Helen Mirren
Adam Sweeting
A year ago Guy Ritchie brought us the Netflix series The Gentlemen, and now here he is on Paramount+ with his latest romp through the verdant pastures of criminal low-lifery. It seems that top thespians are queueing up to bag a slice of Ritchie-world, and an impressive cast includes Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hardy and Helen Mirren.To add a bit of extra lustre, screenwriting duties have been handled by Ronan Top Boy Bennett, with a bit of help from Jez Butterworth in episode one.Ritchie, a bit of a posh boy who likes slumming it, remains fascinated by the underworld/highlife divide. Thus we have Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“I want something Russian…” It’s with such a cry that Helen Mirren, bored by the bizarrely transgressive masked ball that comes at the close of the first episode of Catherine the Great, gets the dancing going: nothing from the imported fashions of Europe will do for her, and the music duly strikes up, a soupily romantic melody on violin, the quintessence, you might think, of mythic "Russianness”. Indeed, this majestic four-part series, jointly produced by HBO and Sky, will no doubt come to represent for many foreign audiences the epitome of the country, every bit as much as classic literary Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The prequel is here to stay. In the end every popular TV drama flogs itself to death. The star wants out, or the writer dies, or the original source material runs dry, or the public falls asleep. And there’s nowhere else to go. Nowhere, that is, apart from back in time. Hence the retro-fitted Endeavour and Gotham and Better Call Saul. In these risk-averse times, the execs enjoy the reassurance that the hard yards of establishing a character have already been gained. It (sort of) worked for Morse. How about the other great ITV cop of the last 30 years?Jane Tennison in the early 1990s was the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren) has a problem: she suspects that a British woman who converted to Islam and tops the international terrorism hit list is holed up in a house in a suburb of Nairob controlled by Al-Shabaab. Can her local agent (Barkhad Abdi) fly his tiny spy drone inside the house and confirm the terrorist’s identity? And are the local military ready to capture the terrorist if she leaves? Powell is orchestrating the operation from an army hangar in Sussex thousands of miles away, with all the stern precision of a Jane Tennison in camo uniform. Director Gavin Hood has 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 ...
Nick Hasted
“No other city has in its centre such an opportunity for profitable progress.” Anyone depressed and outraged by London’s gentrification plague will find this the most chilling statement by visionary gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), as his criminal guests sip champagne and his boat eases down the Thames, where Docklands cranes stand in stilled salute, and he sketches his plans for East London’s redevelopment around a 1988 Olympic stadium.The apparently prophetic nature of this 1979 gangster film is merely symptomatic of its greatness. John Mackenzie’s direction and Barrie Keeffe’s script Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Imagine The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel crossed with Chocolat. That’s The Hundred-Foot Journey in one, meshing a previous success of director Lasse Hallström with the previously neglected but growing genre of 'the mature person's movie'. After all, old folks like food, don’t they? Well, so do young people. Who doesn’t?The Hundred-Foot Journey is based on the novel by Richard C. Morais and screenplay written by Steven Knight (who wrote and directed the very good Locke with Tom Hardy), this is a filmic cuisine culture clash that benefits from a terrific cast and an alluring story. Shot as a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right sort of party. For the National Theatre's golden jubilee, therefore, the stops were jolly well pulled out and the invitations damn well accepted from the actors who, striplings at the Old Vic in the Sixties, are now our own Oliviers and Ashcrofts and Scofields. And it was almost all impeccable.Of course the greatest frissons were reserved for those Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s practically a pub game for overgrown children: factoring in the technical awesomeness, the solid virtues of the plot, the script’s adult-friendly appurtenances of irony and wit, what in your considered opinion is the best film in the Pixar backlist? It could be any one of the Toy Story trilogy, it could easily be The Incredibles, and there are those who would tick the box marked Monsters Inc.The last had all of the above and something else – a fully imagined world mixing elements of children’s fable and outlandish sci-fi. It was so perfectly in and of itself there was nowhere else to go Read more ...
fisun.guner
David Mamet has composed a love letter to Phil Spector. It may not be the most mellifluous ever written, and its tone may occasionally jar, but that’s what this fictional film, which he also directs and which stars Al Pacino as the bewigged legendary music producer, effectively is. It focuses on the months leading up to and during his first trial for the murder of struggling actress and nightclub waitress Lana Clarkson, and ends before we hear the verdict (it’s a hung jury; a retrial convicted him of second-degree murder in 2009).But just in case there’s any danger of mixing fact and fiction Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A pedestrian talent hitches a ride on genius in Hitchcock, director Sacha Gervasi's often cringemakingly banal look at the filmmaker in the run-up to the mother of all horror movies, Psycho. One can only imagine what the Great Man himself would think of a film that applies rudimentary psychology to a celluloid classic that gets under the skin to an extent Gervasi can only dream of. Thank heavens, at least, for the committed performances of a cast headed by Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren as Mr and Mrs H, two classy talents in a film that otherwise feels as if it was made for some Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
That’s Tempest, not The Tempest. It’s not the only thing askew with Julie Taymor’s visit to Shakespeare’s island of exile. Prospero has become Prospera, the banished Duchess – rather than Duke – of Milan. Taymor has transfigurative form, so much so she could be written into Shakespeare. She transmuted The Lion King into a stage show. She brought Spider-Man to Broadway, turning her book into a musical with songs by U2’s The Edge and Bono. Whatever level of adept she is, the alchemy hasn’t worked with Tempest.She’s got form with Shakespeare, having already brought Titus Andronicus onto screens Read more ...