adaptation
Saskia Baron
If one was going to write the recipe for a classic British children’s film, it would probably include the following: adapt much-loved novel; hire fresh-faced young actors and well-worn comedians; budget for steam trains chugging over viaducts; ensure messing around in boats; add lashings of pop and sprinkle with a faint whiff of jeopardy. Swallows and Amazons has all of the above, and watching it is a bit like being transported back in time, not just to the 1930s when the story is set, but to a childhood Sunday evening when settling down to watch a BBC serial was a bittersweet pleasure, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), which has been re-released, is one of the most stately costume dramas films ever made. It is also a monument to tedium, a tale told so deliberately, ponderously, and humorlessly that it raises the question, as do Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, of whether their maker was a genuine master or is a sacred cow. In his adaptation of William Thackeray’s 1844 The Luck of Barry Lyndon especially, Kubrick’s meticulously achieved “realism” (which avoids the squalour of the poor), lugubrious grandeur, Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Think of Holly Golightly, and it’s more than likely that the face you’re picturing is Audrey Hepburn’s. And, while this adaptation by Richard Greenberg of Breakfast at Tiffany's is much closer to Truman Capote’s novella, it doesn’t have an ounce of the appeal of Blake Edwards’ famous film. Directed by antiseptic efficiency in a Leicester Curve production by Nikolai Foster, it’s numbingly dull – a dreary, inert tale of brittle, dislikeable people, inhabiting a tastefully designed bubble that is rarely pricked by events from the outside world.The war gets an occasional mention, but no one Read more ...
bella.todd
Watching Cameron Mackintosh’s joyful revision of this Sixties musical, it’s possible to believe for a moment that all the world needs now is love sweet love and a shit-ton of banjos. With a new book by Downton Abbey behemoth Julian Fellowes, new numbers by the pair behind hit musical Mary Poppins, and design that delights at every turn of the multi-revolve, Half A Sixpence seems destined to follow a flush of previous Chichester Festival musicals into the West End. It also puts vintage stars around the previously unknown name of Charlie Stemp.Charlie Stemp. Isn’t that just the best name? It’s Read more ...
Simon Bent
It’s a little over two years since I was approached to adapt The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson for Manchester Royal Exchange. I was living in Liverpool at the time and had recently seen That Day We Sang by Victoria Wood at the Exchange. It was terrific, wonderfully directed by Sarah Frankcom. I had never seen a musical in the round before, it was so dynamic. There’s nowhere to hide in the round, you can’t get away with anything, you’re totally exposed, and I remember thinking how great it would be to write for such a space.I read Walzer in one sitting and couldn’t put it down. It’s a Read more ...
Ed Owen
How much you enjoy this new version of Alice Through The Looking Glass will be directly proportional to how much you revere Lewis Carroll’s original text. If you love the original you will be perplexed, wondering if you have come into the correct screening. But if you don’t mind some liberties taken with the story or, more than liberties, if you don’t mind the original story kidnapped, wrapped in chains and thrown into a well, or if you just don’t know the book, then you might actually enjoy what’s on offer.Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was an early experiment with modern 3D, taking more Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Jane Austen’s early novel-in-letters Lady Susan has more in common with Vanity Fair or even Les Liaisons Dangereuses than it does with the author’s mature works. Austen’s familiar wit is there, certainly, but sharpened from embroidery needle to dagger. Her eye for social foibles and failings is similarly keen, but lacking the tempering generosity of her later novels. This is satire that cuts deep, and who better to wield the blade than director Whit Stillman, whose Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco have shown him such an idiosyncratic observer of the human condition?Austen’s story Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Benedict Cumberbatch, it turns out, was born to play the blasted, blighted Richard III, as one might expect from an actor whose long-term apprenticeship to both classical theatre and television converged to bring the BBC's Hollow Crown series to a surpassingly bleak if potent finish.Those who associate Shakespeare's "bottled spider" with various excuses through the years for overindulgence and/or camp got instead a portrait of gathering psychosis that was considerably more biting and bitter than has generally been true of this play of late. Along the way, its visual command confirmed director Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Tom Hanks is reaching world treasure status, like some third-century heritage site protected by UNESCO. His everyman allure makes him today’s only equivalent to James Stewart. Stewart shocked fans when he played a vengeful man-hunter in Winchester '73, and maybe it’s time Hanks defibrillated us all by playing a cold-blooded killer. In the meantime, here’s A Hologram for the King in which Hanks is very much Hanks and the main reason to pay up.The source material is the much praised 2012 novel by Dave Eggers. Eggers, author of the super-ludic memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The concept of Room as a home entertainment is freighted with irony. Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel, which she adapted for Lenny Abrahamson to direct, tells of a young woman who, abducted at 17 and held in captivity, has for five years brought up her son in the eponymous room. Their world – the world of Ma and Jack - is 121 feet square, and they have to make their own home entertainment.The film is most celebrated for the compelling performances. Brie Larson won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Bafta as a mother who like a magus recreates her narrow world from scratch. Just as remarkable is Jacob Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So at a stroke, The Night Manager has proved that appointment-to-view television is not yet dead in the age of Netflix, and that the BBC can do itself a favour in battling against the best American dramas if it can find a US production partner (AMC in this case). Perhaps its most vital lesson was that if you want to put bums on seats, pay whatever it takes to get Tom Hiddleston's up on the screen.High fives for director Susanne Bier, who ensured that this sixth and final episode comfortably sustained the tension so successfully spun across the preceding five, and powered thrillingly to a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Choreographers are not generally household names, but Matthew Bourne must come close. Not only does his company tour frequently and widely, with a Christmas run at Sadler’s Wells that many families regard as an essential fixture of their seasonal celebrations, his pieces have also been seen on Sky, on the BBC, and on film, most famously when his Swan Lake featured at the end of the 2000 movie Billy Elliot. This month he’s set to become even more widely known, as a film version of his show The Car Man is shown in dozens of UK cinemas.Bourne, who was knighted in the 2016 New Year Honours Read more ...