America
Adam Sweeting
With the 70th anniversary of D-Day following hard on the heels of the extensive World War One commemorations, battle fatigue is becoming a very real concern for TV-watchers. Breaking the mould of retrospective war documentaries becomes increasingly difficult, as Messrs Enfield and Whitehouse demonstrated with deadly satirical accuracy in Harry and Paul's Story of the 2s, so all kinds of credit are due to National Geographic's frequently devastating record of the D-Day landings and their immediate aftermath.Although this was a multinational collaborative effort, the premise was straightforward Read more ...
ellin.stein
In the very first hours of 2009, Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old African-American, was traveling back to the East Bay suburbs with a group of friends after celebrating New Year’s in San Francisco when they were herded off their BART train (the Bay Area’s version of the Tube) by the transport police onto a platform at Fruitvale Station following an altercation. After an escalation of anxiety and machismo on both sides, one of the BART police shot the unarmed, handcuffed Grant in the back (he later claimed he thought he was firing his Taser) as the train waited in the station. The event Read more ...
Heather Neill
"Johnny get your gun" was a popular American recruiting call in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries and, according to the Irish-American song "When Johnny comes marching home, Hurrah, Hurrah", there should be celebration for him after battle. The Johnny of this story, Joe Bonham, an ordinary "Joe", got his gun alright, but there is no happy ending for him. Aged 20, one day in September 1918, he is saved from an exploding shell but reduced to a silent, faceless torso, lacking all four limbs and the ability to hear, see or speak. In the 120-seat Little studio, Johnny Got His Gun Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly everything may have been said or written about the relationship of artist-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s masterpiece to Solomon Northup’s 1853 book relating how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. But there can be no end to observations on how the true story is unfolded. We know from the title that the protagonist begins, and will end, as a free man, so it’s a question of pacing the narrative. Which McQueen does with absolute mastery, binding the visual beauty or horror of every frame to a genius art of storytelling in film.There are countless examples of dramatic juxtaposition which Read more ...
ronald.bergan
For decades, film audiences have known the craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones as an actor, mostly playing pugnacious, oddball, characters, way beyond the borders of respectability. Here, in his second film as a director, consolidating his credentials as a director-actor after his impressive directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), which drew favourable comparisons with Sam Peckinpah, he portrays a bitter, seen-it-all outsider, cajoled into helping a lonely 35-year-old, "bossy and plain" virgin (the splendidly unplain Hilary Swank) transport three insane married women back Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Favourite of the Coens, John Turturro’s fifth turn at the helm is a surprisingly lively, enjoyable fable of male prostitution. After the shuttering of the New York City bookstore where he worked for Murray (Woody Allen), Fioravante (Turturro) is talked into being the male meat in a female sandwich between Selima (Sofia Vergara) and Murray's dermatologist Dr Parker (Sharon Stone). Meanwhile, Fioravante doesn't fall for either of his lady-pals. Instead, he finds himself drawn to untouchable Hasidic widow Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), she herself shuttered since her husband's death. To add to the Read more ...
Heather Neill
Yellow Face comes into the Shed a year after it was first greeted enthusiastically at the newly-opened Park Theatre. Its category was generally agreed to be "mockumentary". Fair enough as the author David Henry Hwang appears as a character in his own play, a mixture of autobiography and fiction. Hwang was inspired to tackle the subject - the lack of opportunity for East Asians in American theatre - when Jonathan Pryce was cast as the Engineer, complete with taped up eyes, in Miss Saigon, adopting "yellow face" in the tradition of "black face" minstrels. Hwang led the protests against Pryce's Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When absorbing any artistic experience we can be confounded by our own expectations. Such was the case for me with Bonanza. Rather confusingly, Berlin are a Belgian outfit majoring in cinematic, multimedia theatre so, perhaps, I was expecting an element of performance to the evening, of direct human delivery. This was not to be, although the presence of a shadowy figure stage-side, sitting at a laptop behind a rustic wooden sign saying “Bonanza Fire House”, kept me wondering if something of this nature was about to occur. It wasn’t, and once I’d settled to that fact, the evening was engaging Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's surely among the most grotesque factoids in the history of Hollywood that despite being nominated for 10 Oscars, American Hustle won a grand total of none. Its big mistakes were presumably being too entertaining and failing to concern itself with a historic social issue. My own theory is that the cast was just too good - the flick boasted five potential gong-winners, and perhaps it was beyond the capabilities of the Academy to choose wisely between them.Anyway, even compressed to TV-sized viewing, Hustle is a wild ride and a non-stop hoot, a crime caper with buckets of soul. In the DVD's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A quick scan of the credits gives grounds for optimism about Transcendence, with Johnny Depp leading a copper-bottomed supporting cast which includes Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany and Cillian Murphy. Director Wally Pfister may be a first-timer, but since he's been Christopher Nolan's cinematographer since 1999's Memento and won an Oscar for his work on Inception, you might give him the benefit of the doubt.Hence Transcendence frequently looks superb, and for a good chunk of its running time tweaks your attention with ideas about the (over) appliance of science and mankind's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's always room on top for another TV anti-hero. After Tony Soprano, Breaking Bad's Walter White and Mad Men's fatally flawed Don Draper, here's Martin Freeman as Fargo's Lester Nygaard, a downtrodden failure of a husband as well as a second-rate insurance salesman. It could have been worse - they could have made him a journalist or an estate agent.Freeman has quietly blossomed into the little guy who could, a seemingly innocuous presence who's suddenly capable of holding up his end of the screen against all-comers however stellar, whether it's Benedict Cumberbatch or Sir Ian McKellen. In Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's been six years since Peter Flannery's lurid Civil War series The Devil's Whore, which ended shortly after the death of Oliver Cromwell. This sequel, co-written by Flannery and Martine Brant, speeds us forward to 1680, which means Charles II is on the throne and, in between attending bawdy Restoration plays, is hell-bent on tracking down the people who executed his father.To avoid getting stuck in any kind of rut, however, the writers have introduced a transatlantic dimension to the story. We catch up with Angelica Fanshawe, heroine of the first series (she was played by Andrea Read more ...