Hollywood
Sam Marlowe
A decaying London outpost of the Hollywood movie-making machine, where dreams are spun on celluloid, and reality and fantasy intertwine in a nightmarish danse macabre of desperation and dark desire... that’s the concept behind this new immersive piece by the acclaimed site-specific innovators Punchdrunk. In execution, the experience is rather less mesmerising.Punchdrunk – for the uninitiated – have pioneered an interactive form of theatre that transforms unlikely found spaces with meticulously detailed, epic designs. Through these atmospheric, often sinister and unsettling hidden worlds, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Ever wondered what Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel creator, not to mention superhero movie A-lister Josh Whedon, does during his down time? Well, apparently he gets his pals together to have a go at the Bard. And by way of proof, along comes Whedon's film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, which plays like nothing so much as a home movie in Elizabethan tongue. The result is sure to take Shakespeare's most eternally transfixing comedy to parts of the American (indeed, global) heartland where it may have never played before, even I have to confess to being more bemused by the experience Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Skipping across time and place – South Pacific 1849 to Cambridge/Edinburgh 1936 to San Francisco 1973 to UK (looks like England) 2012 to Neo Seoul 2144 to Earth’s post-apocalyptic Hawaii 2321 – Cloud Atlas is like a scary old punk who's actually quite nice. A simple and satisfying moral centre stops you from feeling its 172 minutes are a waste of time and its six stories don’t intertwine as much as play tag with each other. But look past extraordinary makeup, special effects, distracting painted horses and Hugo Weaving as Old Georgie, an irritating amalgam of Tom Waits and Johnny Depp, and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a time, a couple of aeons back, when Bruce Willis wanted to get in touch with his thespian side. Tinseltown kept casting him, he complained, as rubberised lunks rippled in gore (pictured below) who always revert to the vertical after yet another drubbing. But that was then. And this is 25 years on from Die Hard's first outing: the day A Good Day to Die Hard makes it five.The joke of the Die Hard/Harder/Hardest franchise is that a comic-book cop takes a battering as he goes about the important business of deleting scumbags at the point of a machine gun. The villains, as villains will Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Both on screen and off, Montgomery Clift was sensitive, hesitant, introspective, self-destructive and often tortured. A personality that expressed itself on film as if afraid of what the camera would reveal. There were at least three faces of Clift. The early public one of the dark, romantic, handsome star of the fan magazines; the face of extraordinary beauty marred after a car accident in 1956, and the private face of drink, drugs and a series of unloving homosexual encounters. Although the accident itself had not really disfigured him too seriously, it seems to have scarred his character Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As promised, he's back. Arnold Schwarzenegger's last major movie appearance was in 2003's Teminator 3: Rise of the Machines, probably the worst of the Terminators but a lucrative one nonetheless. Since then he has popped up in a few cameo roles including an appearance as Prince Hapi in the Jackie Chan/Steve Coogan remake of Around the World in 80 Days, but from 2003-2011, he was mostly preoccupied with being governor of California. And handling a few personal issues of course, which led to him separating from his wife Maria Shriver in 2011.Anyway, this week the 65-year-old Arnold gets top Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sure, Les Miserables got eight nominations, including the expected acting nods for Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, and Daniel Day-Lewis is poised to make history as the first-ever three-time winner of the Best Actor Oscar, this time for a performance in Lincoln that ranks among his very best.But the 2013 Academy Award nominees are light on Brits and big on the American indy/European art-house circuit. Indeed, a far greater surprise than the failure of Tom Hooper to get a directing nod for Les Misérables, Hooper having been bypassed for a Bafta as well, was the strong showing made by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Knowing Clara Bow brought you down socially”. Although one of the biggest and most bankable film stars of the Twenties, luminous fan-favourite Clara Bow wasn’t so treasured by the Hollywood elite. She didn’t hide her affairs. She turned up for dinner in a swimsuit. Her father was an alcoholic and banned from sets. She revealed her deprived background to the press, undermining the myth that stars sprang fully formed from the Elysian Fields. When it came to assessing the silent era in his seminal book The Parade's Gone By, film historian Kevin Brownlow didn’t mention her. For that slight, he Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Here’s a rancid little hors d’oeuvre for the holiday season. The deliciously loathsome Gothic horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 50 years old and back in cinemas, never ceases to amaze as director Robert Aldrich’s strychnine-laced missive to Hollywood – his second, following 1955’s The Big Knife – and as a psychodrama of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis’s unfeigned hatred for each other.The movie opens in 1917. The junior vaudeville star Baby Jane Hudson simpers through her vomitous song-and-dance numbers onstage and, enabled by her unctuous accompanist father, rules her family with Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Going to the movies will never be quite the same again, as the Victoria & Albert illuminates the work of the costume designers for anybody who has ever been seduced by the world of the cinema, which I guess means all of us. This anthology is a trip down memory lane, from Charlie Chaplin’s tramp to John Wayne’s cowboys and gunslingers. And we’re brought bang up to date with Keira Knightly’s green evening gown from Atonement, a ball gown from Anna Karenina, and then into digital with Avatar – a complex technique called motion capture – and animation.There are three chapters: Deconstruction Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Film critic and historian David Thomson has been writing on cinema for more than 40 years, and in that time has penned books both sprawling (1975’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film) and specific (2009’s The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder). His latest volume The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies and What They Did To Us straddles the divide. It’s an ambitious but selective history of cinema, combining an overview (which is, by Thomson’s own admission, partial) with intimate, specific studies of noteworthy filmmakers. But more than a history of cinema, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Cleopatra didn’t hold a beast to her ass but in this lavish 1934 production, she could have. Cecil B DeMille amped up his two favourite topics - sex and sin - to create the world's second most opulent celluloid Cleopatra. Scripted by Waldemar Young (grandson of Brigham Young) and Vincent Lawrence (who seems to have kept working after his death), this hysterically fancy film was "based" on an "adaptation" of historical elements by Barlett Cormack - this is shorthand for “we only used the shiniest parts of the true story”. Despite phenomenal art direction by Roland Anderson and Hans Dreier Read more ...