Hollywood
Ben Affleck: from Bennifer to Renaissance ManMonday, 04 March 2013
"There are no second acts in American lives," said F Scott Fitzgerald, but he had failed to include Ben Affleck in his calculations. "This is a second act for me," announced Affleck, as he collected the Best Director award for his work on Argo... Read more... |
Oscars 2013: Best Picture/Foreign Language Film/Animated FilmFriday, 22 February 2013
Time is drawing nigh to mark those Oscar ballots, but what movie should one vote for as the year's best? While odds-makers have been busily touting one title over another, the less-vaunted fact about this year's shortlist is that relatively few... Read more... |
MamaThursday, 21 February 2013
You don't have to be highly impressionable to get a shriek or two out of Mama, but it would help, and I suppose there are filmgoers who may never look at walls in quite the same way again. Elegantly shot and boasting Oscar hopeful Jessica Chastain... Read more... |
Side by SideTuesday, 12 February 2013
Does it matter if film dies? Keanu Reeves, always cannier than his limited acting style suggests, produces and presents this even-handed documentary on analogue’s apparently fatal decline in the face of a very recent digital onslaught. His contact... Read more... |
HitchcockThursday, 07 February 2013
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... Read more... |
Hollywood’s Lost Screen Goddess: Clara Bow, BBC FourMonday, 31 December 2012
“Knowing Clara Bow brought you down socially”. Although one of the biggest and most bankable film stars of the Twenties, luminous fan-favourite Clara Bow wasn’t so treasured by the Hollywood elite. She didn’t hide her affairs. She turned up for... Read more... |
CD: John Travolta & Olivia Newton John - This ChristmasThursday, 13 December 2012
It would be a fool who came to any Christmas album sternly expecting radicalism and the pushing of sonic frontiers, and an even bigger fool if they expected the same from one by John Travolta and Olivia Newton John. Christmas albums revel, for the... Read more... |
The Bodyguard, Adelphi TheatreThursday, 06 December 2012
It's Academy Award season within the showbiz-centric world of The Bodyguard, but even the greatest of Oscar obsessives - count me among them - would be hard-pressed to toss many a trophy in the direction of the 1992 film or toward the largely... Read more... |
Merrily We Roll Along, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 29 November 2012
On Broadway, Merrily We Roll Along remains forever scarred as the Stephen Sondheim musical that ground to an abrupt halt, closing after two weeks in 1981. But New York's theatrical failures often exist to be discovered anew across the Atlantic, and... Read more... |
Hollywood Costume, Victoria & Albert MuseumSunday, 21 October 2012
Going to the movies will never be quite the same again, as the Victoria & Albert illuminates the work of the costume designers for anybody who has ever been seduced by the world of the cinema, which I guess means all of us. This anthology is a... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Ingrid Bergman, NotoriousTuesday, 07 August 2012
Before the blonde, there was Bergman. In the second half of the 1940s, Hitchcock cast Ingrid Bergman three times, and on each occasion asked her to incarnate a different kind of leading lady. In the film noir Spellbound (1945) she was a... Read more... |
Intimate Exposure: Marilyn Monroe 50 Years OnSunday, 05 August 2012
It’s 50 years since Marilyn Monroe died alone on the night of August 4, 1962, from swallowing too many sleeping pills. The sad story soon became the stuff of legend. When they found her, she was still slumped over the telephone receiver; she had... Read more... |
