Film
Nick Hasted
Treacle Jr is a cautionary tale of the fragility of UK film careers. Writer-director Jamie Thraves’s debut The Low Down (2000) is still regarded as a minor classic, but he took nine years to follow it up, then remortgaged his house to make this third film.He surely risked his home from a need to bring the film’s odd couple to life. Tom (Tom Fisher) is one of those men who walk out for the paper and don’t come back, nameless anxiety driving him from his young family and comfortable Birmingham home. Taking the train to London, he feels free for a while in a sunny park. He becomes homeless in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lars von Trier wants us to see the big picture. When Terrence Malick similarly returned cinema to the cosmic with The Tree of Life, he tried to make us feel the terrifying wonder of creation as much as death. The prelude to Von Trier’s new film instead sees Earth smashing into an indifferent planet 10 times its size. What’s more, when that planet, Melancholia, hoves into view from its hiding place behind the sun, the famously depressive director has suggested the catastrophe is a symptom, even affirmation, of his heroine Justine’s malaise. You can imagine her saying with grim relish as she Read more ...
ash.smyth
Since breaking onto the movie scene in 2001 with major roles in A Knight's Tale and A Beautiful Mind, London-born Paul Bettany (b 1971) has pretty much gone through the card. From a Darwinian ship's doctor (in Master and Commander) to Charles Darwin himself (in Creation), via romantic comedies, Dogme nightmares, CGI blockbusters and several turkeys involving religion, he has established himself as an actor of significant (and award-winning) versatility.Now, having covered everything between gangster and archangel – including a naked Geoffrey Chaucer and Read more ...