bringing a Danish flavour to traditional western proceedings. But by relying too heavily on the tried and tested it fails to distinguish itself, meaning that the "smørrebrød" western seems unlikely to replace its spaghetti cousin in audience affections any time soon.Set in America in 1871, it begins promisingly with a soon-to-be-shattered softness as a nervous Dane, Jon ( Read more ...
emma.simmonds
This shrewdly assembled, often near-monochrome actioner injects pathos from the off and mirrors the melancholic outlook of its grief-ravaged protagonist, played by Keanu Reeves, who dials down the befuddlement and proves rather endearing. Directed by stuntmen Chad Stahelski and (an uncredited) David Leitch, it's a lovingly crafted, pleasingly characterful effort that delivers impactful, imaginatively executed thrills.Even if you're not an animal lover, John Wick has a crafty way of pulling at the heart strings, demonstrating a simultaneous flair for manipulation and restraint. It opens with Read more ...
Simon Munk
There are so many worthy, interesting, non-violent games in the world. And then there's this… this steaming hot mess of pulsing electronica, endless ultraviolence and drug-inflected hyper-visuals. This is the videogame the Droogs would have played in A Clockwork Orange. And, rather worryingly, it's absolutely brilliant fun.Forget the rather pointless plot, involving drug-addled protagonists and hallucinatory phone calls. Instead focus on the play. Your job in each level is to work your way through whatever hellhole (police station, crack den, mafia penthouse etc.) you find yourself in, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dan Jones has turned up to narrate the dramatised story of the Plantagenets in history lite mode, perhaps aimed at capturing a young audience. In Plantagenet country, as shown on TV, we witness a medieval version of soap opera family sagas where all hinges on an overbearing father, a conniving queen, murder, and general mayhem. The tale, we were informed, was shocking, brutal, more astonishing than any fiction, and this ruling family, from its inception with Henry II of Anjou, became the greatest English dynasty of all time. (Tell that to the Hanoverians.)Who knows what marketing guru decided Read more ...