From its opening scene, Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows,1938) feels like a reverie, a period of sustained waiting, during which the characters stand at a threshold knowing that a tragedy will occur if they cross it.As mist settles over a highway at dawn, a deserter (Jean Gabin) from the French colonial army gets a lift from a lorry driver heading to Le Havre. As they pull into the city, the driver notes the heavy fog. The soldier says he knows all about fog – the fog in his brain. He’s weary and burdened by trauma and an unspoken sense of disillusionment. Marcel Carné’s film is a Read more ...

Is This Thing On? Bradley Cooper has previously directed A Star Is Born and Maestro, but they weren’t nearly as much fun as this. It’s a story of New Yorkers in the throes of mid-life crises, as Alex Novak (Will Arnett) separates from his wife Tess (Laura Dern) and finds himself floating in unfamiliar new waters. Their divorce also has a perverse knock-on effect on the lives of their close friends, Christine (Andra Day) and Balls (Cooper), who both start suffering from copycat syndrome.The joy of the piece (written by Cooper, Arnett and Mark Chappell and loosely based on the life of Read more ...

Tate Britain’s Lee Miller retrospective begins with a soft focus picture of her by New York photographer Arnold Genthe dated 1927, when she was working as a fashion model. The image is so hazy that she appears as dreamlike and insubstantial as a wraith.It exemplifies one of the hallmarks of a good model – the ability to become a screen that invites projection, rather than expressing your own personality. And in shot after shot for British and American Vogue, Miller remains an enigma – impassive and searingly beautiful. Would the exhibition bring her into sharper focus, as I hoped, or would Read more ...

In this strangely dreary recreation of 11th century history, it’s not just grim oop north, it’s grim everywhere. King & Conqueror purports to be the story of how the Norman monarch William (the titular Conqueror) and England’s King Harold found themselves locked in a battle to the death at Hastings, each having negotiated a fearsome labyrinth of plots, treachery, ambition and murder in order to become top dog on either side of the English Channel.But somehow, despite its rather distinguished cast, the drama obstinately refuses to catch fire. Where The Last Kingdom brilliantly evoked the Read more ...

British audiences of a certain age will note Finis Terrae’s similarity to Finisterre, one of the 31 sea areas listed in the BBC’s Shipping Forecast. Or previously listed – it was renamed Fitzroy in 2002 to avoid confusion with another Finisterre off the coast of Spain.This title translates as "End of the Earth", an apt one for a silent film which depicts a community and way of life largely untouched by the industrial revolution. Director Jean Epstein had recently completed an acclaimed but troubled 1928 adaptation of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Feeling exhausted and burnt-out, he Read more ...

Conceived and written by Matt Charman, whose CV includes an Oscar nomination for his work on Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge of Spies, Hostage is a rather puzzling mix of political thriller and domestic drama which can never decide whether it’s serious or not.In the lead role of British Prime Minister Abigail Dalton, Suranne Jones is called upon to do political battle with the French president Vivienne Toussaint (a cold and frosty Julie Delpy), and their fraught power-women exchanges give the show some of its best moments. Especially the bit where Toussaint bounces Dalton into a policy Read more ...

Kinder, Underbelly, Cowgate ★★★ Drag artist Goody Prostate (yes, I know) receives a call from a local library. Garbed in lederhosen and sporting a preposterous German accent, she was expecting a brutal, no-prisoners-taking drag roast battle. Instead, she finds that she’s actually been booked to read to a bunch of kids.Okay, the starting point for Melbourne-based actor/writer Ryan Stewart’s solo show might not be the Fringe’s most convincing, but it nonetheless offers up plenty of opportunities for a dissection of current moral panics, and of the rights and wrongs of introducing children Read more ...

Andrew Garfield was 29 when he played the teenage Spiderman and Jennifer Grey was 27 when she took on a decade-younger-than-her character called “Baby” in Dirty Dancing. So you’d think that directors and casting experts could find actors to advance on the screen through that kind of age gap readily enough.But this French kissing-and-clobbering epic opts to recast its romantic leads midway through as they jump from teens to twenties, and it’s one reason why the Hauts-de-France Romeo and Juliet – directed by Gilles Lellouche – wrings few tears or heart-skips over its two-and-three-quarter-hour Read more ...

The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is the bitter message of The Kingdom. Director and co-writer Julien Colonna’s nerve-fraying drama about an adolescent girl’s sudden immersion in the brutal, uber-macho world of her father, a ruthless Corsican mafia boss, or caïd, builds inexorably to the only possible conclusion. It's still shocking; cathartic, too, but dispiritingly so.While depicting Mafia violence as a pestilential evil, The Kingdom allows that crime families’ blood ties and Old Testament revenge ethos prevent insiders from walking away and starting their lives elsewhere. Such Read more ...

Alexandre Dumas’ novel has been filmed an immeasurable number of times (there was a new French version only last year) and televised even more frequently (a Mexican incarnation materialised in 2023). Yet the world still can’t get enough, so here’s another one, this time a French/Italian production with a polyglot Euro-cast.Apparently much of it was shot in Malta, where the golden Mediterranean light illuminating antique stone towers and ramparts stands in very picturesquely for Dumas’ Marseille. The original novel clocks in at about 1200 pages in most versions – I tried reading it on a Kindle Read more ...

When he was a callow youth of 18, German artist Anselm Keifer got a travel grant to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Vincent van Gogh. Some sixty years later, work by the two artists has been brought together at the Royal Academy in a show that highlights Van Gogh’s influence on his acolyte and invites you to compare and contrast.In the intervening years, Keifer has gained a huge international reputation with gargantuan paintings, sculptures and installations. His obsession with Van Gogh led him, in 1992, to move to the south of France where he transformed a former silk factory and the Read more ...

It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.Take Valley and River, Northumberland 1972 (pictured below right), for instance. A spring emerges from a fold in green hills that resemble limbs. The landscape doubles as a body, with an inviting recess nestling between parted thighs.These pastoral Read more ...