Film
Ismene Brown
The Arts Council of England has escaped the government axe - unlike the UK Film Council. Reports over the past week or two paint a grim picture of diminishing arts budgets in Scotland, Wales and England while the Conservative-Lib Dem Government takes its machete to what it considers the fat in public spending.The ACE is already implementing a £23 million cut in its 2010-11 budgets originally set at £468 million - £4million ordered last year in Darling's budget, another £19million now. Detailed budgets for supported arts organisations will become clearer over the autumn.In a written statement Read more ...
neil.smith
As played by the late George Peppard in the original A-Team TV series, Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith was wont to say he loved it when a plan came together. Alas, whatever plan that might have justified this botched retread of the Eighties small-screen favourite soon gets lost amid a wearying welter of gunfire, pyrotechnics and not-so-special effects, all of which appear haphazardly hurled on screen with all the care an incontinent pigeon might deploy while despoiling parked cars.One should probably expect no more from a mainstream Hollywood product, pitched as it invariably is to the fleeting Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One of those deathless Sopranos moments is where Christopher Moltisanti turns up late at the Bada Bing club for a meeting with Silvio Dante and Tony Soprano, and they ask him what kept him. “The highway was jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive,” Christopher retorts, quoting Bruce Springsteen’s New Jersey anthem “Born to Run”. Nobody would know this better than Silvio, since he was played by Springsteen’s E Street Band sidekick Steve Van Zandt.No other rock act has ever quite matched Springsteen’s feat of bringing his home-town roots and his personal background into the lives Read more ...
josh.spero
To coincide with the release of a not-very-memorable film with a not-very-memorable twist - RPatz's Remember Me (no, we don't) - is a top-ten of twists. We want to hear yours. The list in full (click on the name to buy it on Amazon):
Sixth Sense
Psycho
The Usual Suspects
The Empire Strikes Back
Saw
Fight Club
The Wicker Man
The Others
Seven
Planet of the Apes
There are some obvious omissions, so let's play Let's Twist Again: put your favourite twists in the comments below. I'll start: nothing blows me away like the daughter-sister-daughter-sister moment in Chinatown.
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anne.billson
Serge Gainsbourg, like Charles Bukowski, is one of those blokes who should be banned as a role model for impressionable young men, who may start imagining they too can behave like disgusting old soaks and pull any gorgeous bird who comes into their orbit. Note to Gainsbourg wannabes - this only works if you're a creative genius as well.Joann Sfar, hitherto best known in France as creator of The Rabbi's Cat BD (BD being short for Bande Dessinée or graphic novel, long regarded in France as a bona fide artform), makes his directing debut with Gainsbourg, an adaptation of another of his Read more ...
sarvenaz.sheybany
While most will be familiar with him as an actor, and some will know him also as a photographer and painter, few will be aware of the full extent of the late Dennis Hopper’s artistic practice. Hopper, who died in May of this year, did everything from taking photographs of Dr Martin Luther King Jr during the historic Selma-Montgomery marches through producing oil paintings inspired by the scale of billboards to making pop-art assemblages, abstracts, and painting large-scale figures appropriated from commercial advertising.But then Hopper was always a terribly tricky person to pin down. While Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Julianne Moore (b. 1960) is a true rarity. It’s not just that her hair flames like no other star since Katharine Hepburn. Or that alone of her generation she seems impervious to middle age’s indignities. There’s something else. Having worked with dinosaurs in The Lost World and a cannibal in Hannibal, she is mainstream enough to be considered a genuine leading lady. But much of her most eye-catching work, often written for her by indie directors like Todd Haynes and Paul Thomas Anderson, is fiercely extreme in spirit. Pornography, incest, erotica of various hues – hers would be bargepole Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Giuseppe Tornatore is known overwhelmingly for one international hit. There have been sundry other films from him in the 21 years since Cinema Paradiso won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but none which have sold such a seductive vision of Italian village life. Though damned to backwardness, stymied by introspection, Tornatore’s evocation of Sicily in 1950s was awash with vitality and colour. In Baarìa he finally goes home. Could he have another bittersweet blockbuster on his hands?It’s a very different film, despite a wholesale overlap in tone, provided not least by Ennio Morricone's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although it has taken over a decade to come to fruition, Splice still feels like a timely piece of work with its macabre and gruesome take on notions of genetic mutation for commercial gain and the god-like delusions of the scientific community. In addition, it spits out poisonous barbs in the direction of dysfunctional parents who visit their own inadequacies on their hapless offspring.Canadian director Vincenzo Natali, previously best known for the 1997 shocker Cube, has evidently hoovered up a few tricks from fellow Canuck David Cronenberg, with whom he shares a fascination with weird Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Let me lay a friendly fiver that many critics will rubbish this film, for the following reasons. It’s a romcom, and a Hollywood one at that, the lowest form of cinematic life for many (most often male) critics; it stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose career has gone from British television mediocrity to Hollywood royalty, a heinous crime for some; and its story, about a 40-year-old mother of two who falls in love with a guy 15 years her junior, is a reverse parallel of Zeta-Jones’s own personal life (her husband, Michael Douglas, is 25 years older than she). Just listen to those knives being Read more ...
neil.smith
The 15 years since Disney released the original Toy Story have seen a seismic boom in the computer animation field that has prompted every major movie studio to get in on the act. Relatively cheap to make, accessible to both adults and children and easily converted to 3D, these digital cash cows have become as much a part of a Hollywood balance sheet as the action-packed thriller, low-brow comedy or all-star contemporary reboot.Yet while its chief rival DreamWorks has shown few qualms in turning their animated hits (Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda) into serial franchises, pack leader Pixar Read more ...
anne.billson
Sex, blood and shocking - these are the things Catherine Breillat does well. So long as she's busting taboos wide open you can forgive her the longueurs, the wilful refusal to attend to fundamental principles of storytelling, her characters' inclination towards such dreary soliloquising you feel like yelling, "For heaven's sake, shut up and get back to the full-frontal fornicating!" At first glance, the story of Bluebeard would appear to be right up her street.This, after all, is the director whose specialities include explicit tumescence and in-your-face childbirth (Romance), rape and murder Read more ...