Hollywood
Saskia Baron
It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a movie as staggeringly awful as The Book of Henry. If it was just a touch more shrill it could have qualified as a so-bad-it’s-good camp classic, but unfortunately it teeters this side of tasteful in order to keep its 12 rating. How any studio executive ever read Gregg Hurwitz’s script and thought this was a viable scenario is truly baffling. What terrible atonement for sins in a past life led Naomi Watts to take the lead is another mystery, as is the question of how director Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World) is going to live this debacle down and go on Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Lynch’s Hollywood horror film is casually stripped here of what seemed fathomless mystery back in 2001. Former Cahiers du Cinema editor Thierry Jousse kicks off a packed extras disc by using Lynch’s 10 clues on the original DVD case to easily decode its otherwise utterly disorienting last 30 minutes. The relationship between Betty (Naomi Watts), a perkily indomitable blonde actress from Deep River, Ontario, statuesque brunette amnesiac Rita (Laura Harring) and their seedier inversions of those characters in the final reel becomes almost mundane, when viewed through Jousse’s prism. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Guy Ritchie is back birthing turkeys. Who can remember/forget that triptych of stiffs Swept Away, Revolver and RocknRolla? Now, having redemptively bashed his CV back into shape with the assistance of Sherlock Holmes, the mockney rebel turns to another of England’s heritage icons in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.Do, however, dump that fantasy of yours of a triumphant return to the multiplex for medieval chivalry and courtly romance. Messrs Malory, Tennyson and dear old Lancelyn-Green can start rotating in their tombs now because King Arthur is basically Lock, Stock and One Stonking Sword, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’ve had the pre-release hoopla. We’ve had the gruellingly inevitable backlash. We’ve had, as an additional sideshow, the brief interlude when it was this year’s best picture at the Academy Awards, until it wasn’t. The time has now come for La La Land to embark on a long and doubtless fruitful afterlife as a home entertainment, and the arguments about the stars' abilities as musical performers can continue on the world’s sofas.You’ve seen it in the cinema. What do you get when you take the film home? On the DVD the extras include a mini-doc on Los Angeles and the homage the film pays to it, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a demoralising period towards the start of Miss Sloane, it looks as if we’re in for a high-octane thriller about palm oil. That’s right, palm oil. Everything you never wanted to know about the ethics and economics of the palm oil market is splurged in frenetic, rat-a-tat, overlapping, school-of-Sorkin dialogue. After 10 minutes your ears need a rest on a park bench.Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) is a hotshot lobbyist. Her peerless reputation in DC is for not having a moral bone in her body - she’s a gold medallist in ethical limbo, someone says. She’s the poster child for the most Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When Ridley Scott returned to his hideous intergalactic monster with Prometheus five years ago, he brought with him a new panoramic vision encompassing infinite space, several millennia of time and the entire history of human existence. With Alien: Covenant, he makes a more modest proposal.Picture, if you will, a spacecraft loaded with 2,000 hibernating colonists. They are en route to a distant planet called Origae-6, but the voyage is interrupted when the ship (it’s called Covenant) is battered by a blast of cosmic radiation. The emergency wakes the crew, and you might find yourself thinking Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The original Guardians of the Galaxy from 2014 had a freshness to its humour and introduced audiences to a set of novel characters; unfortunately, the sequel is overstuffed with ageing movie stars trying to get a slice of the action. There’s always a camp knowingness about Marvel scripts, it's one of the studio's charms, but here the overt cynicism begins to drag with lines like "We’re really going to be able to jack up our price if we’re two-times galaxy saviours".Foul-tempered Rocket the raccoon and two of the new characters are very welcome on screen – there's cute baby Groot who just Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Within seconds – literally seconds – of Unforgettable it becomes apparent that this is the kind of film that in the late Eighties and Nineties used to be referred to as “straight to video”, a label that covered a plethora of trashy, sexist, by-the-numbers psycho and erotic thrillers that beat a hasty route to Blockbuster. To actually see one in the cinema, released by a major studio, is a disconcerting experience.Those first few salacious and silly seconds involve the police interrogation of a woman, who looks like the victim of an almighty beating but is actually facing a murder rap. Julia Read more ...
graham.rickson
Born Alfred Arnold Cocozza to immigrant working-class Italian parents in Philadelphia, Mario Lanza was lauded by the likes of Serge Koussevitsky and Arturo Toscanini, becoming a huge Hollywood star by the early 1950s. Lanza couldn’t read music, and only took part in a handful of opera productions, but he was the first opera singer to have earned gold records, his versions of Puccini arias selling by the millions. Mobbed by screaming fans wherever he went, Lanza became a global phenomenon after starring in MGM’s The Great Caruso in 1951. His stage presence and charisma were legendary, and he Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s strange to think that Sean Connery is still out there somewhere, aged 86. But this 17-year-old Gus Van Sant cousin to the director’s Good Will Hunting remains the great Scot’s penultimate film (Sam Mendes pulled back from the Skyfall cameo that should have been). His brawn, brusque charm and impatient street-wisdom are undiminished as the J.D. Salinger-like William Forrester, who wrote a generation-defining novel, but now lives as a secretive recluse in a locked Bronx apartment. This Oscar-winning role joins Playing By Heart (1998) in reviving Connery’s range, away from the wry old-time Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales’ first collaborative album is a song-cycle centred around the piano in the titular room of the Château Marmont in West Hollywood – a hotel with a reputation as something of a den of iniquity during the Roaring Twenties. Featuring cameo appearances from the likes of Jean Harlow, Howard Hughes and Clara Bow, Room 29 comes across like a stripped-down riff on Lou Reed’s classically grubby Berlin album with splashes of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill and even Noel Coward to tell the tale of the ghosts of times past in “a comfortable venue for a nervous breakdown”. Read more ...
Ralph Moore
It’s a fairly big deal to be interviewing Stan Lee. Generations have been enthralled by his work, from the 1960s comics The Amazing Spider-Man and The Uncanny X-Men – which came to the UK first as US imports and later as black and white reprints via Marvel UK – to the more colourful world of Doctor Strange via The Incredible Hulk and Daredevil. Almost four decades on, the co-creator of Spider-Man (reclusive Spider-Man artist and co-creator Steve Ditko, 89, is alive and well too) and all those heroes and villains has now achieved a global level of fame and notoriety that he never quite Read more ...