Film
theartsdesk
“Brandon is everyone.” Shame, Steve McQueen’s new film, opens later this week. It is a brutally frank portrait of a man’s struggle with addiction to sex. As McQueen explains here, it was shot in New York for the specific reason that no one in the UK would talk to him about sex addiction. No sex please.And yet the film has a distinctly British flavour. McQueen co-wrote the script with Abi Morgan, the television scriptwriter who has branched out into film and theatre: she wrote the script for The Iron Lady, which opened last week, as well as the plays 27 and, opening this week at the Lyric Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a moment some way into The Iron Lady when its titular heroine presides over a celebratory domestic soiree. Around the table are arrayed ageing Tory nabobs and their peachy consorts, one of whom at the evening’s end tremulously approaches her hostess, sitting apart in an upright chair. The guest (played by Amanda Root) sinks to one knee and, offering up a gaze that mingles concern and adoration, says, “I hope you appreciate what an inspiration you’ve been.” It’s as if she’s in supplication to Saint Teresa of Avila, not the woman who torpedoed the Belgrano and the NUM.This is more or Read more ...
mark.kidel
The domesticating instinct runs deep: humankind cannot bear too much animality and the wilderness shrinks daily and exponentially. We love to see animals as if they were human: we’re victims of the anthropomorphising compulsion, to coin a phrase for a new disorder. The appeal of the super-hit Frozen Planet is based on stories about humanoids who just happen to have fur, feathers or fins. They’re people, not beasts: that way we can identify with them. Project Nim’s importance as a film – quite apart from its formal brilliance – rests on its shocking indictment of our desire to cosy up to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A capsule summary of Goon doesn't sound very appetising - slow-witted hockey player with awesome fighting skills helps lift the Halifax Highlanders out of their low-achieving doldrums. Yet within the film's oafish wrapping lies a touching little tale of oddball relationships and characters struggling to find their place in the world, set against a melancholy backdrop of small-town Canada in iron-hard winter weather.I know nothing about ice hockey, though I managed to grasp the basic premise that the side with the higher score wins. As presented here, the game consists of a few skilled players Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although 2010 was undeniably a bad year for Greece, the arrival of Attenberg was a timely reminder that despite the country’s financial bankruptcy, it wasn’t culturally bankrupt. Suffused in melancholy, Attenberg nonetheless recognises that courage and facing change head on are core to the human spirit.theartsdesk has already remarked on Attenberg’s “peculiarity and pathos”. Two other things are central to Attenberg. At one point, Marina’s architect father remarks that the project he’s part of “might as well be constructing ruins”. That, and his and Marina’s strategy to cope with and organise Read more ...
matilda.battersby
In the year that Kindle electronic downloads surpassed book sales for the first time, the influence of literature on the wider arts is still as pertinent as ever. Cinemas have been filled with titles first read on the bestseller lists, from Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to the second instalment of J.K Rowling’s final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.In cinema I was most impressed by Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, a take on Michael Lewis’s book about baseball. I think it lives up to its reputation as the film of 2011. However, I must Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.His sectioned Hamlet at the Young Vic underlined what Read more ...
mark.kidel
In a year of mounting turmoil and uncertainty, it was easy to fall back on safe bets and comfort-zone reassurance. Addictive TV series offered a welcome haven from the angst of financial meltdown: Sarah Lund’s melancholy airs in The Killing offered a homeopathic cure for the gloom of double-dip recession. Breaking Bad, the saga of the cancer-struck physics teacher who takes to a life of crime was dark, funny and endlessly surprising. Downton Abbey, by way of a contrast, was well made and watchable, in a warmly soporific kind of way.TV continued to thrive on the cult of celebrity, spewing out Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Commercial TV's most influential and controversial figure Peter Bazalgette, mastermind of TV's Big Brother, Ground Force, Deal or No Deal and Ready, Steady, Cook!, is one of four arts knights announced in the New Year Honours. Bazalgette becomes a Sir alongside the Royal Opera House's musical director Antonio Pappano, Apple's chief designer Jonathan Ive and V&A Museum chairman and arts patron Paul Ruddock.Actress Helena Bonham Carter and comedian Ronnie Corbett become CBEs, as do Scottish Gallery director James Holloway, broadcaster Clive James and the record producer Steve Read more ...
Graham Fuller
My Top 10 movies of 2011, in order, are: Mysteries of Lisbon, Melancholia, Meek’s Cutoff, A Dangerous Method, Aurora, Hugo, The Princess of Montpensier, City of Life and Death, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris.While I couldn't sneak a British title onto that list, it seems to me that UK film is flourishing for the first time since the false dawn of the 1980s. It would be folly to suggest a renaissance is afoot, but it's clearly an exciting time. Lynne Ramsey, who should be making a movie annually, returned after a nine-year hiatus with Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It took a relatively little-noticed television documentary, Vlad’s Army, broadcast in Channel 4’s Unreported World strand to confirm that theartsdesk has a readership in Russia. Peter Oborne’s film (the presenter pictured below) caught the pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Nashi, with its defences down, and the result depicted, no holds barred, how politics works there today. Recent events hint, somewhat unexpectedly, that political change in the country is in the air; at the least what had seemed a depressingly predictable certainty before December’s elections now at least now looks up for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The year’s best arts story was not the cuts (which isn’t art, it’s politics), but the appearance in Edinburgh of a mysterious series of 10 magical little paper sculptures, smuggled into the city’s libraries by a booklover. No name, no Simon Cowell contract - it proved the innocent gloriousness of the human impulse to make art, a joy that has no expectation of reward but without which no existence is possible.An incredible cornucopia of ballerina artistry showed that the interpretation of existing work is just as necessary to the soul as the surprise of new creation. Alina Cojocaru, Sylvie Read more ...