Helen Mirren
ash.smyth
John Madden's mainstream remake of Israeli thriller Ha-Hov – The Debt – features three Mossad operatives despatched to Sixties Berlin on an Eichmann-style mission to kidnap a former Nazi and escort him to Israel for trial.In pursuit of Dieter Vogel, "the Surgeon of Birkenau", Rachel Singer (Jessica Chastain), Stephan Gold (Marton Csokas) and David Peretz (Sam Worthington) each carry the requisite array of general post-Holocaust baggage and individual character flaws, which, in the fullness of time, incline them predictably to a messy love triangle and an even messier Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Back in 2004, Russell Brand performed Russell Brand's Better Now at the Edinburgh Fringe, one of the best shows I have ever seen. In it he described his recovery from addictions to alcohol and drugs and how he had lost his job as an MTV presenter after one too many, er, misjudgments - coming into work dressed as Osama Bin Laden the day after 9/11, for instance.Only Brand made it sound a lot funnier than that, and his descriptions of his life were phrased in the most fantastical and florid language. But he didn't even get a look-in for any awards, which was shameful, and ever since has Read more ...
james.woodall
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is apparently a gift for the big screen. It's full of tricks, illusions, two half-humans and of course kicks off with a stonker of a storm: any film-maker might, particularly in this hi-tech epoch, give his or her eye teeth to unleash wildest imaginings on this magical text for grabbiest effect. “The isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not”, says Caliban. Julie Taymor’s new adaptation is full of digital delights, built mainly around Ben Whishaw as Ariel - and, with Helen Mirren as Prospero, it's also responsible for one of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause uproar. A couple of weeks ago, the Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you, he had read some hostile comments on the internet. “Well ought to have been left alone,” he decreed.Joffe’s film has little hope of acquiring the same mythic status as the 1947 John Boulting version, as he’s doubtless well aware. But Joffe’s line is that he didn’t set out to remake the Boulting film, but to shoot a new interpretation of Greene’s book Read more ...
Veronica Lee
RED has an interesting backstory: rather than being an adaptation of a novel, or the umpteenth reworking of a Hollywood formula, it has been adapted from the graphic novel of the same title by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Cully Hamner and published by the DC Comics stable. And its origins show in its slick editing, sly humour and original take on what is, let’s face it, hardly a fresh format. But where else can you see an action movie in which the youngest participant is well into his fifties?Bruce Willis is Frank Moses, a former black-ops specialist with the CIA, who is now retired and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The final days of Tolstoy are innately dramatic, as the American author Jay Parini intuited. The Last Station, published in 1990, was his novel about the novelist’s own denouement. Towards the end of his long and prodigiously successful life, Tolstoy chose to embrace the simple values of the fabled Russian peasant he had lionised in War and Peace. To that end, he determined to leave his entire fortune and publishing rights to the political organisation set up to disseminate his credo. For his wife, it was naturally all rather upsetting.The main reason for watching the film of the book is that Read more ...