Film
Matt Wolf
Do you know where your teenagers are? If they're smart, they'll be somewhere watching Trust, the sophomore directorial effort from actor David Schwimmer that turns out to be as deftly compelling as it is unnerving. The depredations of the internet are there to be pondered at the current ENO/Nico Muhly opera Two Boys, and they make for even scarier fare in a drama about a social network - namely the family - that starts badly to fray once the parents realise that they can't police their 14-year-old daughter online.Schwimmer's film bears no relation to the 1990 Hal Hartley movie of the same Read more ...
sarvenaz.sheybany
In its second year under creative director David Ansen and in its new home at the LA Live complex, the Los Angeles Film Festival seems to have recovered from the slightly rocky start of its downtown debut last year. While one or two of the several hundred volunteers still seemed to be in it for the free T-shirt, most were clearly film enthusiasts themselves, eager to swap tips with patrons about screenings and potential sleeper hits.The primary venue itself, the luxurious Regal theatre complex in downtown Los Angeles, remains an odd choice for this sort of arts event. Its location in an Read more ...
hilary.whitney
David Leland (b 1947) has worked extensively both sides of the Atlantic but he is best known, both as a writer and a director, for his shrewd observations of ordinary people struggling against the constraints and hypocrisy of the accepted social mores of English life in films such as Mona Lisa (1986), Personal Services (1987) and Wish You Were Here (1987). However, it was Made in Britain (1982), a television play written by Leland for Channel 4 and directed by Alan Clarke, that first brought Leland widespread acclaim and the story of Trevor, a sociopathic skinhead, indisputedly destined for a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s hardly as if he needed critical resuscitation, but the work of Simon Gray is enjoying a moment in the limelight. Butley, starring Dominic West, is currently on in the West End, while in August BFI Southbank is to show a season of films written by Gray for the small screen and large.Among his films written for the BBC are his Play for Today double bill Plaintiffs and Defendants and Two Sundays, shown in 1975 and both starring Alan Bates. From his scripts for Screen Two there are After Pilkington starring Bob Peck and Miranda Richardson as childhood sweethearts who meet again in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This was all set to be released in UK cinemas around about now, but at the last minute it has gone straight to DVD. Perhaps the distributors got nervous. You can imagine why. Kim Cattrall is a totem for all sophisticated, sexually expressive women of a certain age. She’s ultimately the reason Sex and the City was what it was. You can put gratuitous violence, killing, maiming and all manner of cheap moronic sleaze up on a big screen and rake in the moolah. But some things are just too much. Samantha as a former Eighties porn starlet, washed up, penniless and living in a trailer? That Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The capture and arraignment of Ratko Mladic has brought atrocities committed in Bosnia back onto the front page. As Martin Bell used to argue, the Bosnian war struggled to hold the world’s attention even when it was going on. Two much more major conflicts, in which we have been doing the bombing rather than the peacekeeping, have since sent Bosnia plummeting down the squash ladder of important contemporary conflicts. In the arts, WMD and Al-Qaeda have got many more creative juices flowing and box-office tills ringing. It’s as if Bosnia was not there. Which is rather what this shocking, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What is it with Hollywood and education? Hot on the heels (shamelessly come-hither pumps, in fact) of Cameron Diaz in the lamentable Bad Teacher, we now get Julia Roberts as a disaffected babe who, we're told, is a teacher even though she spends precious little time in actor-director Tom Hanks's new film doing anything of the sort. Still, at least Roberts's unquenchable radiance lends Larry Crowne some measure of class; otherwise, here's another movie that merits detention for failing to make more than a passing detour in the direction of real life.You might be forgiven briefly at the outset Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some directors are just grateful that their movies get funded and released, but Robert Redford has loftier aspirations. Scornful of the routine popcorn-spattered multiplex-filler, he thinks we should be prodded to improve our lot by learning the lessons of history, and says he wants to tell stories about "ordinary people that are affected by larger forces out of their control". This lofty blueprint has brought us Bob's latest behind-the-camera odyssey, The Conspirator.It's the story of the aftermath of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, when the American Civil War was Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When the infantilisation of Hollywood started in 1977 with Star Wars, as a 10-year-old I was all in favour. The hugely successful Transformers franchise based on a series of clever 1980s toys - they’re a car; some Origami-style fiddling later, they’re a robot! - probably isn’t where that trend bottoms out. Michael Bay, the most bombastic, critically derided and commercially unsinkable director around, has as the title suggests gone prog rock for this third film, pumping up the Transformers “mythos”, and dragging it out to triple-album, 154-minute length.The pre-credits sequence chucks in Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways to get to the truth. One of the best ways is to ignore the truth. That seems to be the mantra of Ken Russell's colourfully mendacious portrait of the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers, receiving its long-awaited DVD release. The script (by a young Melvyn Bragg) is breathless and ludicrous and yields too swiftly and too often to the hysterical - to carpet-clawing madness, glass-smashing fury and shirt-tearing lust - as it follows an improbably manic and louche Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) and his struggles to juggle the obsessive love of the women and Read more ...