My Week With Marilyn depicts the supposedly sweet dalliance between Marilyn Monroe – an actress in over her head played by an actress, Michelle Williams, reaching her peak – and eager-beaver gofer Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) during the fraught Pinewood production of Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956.
film reviews
emma.simmonds
The Deep Blue Sea, the latest from justly esteemed British director Terence Davies, shares its name with a Renny Harlin movie about genetically modified sharks (well, give or take a definite article). Both films deal in high anxiety and the looming spectre of death and both indulge in their own particular brand of theatrics. And - this may surprise you – as cinema, the shark movie works better.
Adam Sweeting
It's a problem many a cash-strapped Premier League football manager is familiar with. The über-teams like Chelsea and Manchester United have loads more money than you, and can simply spend you out of contention. Over in California, this was what was happening to the Oakland A's baseball team as they headed into the 2002 season, as their top players were picked off by wealthier squads and they couldn't afford to replace them with stars of equal quality. "We're organ donors for the rich," as Oakland's general manager Billy Beane puts it.
A true story based on the bestselling book by bond-trader-turned-author Michael Lewis, Moneyball is a baseball movie that breaks the mould of baseball movies, just as Beane himself upended ingrained precepts of baseball management as he set about dragging his team out of the low-rent mire. Instead of the starry-eyed wish fulfilment of The Rookie or the nostalgia of Field of Dreams (even if Beane is fond of wondering ironically, "How can you not be romantic about baseball?"), it's a hard-boiled account of how he realised that tradition wasn't going to save him, and so pioneered a radical new system for building success. It's baseball's own Winning Ugly.
Among the joys the film affords is the way it gives Brad Pitt an opportunity to stretch out and display a battle-hardened maturity previously not associated with the telegenic star. As Beane, he combines laconic pragmatism and bloody-minded determination, while deriving buckets of motivational fuel from his frustrated past as a hotly tipped baseball star who never delivered on his potential. Maybe there's an implicit wry contrast between Pitt's role here and his sometime mentor Robert Redford's portrayal of baseball hero Roy Hobbs in The Natural.
On a visit to the Cleveland Indians to try to buy players (pictured above), Beane is treated with contempt, but with brilliant intuition he snatches away the Indians' geeky theoretician Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). He's an economist with a degree from Yale who has developed a new method of assessing the value of baseball players by using computerised analysis of their performances. He hadn't convinced Cleveland, but Beane perceives that this could be his lifeline. The clinching evidence is when Brand's assessment of Beane's past abilities as a player corresponds with the deflating reality rather than the hopeful hype he was fed.
Using Brand's calculations, he recruits a seemingly motley crew of lame, over-the-hill or temperamental players written off by other teams, and sets about proving that they can become match-winners when deployed in ways that maximise their overlooked strengths. "We are card counters at the blackjack table," is how Beane sums up their audacious plan to subvert the supposed natural order of things. And, crucially, his unfancied squad comes cheap.
Director Bennett Miller gives the film ballast and guts with his unsparing depiction of the decrepit male gerontocracy running Major League baseball (pictured above), its authenticity enhanced by the casting of several real-life professional scouts. Beane's outlandish new theories are treated like Satanists at a prayer meeting, and no one is more hostile than Oakland's field manager Art Howe (played like a dour, thick-necked old Marine colonel by Philip Seymour Hoffman [pictured below]). The story of how the underdogs battled this ossified hierarchy with a mixture of brains and bravado is a sure-fire winner, and the physical contrast between the still dashing Brad and Hill's bespectacled swot lends an unlikely-lads charm to the proceedings. Scenes where Beane nonchalantly sends the flabbergasted Brand to sack failing Oakland players lob some enjoyable black comedy into the mix, while Beane's motormouth, take-it-or-leave-it phone calls as he hustles rival team managers are a recurring motif.
However, although screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian have done their persuasive best to put characterisation and the long climb against the odds centre stage, at some point the fact has to be faced that at its core this is a story about the analysis of reams of baseball statistics. I had the vague notion that there was some similarity between baseball and cricket - they both have batters, fielders and pitchers, for instance, if we make allowances for transatlantic nomenclature - but baseball's fixation with blizzards of stats and averages might tax even the intellectual resources of Stephen Hawking. The game's terminology (walk, bunt, top of the ninth etc) may also present a few problems to the European viewer, since you can lose sight of the keen edge of the action.
But such caveats aside, what carries Moneyball triumphantly to the tape is Miller's refusal to lapse into rose-tinted melodrama, a stance exemplified by his use (with one prominent exception) of real game footage instead of the usual sports movie re-enactments. Even when the A's have won a historic 20 matches on the trot and it looks like there's a Seabiscuit-style climax looming, Miller still has an ace and a couple of jokers up his sleeve. Despite its Academy-pleasing cast, this manages to be film-making a little bit outside the Hollywood box.
BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS
Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood
Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck
Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history
Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble
The Big Short. Pitt’s on the money as director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring
The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story
PLUS ONE TURKEY
World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Moneyball
Nick Hasted
Dream House’s crude selling point is the chance to see newly married couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz co-star as Will and wife Libby, in the film they made just before their first date. In bed and around the home their characters have moved to with their two young daughters, they’re appropriately, easily affectionate.
ellin.stein
The advent of AIDS tore through San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community, with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Obviously there were differences - buildings and infrastructure remained intact and this was a slow-motion disaster that unfolded over years as opposed to days - but a devastated community reeling from loss was similarly left abandoned by indifferent authorities and so forced to fall back on its own resources to cope and rebuild.
ash.smyth
How much do you remember about the Ghanaian presidential run-off of 2008? Me neither. And there's a reason for that. The Swiss documentary-maker Jarreth Merz spent three hectic months on the campaign trail, the better that we might understand – and he's put it all down in An African Election.
Dylan Moore
What if D-Day had failed? Even at a remove of nearly 80 years, it is strangely arresting to hear a BBC radio announcer giving details of how the Nazis have taken over Oxford and Swindon but are being met with resistance in Coventry and Leicester. Amit Gupta’s directorial debut, an adaptation of co-screenwriter Owen Sheers’s own first novel, begins promisingly enough.
Nick Hasted
Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless, unsensationalist job of memorialising the 12 people murdered by a gang led by John Bunting in an Adelaide suburb, Snowtown, between 1992 and 1999. Kurzel, who grew up nearby, filmed in the area, and cast many non-professional locals. This authenticity is a sort of homage to the victims.
Graham Fuller
As supremely silly as they are, the Twilight movies are made watchable by Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan, whose combination of fidgetiness and aloofness puts me in mind of James Dean’s Cal Trask and Jim Stark. If not as virtuosic as Dean (she's as beautiful), Stewart has made Bella as potent an empathy-figure for today’s alienated teenage girls with Gothic fantasy lives as Dean made Cal and Jim for would-be rebellious youths in the Fifties.
Adam Sweeting
Ken Kesey is one of these characters who gets filed under "Counterculture Legend", alongside the likes of Hunter Thompson and Abbie Hoffman, though his accomplishments are somewhat amorphous. His early achievements as a novelist are easier to quantify - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion put him pretty high up in the batting averages of modern American literature - but he gave up literature for film-making.