Film
Tom Birchenough
Richly nuanced in its sideshot view of Uruguay’s film world and Montevideo street atmosphere, Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life is a small film that picks up on suppressed emotions which are only released in its second half. Its black-and-white images (actually transferred from colour, in a manner consciously evoking previous eras) recalls something of European cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. The three non-professional leads live rather than play their parts, but it’s atmosphere, conveyed especially through its score, that gives the film its charm.Central character Jorge (played by real-life Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The thrilling does battle with the banal and just about calls it a draw, which is a synoptic way of describing the effect of Steven Spielberg's film of War Horse, based on the Michael Morpurgo novel that spawned the now unstoppably successful play. Those nay-sayers who said it couldn't be done will find their prejudices confirmed, preferring the imaginative reach infinitely more easily arrived at by the use of puppets on stage. On the other hand, no one does epic screen moments quite like Spielberg, which on occasion means wincing through various passages while you await this director's long- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Margin Call, a smart, taut and brutally frank portrait of the money game, asks a lot of its audience. A movie about traders as, if not quite good guys, then at least rounded guys? It’s not a trick Oliver Stone ever managed to pull off, and he tried twice. Refusing to deal in the Hollywood placebos of idealism and redemption, this is not a product that the big studios would have gone anywhere near. Scripted and shot by first-time writer-director JC Chandor, it was made on the very stringiest shoestring – a snappy little irony given the numbers its characters bandy around in the course of its Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Wanted: classic novel, preferably 19th-century but 18th will do, or early 20th. Anything reeking of period before television acceptable, though preferably not too working class. English if poss. Barnaby Rudge need not apply.Is there a crisis in the adaptation industry? Is inspiration running dry? This Christmas a new adaptation of Great Expectations became the fifth – yes, the fifth – version of the work put out by the BBC. In a nanosecond or two the movie will follow with Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham and Mike Newell (Four Weddings, Harry Potter 4) at the helm. No matter that Dickens Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Western image of manga comes from the thick volumes of knicker-flashing schoolgirls and lurid s.f. teenage boys pore over, and the anime (cartoon films) which adapt them. Singaporean director Eric Khoo’s animated adaptation of five stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, framed by details from his graphic autobiography A Drifting Life, reveals a radically different medium. As a young man proud of an art form which was being attacked for corrupting postwar Japanese youth, the now 76-year-old Tatsumi coined a new term for adult comics, gekiga (dramatic pictures), in 1957. It took until the 1970s for Read more ...
theartsdesk
“Brandon is everyone.” Shame, Steve McQueen’s new film, opens later this week. It is a brutally frank portrait of a man’s struggle with addiction to sex. As McQueen explains here, it was shot in New York for the specific reason that no one in the UK would talk to him about sex addiction. No sex please.And yet the film has a distinctly British flavour. McQueen co-wrote the script with Abi Morgan, the television scriptwriter who has branched out into film and theatre: she wrote the script for The Iron Lady, which opened last week, as well as the plays 27 and, opening this week at the Lyric Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a moment some way into The Iron Lady when its titular heroine presides over a celebratory domestic soiree. Around the table are arrayed ageing Tory nabobs and their peachy consorts, one of whom at the evening’s end tremulously approaches her hostess, sitting apart in an upright chair. The guest (played by Amanda Root) sinks to one knee and, offering up a gaze that mingles concern and adoration, says, “I hope you appreciate what an inspiration you’ve been.” It’s as if she’s in supplication to Saint Teresa of Avila, not the woman who torpedoed the Belgrano and the NUM.This is more or Read more ...
mark.kidel
The domesticating instinct runs deep: humankind cannot bear too much animality and the wilderness shrinks daily and exponentially. We love to see animals as if they were human: we’re victims of the anthropomorphising compulsion, to coin a phrase for a new disorder. The appeal of the super-hit Frozen Planet is based on stories about humanoids who just happen to have fur, feathers or fins. They’re people, not beasts: that way we can identify with them. Project Nim’s importance as a film – quite apart from its formal brilliance – rests on its shocking indictment of our desire to cosy up to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A capsule summary of Goon doesn't sound very appetising - slow-witted hockey player with awesome fighting skills helps lift the Halifax Highlanders out of their low-achieving doldrums. Yet within the film's oafish wrapping lies a touching little tale of oddball relationships and characters struggling to find their place in the world, set against a melancholy backdrop of small-town Canada in iron-hard winter weather.I know nothing about ice hockey, though I managed to grasp the basic premise that the side with the higher score wins. As presented here, the game consists of a few skilled players Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although 2010 was undeniably a bad year for Greece, the arrival of Attenberg was a timely reminder that despite the country’s financial bankruptcy, it wasn’t culturally bankrupt. Suffused in melancholy, Attenberg nonetheless recognises that courage and facing change head on are core to the human spirit.theartsdesk has already remarked on Attenberg’s “peculiarity and pathos”. Two other things are central to Attenberg. At one point, Marina’s architect father remarks that the project he’s part of “might as well be constructing ruins”. That, and his and Marina’s strategy to cope with and organise Read more ...
matilda.battersby
In the year that Kindle electronic downloads surpassed book sales for the first time, the influence of literature on the wider arts is still as pertinent as ever. Cinemas have been filled with titles first read on the bestseller lists, from Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to the second instalment of J.K Rowling’s final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.In cinema I was most impressed by Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, a take on Michael Lewis’s book about baseball. I think it lives up to its reputation as the film of 2011. However, I must Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.His sectioned Hamlet at the Young Vic underlined what Read more ...