Film
Jasper Rees
Pete Postlethwaite, who has died from cancer at the age of 64, was an extremely amicable man whom Hollywood had down as a lugubrious baddie. It happened in Aliens 3, in The Usual Suspects, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.You could see Hollywood's point. His greying itinerant preacher's hair flailed behind him wildly. His green irises blazed bright around pupils the size of pinpricks. And then there were the cheekbones jutting beneath them. "They are quite whopping, aren't they?" volunteered their owner when I met him. "Who was it said, 'He looks like he's got a clavicle stuck in his mouth Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s difficult to know how to categorise Love & Other Drugs; is it a rom-com, a biopic, a melodrama, a satire or a hard-hitting attack on the influence that mega pharmaceutical companies have on America’s healthcare system? The film’s makers, meanwhile, tell us in their press notes that it’s an “emotional comedy”. Nope, me neither.I was none the wiser after seeing the film, which premiered at New York's CMJ festival and which stars two of Hollywood’s most intelligent and pleasing-on-the-eye young actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, previously seen as a couple in Brokeback Mountain Read more ...
theartsdesk
Avatar or The Hurt Locker? Although the Academy Awards are by no means the only barometer of cinematic trends, at this year’s Oscars the two centrifugal strains in contemporary movie-making went head to head. For Best Picture and Director, James Cameron’s digitally created sci-fi-scape locked horns with Kathryn Bigelow’s visceral visit to Iraq. One demonstrated Hollywood’s ever-increasing capacity to wish away actuality as we know it. The other went in where the bullets fly for real. You could see why the two directors, formerly married, had untied the knot. Our reviewers are Jasper Rees, Read more ...
anne.billson
2010 will go down as the year I fell out of love with Johnny Depp. And not just because of his cringe-making Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, an over-produced farrago which reduced Lewis Carroll's dark Victorian whimsy to a dull computer gamelike chase-rescue-showdown scenario. The Deppster sealed the Double Whammy of Dreadfulness with his uncanny impression of naff comedian Rob Schneider in The Tourist, a would-be rom-com thriller that somehow sacrificed the romantic, comedic and thriller elements of its remit to fawning close-ups of the increasingly prognathic Angelina Jolie. If only it Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Whatever else one thinks of Hollywood, one can hardly accuse Tinseltown of overdosing audiences on good cheer this holiday season. Filmgoers States-side can at the moment choose between James Franco hacking at his flesh, Mark Wahlberg landing a blood-spattering punch or two, and a seriously grizzled Jeff Bridges going none too gently into the good night. But as if to jump the gun on any of the award-season heavyweights, the UK first gets Peter Weir's The Way Back, a film about an epic walk to freedom that all but shouts its own desire to run and not walk up the aisle on Oscar night.On Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its finger-on-the-pulse tagline, “Welcome to the anti-social network” and respectable credentials, Chatroom is an intriguing prospect. It’s based on an acclaimed stage play, directed by the visionary Hideo Nakata (Ringu, Dark Water), with a script by Enda Walsh (Hunger) and populated by a cast of bright young things including Aaron Johnson and Imogen Poots. However, this cyber-thriller offers precious few thrills and is hampered cringingly by an absolute lack of authenticity. It is, as its title and tagline suggest, an exploration of the chatroom phenomenon, focusing on five teenagers as Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The third instalment of the Meet the Parents franchise, which began in 2000 and was followed by Meet the Fockers in 2004, moves the story on a few years. In Little Fockers Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) and Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo) are now married and have twins, Sam and Henry.As Sam and Henry’s fifth birthday approaches we see Pam’s dad, paranoid ex-CIA man Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro), newly obsessed with genealogy, confronting his mortality. In one of the movie’s early and funnier scenes, he suffers a heart attack and, alone in the house, defibrillates himself with the leads from his lie-detector Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A nostalgified panacea of pine, tinsel, and tintinnabulation? Or a black hole of loneliness, bitterness and melancholy? Films about Christmas, wholly or partially, have straddled both polarities over the years, producing a surprising number of classics. In compiling this list, I hummed and hahed over Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003), starring Billy Bob Thornton as a hard-drinking (if redeemable) misanthrope who poses in the red suit and white beard to get at a department store’s Christmas takings. It's wicked fun, but to have included it would have been disingenuous: at the time of writing [ Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Show a little more, show a little less. Add a little smoke – welcome to burlesque.” The coy, wittier sister of stripping, and first cousin to musical theatre, the 19th-century art of burlesque is currently enjoying a revival. With comely champions in Dita von Teese and our own gloriously named Immodesty Blaize, the art has shaken off its cruder associations and shimmied into the diamante-studded mainstream. Naughty enough for a red-cheeked thrill, wholesome enough for a BBC documentary, the paradox of burlesque is made for Hollywood and its contradictory values. Add one ex-Mouseketeer, an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ever since Catfish appeared in the States earlier in the year, debate has been raging about its bona fides. On the face of it an ingenious documentary playing smartly with the potential and pitfalls of social networking and the nature of personal identity in the cyber age, the film has triggered cries of “foul” from a number of critics and viewers. Morgan Spurlock, who made the junk-food odyssey Super Size Me, has called Catfish “the best fake documentary I’ve ever seen”.This is denied by film-makers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, who chose as their subject matter Ariel’s brother Yaniv, or Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a climactic moment in Loose Cannons when one of the characters has rather more dolci than is good for her. For anyone without a sweet cinematic tooth, the two hours’ traffic of this soft-centred Italian melodrama may induce a similar kind of diabetic shutdown. For everyone else, it’s a dessert trolley to feast the palate. But there is one intriguing discrepancy between this and other entertainments blown up from the bottom of Europe on warming southerly thermals. While everyone here wears hearts on exquisitely tailored sleeves, one character has to keep quiet about the emotions which Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the lightning speed of online delivery, there is still masses of time to select the best and most enjoyable presents for Christmas, thanks to the taste and wisdom of theartsdesk's pack of writers. With battered guitars, Belgian cartoons, Pacino's Shylock on Broadway, Australian festivals, Ballets Russes scarves, boomboxes, special edition CDs, advance booking on next year's hot shows, a subscription to The New Yorker and commissioning a portrait by a top artist among the cornucopia of suggested desirables, there really is something for everyone and for every purse. Kieron Tyler Read more ...