Film
graham.rickson
Vertigo’s recent elevation to the top of Sight and Sound’s contentious Top 10 makes its minor shortcomings all the more glaring. But dodgy back projections, a plot full of holes and a truly terrible painted portrait ultimately don’t dim its brilliance. Barbara Bel Geddes, later to attain global fame in the late 1970s as Larry Hagman’s mother in Dallas, plays the supporting role of Midge, the former fiancée of James Stewart’s Scottie. In a film notable for glacial pacing and stilted, spare dialogue, Midge’s warmth shines out. It’s as if she’s strayed in from a different film. She’s Vertigo’s Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The great Leonard Cohen has brought his trademark poetry and pain to a whole host of film and TV soundtracks: the cynical “Everybody Knows” accompanied the bump and grind of Atom Egoyan’s Exotica; the raggedly beautiful “Hallelujah” brought soul to Watchmen and best of all is his melancholic musical backdrop to Altman’s heartbreaking McCabe & Mrs. Miller. In fact we’ve already seen one film this year take its title from a Cohen song – A Thousand Kisses Deep. This time it’s the wooziness of 1988’s “Take This Waltz” that provides the inspiration, as Canadian actor-turned-writer/director Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We haven't had a Bourne movie since 2007's Bourne Ultimatum, so Hollywood naturally felt it was high time to reheat the much-loved franchise. Back comes Tony Gilroy, screenwriter for the first three Bournes and now writer/director on this one. In the mix, too, are brief cameos by some familiar faces from the earlier pictures, including Joan Allen, David Strathairn and Albert Finney, who are used to emphasise the way this new instalment grows out of the dark and dirty covert shenanigans we've seen in its predecessors.But what fans will want to know is whether The Bourne Legacy can survive Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Many an English actor has found himself playing a suave and supercilious Hollywood villain, but none has done it with the exquisite finesse of George Sanders. His performance as Jack Favell in Rebecca only brought him a handful of scenes in a movie running over two hours, but he's not just one of the major pivots of the drama, but perhaps the most memorable character in a film teeming with splendid turns.Favell is the would-be nemesis of Larry Olivier's self-indulgently morbid Maxim de Winter, a short-tempered aristocrat severely burned by his marriage to the ravishing, charismatic but bad-to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the collaboration between Jane Arden and Jack Bond was truly two-way, their films were wholly driven by a female perspective. They also evolved from Arden’s explorations into the nature of self and how external forces affect that. Yet instead of being a form of therapy, the Arden-Bond films are magical journeys blurring the boundary between the real and unreal.Separation (1967) has some mod-ish trappings: music by Procul Harum, visuals from light-show artist Mark Boyle and clothing from Ossie Clark. The character Jane (Arden herself) drifts through a world where she interacts with a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Animated 11th-century Scotland is a great place to live for a girl with a bow and arrow, until your mum decides to marry you off to any young numpty who wins a clan tournament. No wonder the female audience comes predisposed to love Merida, the star of Disney Pixar’s Brave. She’s a snappy, arrow-shooting, red-haired Scottish princess who’ll do anything not to end up like her mum. Who wouldn’t love a feature-length 3D animated film shining with the vocal talents of Kelly Macdonald, Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson, Billy Connolly and half-Glaswegian Emma Thompson and five propriety software Read more ...
james.woodall
The most radical Locarno ever: it's in the upper 20s Celsius in the southern Alps. The sky is cloudless blue. Moreover, not for one, or two, or three, or four nights in a row, but for FIVE has it not rained in this small resort. Next year no doubt it will again be the normal business of deluges in the Piazza Grande, and an air of anti-climactic, soul-freezing damp will prevail.Good weather helps the mood but does not, of course, affect the quality of films. Of the ones I’ve seen in the Piazza (not in competition) only Pablo Larraín’s No, about a 1988 referendum in Chile to extend or bring an Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Alfred Hitchcock’s atmospheric boxing silent The Ring pivots on the allure of WAG-dom, 1927-style, for Lillian Hall Davis’s Mabel. At the start, she is the ticket-seller for the fairgound booth in which her pugilist boyfriend, “One Round” Jack Sander (Carl Brisson), takes on all-comers. And one can tell by the way she chews gum that she’s bored.When a fight manager pits the unrecognised Australian heavyweight champion Bob Corby (Ian Hunter) against Jack, to see if he’d be worth signing, Mabel is smitten by the smooth-talking hunk. Hall Davis’s amorous glances never suggest vulgarity, though Read more ...
fisun.guner
Every year, FHM produces its 100 sexiest women of the year list. It follows a simple formula, since sexiness, as determined by the magazine’s readers, is predicated on fame – a particular type of fleeting, red-top tabloid fame. So this year, top of that list is Tulisa of the sex tapes. Likewise, every year Art Review does its 100 most powerful people in the art world list. So what is it to be the most powerful person in the art world? What is its relationship to fame, market value and fashion?Last year, it was Ai Weiwei, who still holds the title. One isn’t suggesting that the two title- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Britain’s New Towns – constructed to address post-World War II housing shortages – were meant to be places of dreams. Modern amenities abounded. The clean lines of post-Le Corbusier architecture screamed “this is the future”. Yet there was no sense of community, more a sense of alienation for residents. That wasn’t an issue for on-message government agency the Central Office of Information, whose 1974 film New Towns painted them as places of wonder. Retitled A Dark Social Template, this ad for the miracles of concrete, bathrooms and a bank on your doorstep has been recast with a new Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Whenever the name of Ivor Novello is mentioned, which is not often these days, the term “matinee idol” is inevitably appended. Novello, now best known as a songwriter, had already starred in nine silent films before Hitchcock chose him to play the title role in 1927’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. In a way, Novello, whose well-carved profile, smouldering dark eyes and bow lips gained him the reputation of Britain’s answer to Rudolf Valentino, was cast against type as a possible serial killer. (Not so the creepy Laird Cregar in the 1944 remake.)
The influence of German Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Blood feuds and mobile phones are not something you expect to find in the same film narrative. But they are both part of the landscape of American director Joshua (Maria Full of Grace) Marston’s Albanian-language The Forgiveness of Blood, which shows that while a small Balkan nation has caught up with the modern world in some technological respects, age-old traditions of clan revenge survive. Murder must be avenged with murder, making for generations-long disputes.The kind of simmering disputes between neighbours that end in bloodshed were a part of William Faulkner’s American South. In the Read more ...