sat 05/04/2025

Hollywood

theartsdesk in Los Angeles: The Film Festival Without Stars

'An Ordinary Family' seems determined to sidestep a whole host of clichés about religion and gay identity

In its second year under creative director David Ansen and in its new home at the LA Live complex, the Los Angeles Film Festival seems to have recovered from the slightly rocky start of its downtown debut last year. While one or two of the...

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Classical CDs Weekly: Dvořák, Rózsa, Xenakis

Roger Woodward: Undaunted by Xenakis

An unreleased live recording from a much missed conductor provides heartwarming food for the soul, while another podium giant brings musicality to uncompromising Modernism, aided by a phenomenal pianist. Meanwhile, a Hungarian exile in Hollywood...

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Larry Crowne

What is it with Hollywood and education? Hot on the heels (shamelessly come-hither pumps, in fact) of Cameron Diaz in the lamentable Bad Teacher, we now get Julia Roberts as a disaffected babe who, we're told, is a teacher even though she spends...

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Just One More Thing: Peter Falk, 1927-2011

Peter Falk: 'I’ve always said that Columbo was an ass-backwards Sherlock Holmes'

A few years ago I chanced upon something truly surreal. I was driving along a track in New Zealand. The way you do. There was a field on the left. In it there was a man sitting on a portable chair, a sketchpad in his lap, a pencil in his hand....

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Transformers: Dark of the Moon

When the infantilisation of Hollywood started in 1977 with Star Wars, as a 10-year-old I was all in favour. The hugely successful Transformers franchise based on a series of clever 1980s toys - they’re a car; some Origami-style fiddling later, they’...

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DVD: The Fighter

It’s an accepted flouting of reality that in films “based on a true story”, the first betrayal of the truth is in the casting. The reveal over the closing credits of The Fighter tells you just how well its two main characters have done out of...

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The Beaver

It doesn’t augur well when the first comment you hear as the credits roll is, “Well, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.” That’s really not a great place to begin a review either, but let’s anyway. Or rather with a fnar, fnar moment - did nobody...

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Bad Teacher

As if the education profession wasn't beleaguered enough at present in America, along comes Bad Teacher, the Cameron Diaz vehicle dedicated to the proposition that the only sector of society more deserving of contempt than students is filmgoers....

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DVD: Kiss Me Deadly

AI Bezzerides, who scripted Kiss Me Deadly (1955) for director Robert Aldrich, thought Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel was trash. Spillane, offended that Bezzerides changed so much, couldn’t understand why the film became a cult favorite in France; one...

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Strictly Gershwin, English National Ballet, Royal Albert Hall

Mark Twain once wrote of his experience of going to German opera. It starts at 6, he said, and they sing for four hours. Then you look at your watch, and it’s 6.15. This is also an all-too-accurate description of a night at English National Ballet’s...

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DVD: True Grit

As shoes to fill go, John Wayne’s dusty cowboy boots are about as big as it gets. So when the Coen brothers decided to take their shot at True Grit – the Charles Portis novel that finally won Wayne his Oscar – the world sat back with folded arms to...

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Gallery: Weddings and Movie Stars

Movie stars and marriage have always helped the headline-writers. When in 1956 Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe tied the knot (he for the second time, she the third), they were dubbed the Egghead and the Hourglass. “Arthur Miller wouldn’t have...

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