Film
emma.simmonds
A police procedural played out over a long dark night of the soul, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is the magnificent sixth feature from Turkish writer / director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Three Monkeys, Uzak). So much more than a simple thriller, it transforms a murder investigation into something gratifyingly profound and perversely beautiful; its grizzled, largely unfamiliar faces and their tales of woe will remain with you long after the end credits roll. Swathed in scintillating sadness and infused with life’s grim realities, it’s lit up by bursts of black humour and an overwhelming sense of Read more ...
ash.smyth
Put your hand up, please, if you’ve seen the multi-award-winning movie Blood Car. No? Fair enough. It was ostensibly released about two weeks ago – “in selected cinemas” – but you can be forgiven for not having tripped over any posters.Blood Car is (if one were feeling incredibly generous) the Napoleon Dynamite of the slasher-eco-vehicular-comedy-porn genre. It is the very near future – “like, two weeks from now” – and no-one can afford to run a petrol vehicle any more. Well-meaning vegan kindergarten-teacher Archie is working on a wheatgrass prototype engine (believe me when I tell you that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ken Russell fans within reach of the capital will have a surfeit of goodies from tomorrow as London films clubs in the Scala Forever network open a tribute season devoted to the iconic British film director, who died last November.The season not only pays due homage to him, but marks the BFI DVD release of The Devils (starring Vanessa Redgrave, pictured below), perhaps Russell's most controversial film, by a director who enjoyed geeing up the establishment and was forever kicking against the pricks. It's the film's first UK DVD release, which is available from 19 March, while the director's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Literary adaptations are a godsend to an industry that loves a good story but is too busy blowing the budget on chase sequences and explosions to pay a decent screenwriter. But among the glossy, desperately earnest adaptations (last year’s Jane Eyre, this year’s The Great Gatsby) there are also some quirkier reworkings that invite audiences to play an extended game of spot-the-classic – Clueless (Jane Austen’s Emma), Tamara Drewe (Far From The Madding Crowd) The Lion King (Hamlet – yes really). The novels of Thomas Hardy have drawn more attention than most, providing a whole filmic sub-genre Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In many respects it's hard to fault director Cary Fukunaga's take on the Charlotte Brontë classic. Fast-rising Australian actress Mia Wasikowska brings appropriate strength and moral clarity to the title role, while Michael Fassbender makes a mocking, sardonic Mr Rochester (albeit a rather too photogenic one). The lovelessness of Jane's early years with her unfeeling aunt, Mrs Reed (Sally Hawkins), is wincingly drawn, and her time at the grim Lowood school leaves the viewer feeling as beaten and abused as the heroine herself.Chuck in a quietly sparkling turn by Judi Dench as Mrs Fairfax Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Many a redoubtable British theatre talent has stumbled at the altar of cinema before, which is another way of saying that Bel Ami is hardly the first film to suggest that not every heavyweight of the London and international stage - in this case two such titans in Cheek By Jowl supremos Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod - is to the celluloid manner born. Leading man Robert Pattinson deserves credit for thinking outside the Twilight box while only confirming one's sense that he, too, looks sadly adrift beyond his established habitat. Much like his co-directors, if the truth be told.There Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hats off to independent British writer/producer/director Hadi Hajaig, who has doggedly piloted his thriller Cleanskin to the screen and picked up distribution support from Warner Bros in the process. Hajaig was never going to be splashing around in a Bourne- or Bond-sized budget, but he has played up the flick's British roots with pungent use of some prime London locations. He's also bought himself some box office buzz by recruiting an especially grizzled-looking Sean Bean to play Ewan Keane, ex-British soldier turned terrorist-hunter, as well as luring James Fox and Charlotte Rampling aboard Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Robert Sherman, who has died at the age of 86, was three years older than his brother Richard, and much quieter. Indeed, on the two occasions I interviewed the songwriting brothers – once in person, the other time on the phone from California – his personality felt intriguingly at odds with the benignity of their songbook, mostly consisting of the cheery children’s anthems they wrote for the likes of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book and The Aristocats.When they first began working on Poppins, Pamela Travers, whose first set of Poppins stories were published in 1934, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its near-simultaneous cinema and DVD release ringing alarm bells to rival Big Ben, The Decoy Bride takes talent and stuffs it into a GM turkey of a film. This insincere romantic comedy from director Sheree Folkson is replete with wobbly accents, head-slapping clichés, cardboard characters, preposterous plot developments, all flanked by a distractingly dire TV movie score. That it’s such a shambles will be a particular disappointment to (the innumerable) fans of David Tennant, for whom this represents his first filmic foray as romantic lead.Writers Sally Phillips and Neil Jaworski give us Read more ...
Norma Burke
The first ever work of literary theory was Aristotle's Poetics, which was written on two separate papyruses - one on tragedy and the other on comedy. However, at some point the second was lost and along with it our most ancient understanding of the comedy genre.Although there have been many important attempts to unpick the secrets and meaning of comedy since - Freud got himself in knots trying to deconstruct it and other thinkers such as Hobbes, Koestler, Bergson and Kant also made inroads - there has been nothing to match the gravitas of Aristotle's Poetics. What insights were in this Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The death of Peter Cook on 9 January 1995 was my JFK moment. I'll never forget what I was doing when I heard the news. I was driving from London to Granada Studios in Manchester to interview comedian Caroline Aherne. At the time she was married to the New Order bass guitarist Peter Hook, so when the radio announced that Peter Cook was dead my ears did a double take.I did not pull onto the hard shoulder and have a sob, but it certainly cast a shadow over the rest of the day. That and the fact that my interview was cancelled. This was in pre-mobile days so no one had been able to tell me Aherne Read more ...