Film
Jasper Rees
It is regularly cited as quite the grossest moment in the Top 1000 gross moments in gross-out comedy. Flooping out of Ben Stiller, dangling off his earlobe, whence Cameron Diaz takes a pinch to stiffen her hair flick: the world-famously icky spunk-gel sight gag. The Farrelly Brothers have never been ones to duck a gross-out challenge, and in Hall Pass they may have just knocked their own There’s Something About Mary off the Number One slot. Without bothering to rummage around the history of Things You Never Knew They Could Show in a Family Film, there's a shot in here which pushes the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
News junkies and connoisseurs of Iraq war conspiracies may be familiar with the true story of CIA agent Valerie Plame, which is earnestly converted to celluloid here by director Doug Liman. Part of Plame's work was infiltrating Saddam Hussein's weapons programme before the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was taken. Her husband Joe Wilson, a career diplomat who had served a stint in Niger, was sent back there by the State Department to investigate rumours of the sale of enriched uranium to Iraq for use in nuclear weapons.Wilson reported that he could find no evidence of any such Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ken Wardrop is a young Irish film-maker who has been winning awards since his days at the National Film School in Dublin. His & Hers, his feature debut, is no exception: it won the World Documentary Cinematography award at last year’s Sundance film festival. The title is deliberately misleading. We might expect a film with males and females in it, but instead this is a group of 70 girls and women talking to camera about the men - fathers, brothers, boyfriends, husbands and sons - in their lives.But, conversely, in asking them to talk about their lives in relation to men, their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The credits unfold against a backdrop of a tall, exotic plant, down whose length the camera slowly pans. The African Queen, in glorious Technicolor, based on a novel by CS Forrester, directed by John Huston, shot by Jack Cardiff, starring two of the great names of the cinematic age. Katharine Hepburn, the female face of the screwball comedy, and Humphrey Bogart, the hardbitten star of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. If you’re reading carefully, you’ll note that the credit for continuity goes to Angela Allen. Sixty years later, I sit in a cinema in Soho with Angela Allen and watch Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I’ve never been intimidated by them. I don't suffer from thinking, that person is a star. They’ve got their job. I’ve got mine. If they’re pleasant so much the better.” Angela Allen’s lifetime in film has found her working closely with some of the most iconic figures in 20th-century entertainment, from matinee idols to gnarled silverscreen pros. Of the 75 pictures on which she was script supervisor, this selection of photographs from her personal album gives some sense of her long and distinguished contribution to cinema, including the occasional bit of body double work when no other Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If you’ve seen Tomas Alfredson’s remarkable Swedish adaptation of John Alfrede Lindqvist’s vampire novel Let the Right One In, then this US remake by Matt Reeves is far from required viewing. He shadows the original so closely, you’ll never be surprised or scared. But like a loving cover version of a favourite hit, there are pleasures in the riffs he plays.The idea of a lonely, bullied 12-year-old boy bonding with a similarly isolated girl who tells him she’s been 12 “for a very long time”, due to being a vampire, works as well in Los Alamos, New Mexico as on Alfredson’s bleak Swedish housing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To anyone less than familiar with a transatlantic migration of 150 souls which took place in 1865, a bilingual film with dialogue in Spanish and Welsh may look like a subtitled bridge too far. Any such prejudgement would be a mistake. Patagonia is a film rich in cinematic textures which visits not one but two ravishing parts of the world rarely celebrated in widescreen. The fact that it has a lovely little cameo from Duffy, making her acting debut and contributing (in Welsh) to the soundtrack, is an extra recommendation.Patagonia opens, appropriately, in the week of St David’s Day. March 1 Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Upper-middle-class familial relations are placed under an unflattering spotlight in Joanna Hogg’s rich, resonant and often scathingly comic drama, which triumphantly harnesses the power of the unsaid and the unseen. Like its predecessor Unrelated, Archipelago is a superior, stylistically distinct work that is utterly, almost cringingly credible.Coming together for a family holiday on a remote, unnamed island (actually Tresco, the second largest of the Isles of Scilly) are Patricia (Kate Fahy) and her adult offspring, Edward (Tom Hiddleston) and Cynthia (Lydia Leonard). Her husband William’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It is, of course, a masterpiece - not Castleton Knight’s primitive 1929 British talkie, but Sir Nigel Gresley’s LNER Class A3 4472 Flying Scotsman, which iconic steam locomotive is currently being refurbished for commissioned runs in the spring. It enjoyed its inaugural London-Edinburgh journey on 1 May, 1928, and so excited the public that it generated a silent comedy-thriller, to which sound was added in 1930. The talking scenes, introduced halfway through, weigh down the story but sound effects enhance the thrilling train action that was shot with Gresley's co-operation.Moore Marriott, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The tiny theatre where the Oscar-vanquishing film The King’s Speech was spotted as a potential film project is working on a new script with the play’s author, and the film’s Oscar-winning scriptwriter, David Seidler.Last night at the Oscars, The King’s Speech director, Tom Hooper, taking his own Oscar for best director, told how his mother was at the 54-seat Pleasance theatre, Islington, North London (pictured below), in 2007 listening to a readthrough of the play. She rang her son and told him she thought she had found his next film project.
David Seidler, the playwright, had waited 30 Read more ...
james.woodall
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is apparently a gift for the big screen. It's full of tricks, illusions, two half-humans and of course kicks off with a stonker of a storm: any film-maker might, particularly in this hi-tech epoch, give his or her eye teeth to unleash wildest imaginings on this magical text for grabbiest effect. “The isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not”, says Caliban. Julie Taymor’s new adaptation is full of digital delights, built mainly around Ben Whishaw as Ariel - and, with Helen Mirren as Prospero, it's also responsible for one of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The King’s Speech survived a faltering start at the 83rd annual Academy Awards – think of it as an Oscar-night stammer – to emerge victorious with four trophies, three of them in the last 30 minutes of the (seemingly endless) ceremony. But long after this cinematic Cinderella’s final domination of the gong-giving season just gone is forgotten, 2011 will be remembered as the year that the Oscars dropped the F-bomb.The perpetrator of the above was not the British Christian Bale, though he made a joke about his familiarity with that very word when stepping to the podium to receive his Best Read more ...