Film
Ismene Brown
The Facebook film The Social Network and TV's Glee were the big winners at the Golden Globes last night, though much attention has focused on the best acting awards to Colin Firth for The King's Speech and Natalie Portman for Black Swan. Not to mention Ricky Gervais's British sense of humour as host. Christian Bale was another eminent British actor who won an award, for his supporting role in The Fighter, but Helena Bonham Carter, Judi Dench and Romola Garai missed out despite nominations.The British have traditionally done well at the Globes, which are awarded by film and television Read more ...
graham.rickson
The classical-music industry loves dead icons; witness the endless reissuing and remarketing of recordings by Kathleen Ferrier and Jacqueline du Pré. Canadian pianist Glenn Gould died from a stroke at the age of 50 in 1982 and his seminal Bach discs have never been out of the catalogue since. Françis Giraud told Gould’s story on screen before in his 1993 film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, an imaginative series of vignettes depicting scenes from Gould’s life.Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont’s new film is more conventional in being chronologically ordered and composed almost entirely Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In 2011 the Barbican offers eminent theatre directors Robert LePage and Peter Brook along with the diversions of London International Mime Festival. Music includes composer focuses on Unsuk Chin, Brian Ferneyhough and Peter Eötvös, and high-profile visits by great conductors Sir Simon Rattle, Bernard Haitink, Sir Colin Davis and Barbican resident guest Valery Gergiev. Joan as Police Woman, the Waterboys, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Marianne Faithfull are among contemporary music performers while video and media art is featured from Ryoji Ikeda and Cory Arcangel. Full season listings below. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Toby Jones’s cameo in Notting Hill – he was cast as an over-eager fan of Julia Roberts - was deposited on the cutting-room floor. Most actors would have chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel he obtained permission to show the suppressed material. Anyone attending the play, or listening to it on Radio 4, would have laid long odds against the actor once cast as a stalker of stars eventually landing the lead in a Hollywood film Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Toby Jones’s cameo in Notting Hill – he was cast as an over-eager fan of Julia Roberts - was deposited on the cutting-room floor. Most actors would have chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel he obtained permission to show the suppressed material. Anyone attending the play, or listening to it on Radio 4, would have laid long odds against the actor once cast as a stalker of stars eventually landing the lead in a Hollywood film Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The multiplatform franchise might sound like a modern concept - the film that leads parallel lives as video game, TV spin-off, T-shirt and toy. But no, ‘twas ever thus. Entertainment moguls have always known how to squeeze every last dime out of a popular hit, none more than The Green Hornet. Created in Detroit as a radio drama in 1936, it has buzzed across the decades and the genres, from film to comics to television to fiction and back to comics again. It’s now returned to the big screen with a bang. And a nod and a wink.The Green Hornet was conceived as a different kind of superhero. By Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The American indie Blue Valentine was heralded in October by a sexy W magazine cover of its stars - Ryan Gosling smooching Michelle Williams’s temple as she parts her becrimsoned lips and gazes provocatively at us - and the restrictive NC-17 rating (the old “X”) granted it for “its shocking, gory depiction of a dying marriage”. Both cover and rating were wholly misleading publicity fillips for the movie, which isn’t glamorous or gory, or even pornographic: the shots of Williams’s Cindy being taken from behind by one boyfriend and receiving oral sex from another - Gosling’s Dean, with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The real-life story behind Conviction had a big balloon over its head saying “Hollywood screenplay!!!”, and sure enough here’s director Tony Goldwyn’s big-screen version, with Hilary Swank striding out front carrying the banner for truth, justice and the supernatural properties of sibling devotion. There’s no denying it’s an incredible story.Swank plays Betty Anne Waters, a working-class woman from rural Massachusetts (a region depicted here as startlingly primitive and impoverished) who shared an unusually close bond with her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) after the pair of them had endured a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Once upon a time, composers ran Hollywood. As conductor John Wilson reminded us last night, 44-time Oscar nominee and movie composer Alfred Newman became so powerful as second in command at MGM that he had two security guards posted at his office door. Any directors attempting to enquire how the score to their movies was getting along were told to clear off. Big, bold orchestral scores were Hollywood's crown jewels. At the Barbican last night we got a rare chance to inspect them close up. And how they dazzled us.Erich Korngold was up first, the father of Hollywood composition. Wilson, a suave Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a while back there, Russell Crowe was incapable of a false move. LA Confidential, Gladiator and The Insider all flagged up a thrilling talent for pugnacious individualism. Here was an actor with a bit of dog in him, a street-smart upgrade on Mel Gibson. Then he went and inherited Gibson’s gift for naff headlines. Maybe it’s an Aussie He-Man thing. Either way, the pictures got a bit smaller as tales of the incredible expanding ego did the global rounds. The films that could channel and contain Crowe’s animal aggression stopped happening. Does The Next Three Days spell a redemptive return Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Only project!" That's not quite what EM Forster famously wrote, but it serves as the leitmotif of The King's Speech, as ripe a piece of Oscar bait as you are likely to see this year. Neither as visceral as The Fighter nor as resonantly and fully realised as The Social Network, Tom Hooper's film nonetheless fields the necessaries guaranteed to lead this true-life tale of the maladroit stammerer who would be king to many a film awards dais.Alive to issues of class, disability and family, and yet occupying royal terrain that remains intriguingly remote from most filmgoers, the movie's abiding Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Made with the same furious energy which has characterised so much of Danny Boyle’s output, 127 Hours goes from the macro to the micro. It opens with a pounding split-screen assault of imagery depicting the frenetic, dehumanising nature of modern life, before closing in on one man’s five-day ordeal in a crack in the earth. In Boyle’s exuberant interpretation of Aron Ralston’s real-life story, what starts out as a cruel lesson in the perils of hubris quickly reveals itself as a life-or-death scenario.Aron Ralston (James Franco) is a young, cavalier adventurer, full of pluck and derring-do. As Read more ...