Film
alexandra.coghlan
Those who are “Jung and easily Freudened” (to misquote Joyce) need have nothing to fear from David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Yes, it’s the film where Michael Fassbender takes a cane to a barely corseted Keira Knightley, but don’t let the S&M seduce you; in an elaborate double bluff, it turns out that this costume drama is every bit as blandly bourgeois as its fin-de-siècle characters, with less sex than the average episode of Downton Abbey.While the fascination with society’s more deviant elements is classic Cronenberg, there’s little else here to signal the director’s input. The Read more ...
graham.rickson
I started keeping a swear word tally at the start of Paddy Considine’s Leeds-set Tyrannosaur and abandoned my efforts several minutes in when it looked as if I was about to fill an entire page. As the film begins, Peter Mullan’s character Joseph does something truly unspeakable to a dog. He then racially abuses the post office clerk where he’s cashing his giro and smashes the shop window. This is a character sorely in need of redemption, and it is to the film’s credit that Joseph’s upward trajectory turns out to be so gripping to watch.His life unexpectedly intersects with that of Hannah (an Read more ...
emma.simmonds
This Friday sees the release of James Watkins’ bloodcurdling adaptation of The Woman in Black, produced by the recently resurrected Hammer Films, who have risen like one of their macabre creations to torment us once more. With its old dark house spookiness and “bat out of hell” villainess, the screen incarnation of Eel Marsh House is suitably forbidding, but it’s only the latest in a long of line of diabolical dwellings where you reside at your peril and leave - only if you’re lucky - sanity surrendered and trousers browned. Buyer beware: these are the houses that drip blood.Every horror film Read more ...
ash.smyth
So, Birdsong is over, and for all the arts-crit ink spilled upon it I am still none the wiser vis-à-vis my three main points of concern. First: it is a truth universally acknowledged (I asked around) that the most memorable episode in the Faulks novel was the one about the blowjob. This scene was not so much absent from the TV version as, er... cunningly re-gendered. Why?! Second: there was, in the first few minutes of the "drama", a superfluous and sarky line (by a Frenchman, obviously) about modernist composers who can only work around four notes. Which was not Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The first time I saw Michael Fassbender (b 1977) in the flesh, it was in Venice, in 2011. I was heading home on the last day of the film festival, where Steve McQueen’s Shame – starring the Irishman as a New York sex addict – had enjoyed an enthusiastically received premiere a week before. As I jumped off a vaporetto at Marco Polo Airport, I noticed Fassbender walking in the opposite direction, towards the water. Alone, with a tuxedo slung casually over his shoulder, the actor had obviously got “the call”, to return to the festival to collect a prize.Indeed, that night he was on stage, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Yasmina Reza first came to theatregoers' attention with her 1994 play Art, a very funny three-hander about friendship and intellectual pretension. God of Carnage, this time a four-hander but an equally astute comedy of manners peopled by another bunch of bourgeois characters, debuted in 2007 - and now Roman Polanski has adapted it for the screen, co-writing the screenplay with Reza and moving the action from Paris to New York City.God of Carnage is a real-time, one-room drama and Polanski has made little effort to widen it out in Carnage, but this works very much in the film's favour, as we Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is it a voice coach Sam Worthington needs? He plays nothing but Americans – even in the mythological mash-up Clash of the Titans - but come those moments of what passes for heightened emotion in his performances, the Kiwi vowels will out. There is a lot of heightened emotion in Man on a Ledge, or at least height, being set on a ledge from which a man is threatening to jump. Close your eyes and you could be in Kaikoura or Wanganui, or Invercargill.In fact we are in Midtown New York on the flank of the Roosevelt Hotel, which intriguingly seems to assume some commercial benefit derives Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, originally released in 1970, is without doubt his masterpiece and marks the Italian director’s move from experimental art-house movies to larger scale-studio production. The film is stunningly beautiful, each frame carefully composed in terms of colour and form, and every camera movement contributing to mood and story rather than being used for effect. Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography broke new ground and inspired many other great film makers, not least Coppola who hired him for Apocalypse Now.In a series of seamlessly handled flashbacks, the film tells Read more ...