Film
alexandra.coghlan
Plenty of great films have been made about old age, about the humiliations, emotions, fragilities and joys of the end of life. Wild Strawberries, Harold and Maude, Venus, Driving Miss Daisy, even Pixar’s Up probably has a claim on this category, but Asia, with its regard for the elderly, has always had a special cinematic affinity for the subject. Following in the path of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, A Simple Life explores and exposes with infinite delicacy the relationship between an ageing Hong Kong servant and her employer.Ah Tao (Deanie Ip) has worked for the same family for 40 years, bringing up Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The final collaboration between Grant and Hitch also happens to be some of the helmer’s most deft, joyously irreverent work, light of touch and bereft of sentiment. Grant stars as a slick Mad Ave exec who’s mistaken for a spy and pursued across the US by a cabal of shadowy agents, a state of affairs that he takes impressively in his debonair stride.“Not that I mind a slight case of abduction now and then,” his Roger Thornhill quips drily, “but I have tickets for the theatre this evening.” A line like this could easily play as posturing, but Grant walks just the right razor’s edge between Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As a director François Ozon perpetually confounds, with a string of diverse films to his name (the intense 5X2 and the gambolling Potiche to name but two) and this effort from 2002 is characteristically capricious - is it crisp, contemplative drama, eroticism or thriller? In Swimming Pool former provocateur Charlotte Rampling finds her peace shattered, her sensuality re-awakened and her robust beauty upstaged by the brazen Ludivine Sagnier.Swimming Pool tells the story of artistically frustrated crime writer Sarah (Rampling) who retreats to France at the behest of her greedy publisher and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first time I saw Orlando, on general release in 1992, I was blown away by the beauty of Sally Potter’s homage to Virginia Woolf. Beginning in 1600 when Orlando (the suitably androgynous Tilda Swinton) is a young man, the film skips and hops through to the present day. The first scene, a banquet for Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp resembling a pantomime dame in a tall red wig) takes place after dark and, in the glow of candlelight, everything is burnished a rich golden brown.The aged queen gives Orlando the deeds to a grand house – on one condition: “Do not fade,” she commands; “Do not wither, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe.Since the Eames phenomenon didn’t readily cross the Atlantic and we are not overly familiar with their achievements, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hitchcock’s penultimate film was the grubby, squirm-inducing Frenzy, and Barry Foster's depiction of the grim killer Robert Rusk is central to the disquieting aura it casts. The film’s production was problematic enough, having been cut by the BBFC before release. It also had casting problems – Michael Caine turned down the lead role. Hitchcock dismissed composer Henry Mancini from soundtrack duties after having commissioned him. Hitchcock’s first British production for two decades wasn’t an easy ride for the director or audiences.Students of London history can look to Frenzy as a time capsule Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s always a thrill watching The 39 Steps’ Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) doing daredevil feats on the Flying Scotsman as it speeds across the Forth Bridge, kissing a Scottish crofter’s jealously guarded wife, and bringing down the house with an inane extemporized speech at a constituency meeting.A passive ex-Canadian rancher in London, Hannay must extricate himself from a murder rap and expose a spy ring by revealing unexpected daring, physical agility, and mental resourcefulness. Wrongly suspected of murdering a Mata Hari type (Lucie Mannheim) he thought was a prostitute but had no interest Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Seth MacFarlane is the equal opportunity offender responsible for a trio of animated sitcoms: Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show. The hardest-working man in TV comedy is known for his colourfully un-PC style and agreeably obnoxious humour, marrying American brassiness with sharp satire, and for turning a baby into a maniacal genius. Ted, his largely enjoyable film debut, focuses on a man held in a state of arrested development by his bad-influence buddy, the twist being that said buddy is a teddy bear. Teddy Ruxpin he most certainly isn't.In last year’s child-friendly Hop the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Football and film: what is that? Let’s agree that it has not always been the happiest relationship. If you’ve observed Brian Clough’s brief encounter with the Leeds squad in The Damned United, you'll get the picture. They really ought to be best mates, both being forms of mass entertainment. They have the same values, dreams and indeed time frame: 90 minutes or thereabouts (depends who's reffing/directing). And at their most venal they both pray at the altar of profit. Somehow, though, they just don’t click.Why? Time for a bit of punditry, Ron. The main problem is no scriptwriter can make up Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Is that a sabre you see before you? It could be if you’re talking any of multiple stage and screen versions of Hamlet, the Shakespeare play that puts centre-stage arguably the most esoteric of all Olympics activities: fencing. (Well, OK, beach volleyball is possibly just as rarefied, though it’s hard to imagine Hamlet and Laertes having much truck with that.)Hamlet may in fact represent most culture vultures’ first (only?) exposure to a sport that seems to belong to a select few, bringing with it a self-enclosed language that left even the BBC flummoxed one recent evening as a commentator Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
You’d have to have a heart of coal not to be moved by Aki Kaurismäki’s celebration of tolerance, redemption and the goodness that people can do. Le Havre isn’t quite It a Wonderful Life, but it’s not far short. The sensitivity with which the Finnish – now resident in France – director brings together unlikely elements makes him more than a humanist and takes him further into the political than any of his previous films.Le Havre is the story of shoe-shine man Marcel Marx (an impressively ragged but still noble André Wilms). He scrapes a living in Le Havre, where the real focus of his life is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Uncontrollable mirth is the response of many onlookers to the Olympic spectacle of synchronised swimming, though it is (they say) a discipline which demands formidable strength and technical accuracy. Be that as it may, it probably wouldn't exist without Australian swimmer, vaudevillian and movie star Annette Kellerman, who was credited with inventing synchronised swimming after she performed the world's first water ballet in a glass tank at the New York Hippodrome in 1907.Kellerman's career was celebrated in the 1952 biopic The One Piece Bathing Suit - originally titled Million Dollar Read more ...