Hollywood
David Nice
Could the fascination of Glenn Close's Norma Desmond transcend the frequent bathos of Lloyd Webber? Would they have sorted out the miking which wrecked last year's first choice of semi-ENO musical, the infinitely superior Sweeney Todd? Yes, to varying degrees. But the real saviour here was the ENO Orchestra, fresh from its triumph alongside its inseparable chorus at the Olivier Awards and now on hand to make a silk purse, or rather a gold cigarette-holder, out of a patchy but always superbly orchestrated score.Still, give a diva her due. There's little doubt that if Billy Wilder had been Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As a title, Hail, Caesar! is as delightfully self-conscious and “inside Hollywood” as The Hudsucker Proxy and O, Brother Where Are Thou? An alternative might have been It’s a Wonderful Lie.Set in 1951, Joel and Ethan Coen’s satirical fantasy, a companion piece to Barton Fink, stars Josh Brolin as a fictional studio boss who doubles as a gumshoe to protect his company’s image from scandals. Among the stars who test his resolve are a dim matinee idol (George Clooney) kidnapped by a Communist cell modelled on the Hollywood Ten while playing a Roman officer in the eponymous biblical epic, a Read more ...
Holly O'Mahony
Secret in Their Eyes is not a mystery-thriller that leaves us pondering for long “whodunit”. The focus is on how two investigators and a Deputy District Attorney can relinquish obsessions that have glued them to a murder case for 13 years. This is a story of longings, obsession, and the inability to move on from events unaccounted for by justice. Written and directed by Billy Ray (who was Oscar-nominated for his Captain Phillips script), Secret in Their Eyes is based on Juan Jose Campanella’s 2009 El Secreto De Sus Ojos, which won the 2010 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Ray’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Trumbo depicts the 13-year struggle by the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) to break the blacklist imposed on him and the other members of the Hollywood Ten in 1947. By continuing to get his scripts produced throughout the Fifties, Trumbo made a heroic, if morally complex stand against rabid Red Scare-mongers like the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) and John Wayne (David James Elliott). It’s disappointing that his courage and brinkmanship should grace a movie with no attitude of its own – that has the narrow sensibility of a 1980s or 1990s telefilm.Cranston nails the Read more ...
theartsdesk
The autumn cinema schedules of 2015 were assailed by the double whammy of Spectre and The Force Awakens– at times making it hard to find a screen showing anything else. Yet you’ll see that neither that latest instalment in the Bond franchise – though it’s been acclaimed as among the very best – nor the much-anticipated return of Star Wars appears on our list. Does that place us at the higher-brow end of the spectrum? Or sticking to a more determinedly eclectic ground, with Asif Kapadia's remarkable documentary Amy, Bill Condon’s unexpected addition to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nostalgia for the good old days of mutually assured destruction? You’d have got long odds on such a thing on 9 November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall was breached. A quarter of a century on, the Americans and the Russians are entangled in a whole other theatre of war in which the idea of negotiating with the enemy is unthinkable. The Soviets may have been abominable commie bastards but, hey, our guys could still clink a glass with them. So Steven Spielberg is able to visit the Cold War in something like a spirit of levity.Bridge of Spies is much more overtly an entertainment than Schindler’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To create this strikingly original portrait of the man some (though not Frank Sinatra) liked to call "the greatest movie actor of all time", writer/director Stevan Riley has plundered a remarkable trove of Brando's own audio recordings and used them to create a kind of self-narrating autobiography. The notion that we're hearing Brando telling his own story from some post-corporeal ether is reinforced by the device of opening the film with a computerised 3D talking head, based on a digital image of Brando's own head made in the 1980s. "Actors are not going to be real," it predicts, in Brando's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till at a convenience store in the fictional Liman, West Virginia. His girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is the competent one who Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oh Arnie. For two terms Arnold Schwarzenegger retooled himself as the Governator who could save California from debt, drought and Democrats. By the time his term ended, the Californian exchequer was reduced to rubble. A bit, in fact, like the Golden Gate bridge at the start of Terminator: Genisys. When the Terminator said he’d be back he wasn’t wrong. But this time he’s leading a project that’s only pretending to destroy California’s infrastructure.In fact it’s more complicated than just being back. Schwarzenegger is back and he's forth in a time-switching plot that commutes between 1984, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Jurassic World opens on a close-up. The smooth creamy surface of an egg is shattered by a claw attacking it vexatiously from within. In no time at all a scaly little critter is peeping out at us. It took a mite longer for the latest in the Jurassic Park franchise to hatch. The last film was 14 years ago and this fourth instalment seems to have been on the development slate almost ever since. Now that it's here at last, what’s new?For starters, this is a film which will give you tinnitus. The latest generation of dinosaurs are louder, scarier, toothier. Arguably, also sillier. Twenty-two years Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Teeth. Who’d have them? This documentary about the state of the nation’s gnashers came along at a timely moment for your reviewer. Earlier in the week I suffered my first ever extraction. Didn’t feel a jot of pain, of course, but by Christ you know all about it when the dentist is fiddling about inside your mouth, attempting with a variety of utensils to pluck out the culprit.I now see I had it easy. Meet Angela, a dog-walker from Cheshire. Her teeth were in a state of rococo disrepair. The camera went in for a snoop and it was like a cross between a motorway pile-up and a binful of rotting Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hollywood has never met a cliché it didn’t love; unfortunately, neither has Dylan Costello. His peek behind the curtain of Tinseltown’s Golden Age employs every stock type imaginable, from the boorish, chain-smoking manager to a pill-popping Marilyn-lite. It’s a play with admirable aims, but desperately in need of a good script doctor.Playing the part of fresh-off-the-bus ingénue is British thesp Patrick Glass (David R. Butler), getting his big break in 1949 when – you guessed it – the movie’s lead actor is forced to withdraw. Not the victim of All About Eve scheming or a good shove down the Read more ...