Carey Mulligan
James Saynor
This seems to be a season for films majoring on bisexuality, with the awards round encompassing Ira Sachs’s Passages, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a story of high-class high jinks in a modern twist on Evelyn’s Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.Saltburn describes the bad education of an awkward young man, played by the electric Irish actor Barry Keoghan, at an English stately home, and follows in the path of those other two films in not giving bisexuality an especially good name. At least in Brideshead it was allowed a subtle nod and presented as a rite of passage, but Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Five years have elapsed since New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey revealed that dozens of women had accused the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual abuse and harassment over three decades. Based on Kantor and Twohey’s book about their investigation, which sparked the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, She Said is an urgent if belated film.In February 2020, former Miramar chief Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment, a term that might increase depending on the outcome of the trial currently proceeding in Los Angeles. She Said, which stars Zoe Kazan as Kantor and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In a revelatory interview for the Royal Court’s playwright’s podcast series, David Hare admits to a thin skin. In his adversarial worldview, to take issue with him is – his word – to denounce him. He’s quite a denouncer himself, of course. In Collateral (BBC Two), the denunciations were directed at something rotten in the state of, in no particular order, the Church of England, the Labour Party, the British Army, the Fourth Estate, the security services, the body politic, the establishment, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Somewhere in there there was also a police procedural. This has been a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
This is Carey Mulligan week. She appears, improbably enough, as a hard-nosed cop in David Hare’s BBC thriller Collateral, as well as onstage at the Royal Court in London’s Sloane Square (she’s much better live than on film). In a 90-minute monologue, written by Dennis Kelly, Mulligan explores a contemporary love story, and she is in good hands. Kelly is the wordsmith behind the edgy GCSE syllabus play DNA and The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas, as well as the infinitely sweeter Matilda the Musical, so you would be forgiven for expecting a rather acerbic view of modern marriage. And you’d Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It says something about the state of television that sooner or later every actor has to play a cop or a spy. Latest in line is Carey Mulligan, starring as DI Kip Glaspie in David Hare’s new four-parter Collateral.This is, on the face of it, a thriller. The wheels of detection spun into action after the puzzling death of Abdullah Asif, a pizza delivery man who’d just delivered a quattro formaggi to harassed mother of two, Karen Mars (Billie Piper). Karen indignantly pointed out that the pizza in question lacked its requested additional topping, though this did not prove to be the motive for Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Suffragette is exemplary in its attempt to depict the harrowing experiences of the British women who risked their lives to win the vote. It depicts the awakening of a reluctant recruit who becomes a militant, and graphically depicts the violence meted out to the protestors and hunger strikers in the critical years of 1912-13, potently drawing parallels with the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike and the 1981 Irish Republican hunger strikes. Yet it’s also a history lesson so worthy and dutiful that viewers might miss how unusual it is for a mainstream movie to endorse acts of anti-state terrorism, even Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg specialises in claustrophobic, asphyxiating atmospheres, from his breakthrough family abuse tale Festen to the more recent study of small-town paranoia, The Hunt. Moving from domestic close-up to the Wessex wide shots and cosmic panoramas of Thomas Hardy, there’s a grinding of gears, and choosing Far From The Madding Crowd as his Hardy debut, when John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation is so revered, seems provocative.The Wessex countryside comes across as postcard-pretty rather than awesome and bleakVinterberg has cast well, and Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The arrival of Thomas Vinterberg's new treatment of Thomas Hardy's novel has triggered a retro-wallow in John Schlesinger's 1967 version, but happily, that was long enough ago to allow Vinterberg's vision to resonate in its own space. My expectations weren't high, but more fool me. This Madding Crowd rocks.Maybe Vinterberg's Danish perspective was just what the project needed, because the director has adhered to the logic of place and period but skilfully sidesteps the fussy dressing-up and anodyne wallpaper-scenery familiar from too many home-grown costume romps. The 1880s rural Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A totemic play from (nearly) 20 years ago surfaces afresh in Stephen Daldry's West End revival of Skylight, the power of David Hare's intimate epic fully intact if somewhat redistributed as is to be expected from the passage of time and a new cast. Make that a mostly new cast, given that the current leading man, Bill Nighy, followed on from Michael Gambon in the original Richard Eyre staging of a play that has plenty to say about how we live and love now as it did during the Thatcherite era in which the writing is steeped.If the evening as a whole feels less erotically charged than the first Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen's brooding homage to the Greenwich Village folk scene, is set in 1961 (January probably), just before Bob Dylan's revelatory songs popularised it. The film is named for its protagonist, a working-class singer-guitarist suggested by the seminal Village folk-blues performer and musicians' mentor Dave Von Ronk. The undomiciled Llewyn also inherited Phil Ochs's habit of crashing on other performers' couches.Portrayed with consummate weary restraint by Oscar Isaac, Llewyn is not a prepossessing movie hero. Selfish and self-destructive, capable of being Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Showbiz is a cruel and mysterious cosmic code that can grind the artist down, before he comes close to cracking it. That’s the message behind the Coen brothers’ elegy to the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) stands bruised and baffled at its heart.Speculation mounted in the wait for the Coens’ sixteenth that Davis’s resemblance in early footage to Dylan on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’s sleeve meant he’d be a satire on the singer. Actually, he’s Dylan’s shadow: the folkie scuffling round New York who then doesn’t get the breaks, and whose American dreams aren’t Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The mothership has landed. After a year or so of countless stage adaptations ranging from a recitation of the novel in its entirety to a themed party and (just this week) a dance piece, Baz Luhrmann's celluloid version of The Great Gatsby has finally arrived in all its superhero-style 3D scale and scope. So, is this Gatsby great? Not by some measure, and for every moment of inspiration and ingenuity comes another that fails both its literary source and Luhrmann's own instincts. Only in terms of the title character does the film deliver on the adjective that gets written out before us in Read more ...