Tom Hiddleston
Saskia Baron
Nick Park’s utterly charming new animation channels the spirits of so many cinema and comedy ghosts that its originality can be overlooked – but it shouldn’t be. This is a fresh narrative in an era where films aimed at young audiences are dominated by sequels, prequels, remakes, comic book and TV adaptations, and it is all the better for it. The in-jokes and references come thick and fast and it’s fun spotting them. From the outset there’s a homage to Douglas Adams and the Pythons; we may be in the primordial soup but captions tell us we’re near Manchester, around lunchtime. Meanwhile two Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There have been three versions of King Kong and only one of them answers the question of how they get a massive ape back to New York. In 1976 they shipped him in an oil tanker, but the vessels in RKO’s 1933 original and Peter Jackson’s 2005 homage were nothing like big enough.The new Kong is so colossal that there is no thought of monetising him back in the Apple. How would they airlift him off? This 3D neo- monstrosity stands 60 foot tall, twice the size of any previous screen appearances. They’d need a fleet of helicopters to lift him, and he doesn’t like choppers: a fleet of them are soon Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ben Wheatley is a one-off, drawing on his experience in commercials and taste for wacky comedy. He does art house with a surreal twist, crafting a fast-paced montage of disjointed yet interrelated images and sequences that suit the cut-up universe imagined by author JG Ballard, in his dark and satirical vision of a modern world in terminal decay.The brain scientist and psychologist Laing, played with disarming cool by Tom Hiddleston, moves into a residential high rise, in which the rich swan around in the upper storeys and lesser mortals have to make do with the lower floors. The film is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The sad, short life of country legend Hank Williams makes for a surpassingly dour biopic in I Saw the Light, which does at least prove that its protean star Tom Hiddleston can do a southern American twang and croon with the best of ‘em. If only the actor weren’t trapped in the feel-bad film of the season.But as written and directed by Marc Abraham and broodingly shot by the great cameraman Dante Spinotti (LA Confidential, The Last of the Mohicans), the film wears Williams’s unlikeability like some perverse badge of honour, and even Hiddleston’s natural warmth can’t cosy the audience up 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 ...
Nick Hasted
Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) feels he’s “living in a future that had already taken place”. Director Ben Wheatley, too, has made a late-arriving Seventies exploitation pic from JG Ballard’s 1975 novel. High-Rise is a highly sexy and violent look through a distorting lens at both that familiar past, and the way we live now.Like many similar Ballard tales, its dystopia is cleanly simple, with architect Royal (Jeremy Irons) living in Bourbon splendour with wife Ann (Keeley Hawes) at the top of his new, self-sufficient tower-block. In lower floors, like a concrete Titanic, malfunctions Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
John le Carré's 1993 novel The Night Manager was his first post-Cold War effort, and the fortuitous setting of its early scenes in a hotel in Cairo has allowed TV dramatiser David Farr to move the action forward from the post-Thatcher fallout to the 2011 "Arab Spring". Here we encountered the fastidiously tailored Jonathan Pine, the titular night manager of the Nefertiti hotel, a man who keeps his head while all around him is panic, gunfire and explosions.Pine's journey is going to be the mainspring of this six-part series, and judging by the opener, the casting of Tom Hiddleston is Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Unique, dreamy, super cool and splendidly silly, just like its maker Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire flick packed full of romanticism, wit and enchanting, fuzzy music. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are perfectly cast as a pair of vampires named Adam and Eve entangled for eternity by the bonds of love. They don't prowl around town searching for victims, instead they live peaceful existences surrounded by the “human zombies” who are slowly ruining their beloved planet.LA is “zombie central” according to Adam (Hiddleston), an ex-rock star who now hides away from the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In his later life Shakespeare, who never ducked ways to define a hero, offered the public a challenge: Coriolanus is a professional warrior, deaf to reason, patrician hater of people power. To beat all, this man’s man’s a mother’s boy. In a world trying to be newborn in democracy and a big society, Coriolanus sticks out like a sore thumb.The play’s action is hectic, wracked by war and famine, and the shining simplicities of the sword contrast with the writhing difficulties of words to fashion slow consensus and agreements between people of sharply different motives. Josie Rourke’s production Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Jim Jarmusch's characters have always been ineffably cool, whether the slackers of Stranger than Paradise, the accountant lost in the Wild West of Dead Man, or the hit man with samurai pretensions of Ghost Dog. It goes without saying that if he makes a film about vampires, they’ll be dripping with style.From the opening sequence of Only Lovers Left Alive – a spinning camera peering down upon the lounging, elegantly clad, pre-Raphaelite figures of Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston – this gently satiric vampire film has us in a seductive grasp. Adam and Eve are a married couple who, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Forget the ages-old talk of London buses arranging their schedules so that they all arrive at once. The capital's patterns of public transport have nothing on the rapidity with which Henry V has hoved into view of late, whether at Shakespeare's Globe, on tour from the all-male Propeller company, in repertory at Islington's Old Red Lion pub theatre or as a baleful conclusion to the BBC's impressive Hollow Crown series of the Bard-on-film. And one thing seems certain after this most recent version: a play often renowned for its braying jingoism has rarely seemed so mournful, as if the " Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One intends no discredit to the keenly judged monarch-to-be that is Tom Hiddleston's Prince Hal, who will reappear on the small screen next weekend carrying the story forward in Henry V, to point out that Richard Eyre's terrific BBC adaptation of Henry IV Part 2 was stolen by dad. Playing the ailing King Henry who will not go gently into the good night, Jeremy Irons gave a performance of equal parts fury and passion that ranks with this actor's very best. Can someone not accommodate Irons once more on the classical stage, and soon?It's tempting to think of both halves of the Henry IV duo Read more ...