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Matt Wolf
A vital theatrical partnership gets renewed, and then some, in Jamie Lloyd's revival of Passion, a transforming production that not only marks the start of various Donmar-related tributes to Stephen Sondheim in his 80th birthday year but also reminds us that this theatre reopened its doors in 1992 with the UK premiere of Assassins, since which time it has staged five further Sondheim shows; Passion, to speak as openly as this musical's heroine does of the entire spectrum from ecstasy to pain, is one of the very best.A vital theatrical partnership gets renewed, and then some, in Jamie Lloyd's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Welcome to Charlestown, a Boston neighbourhood of just one square mile that has produced more bank robbers than anywhere else in America. Here crime is a “trade” passed down from father to son, and the height of ambition is to serve your inevitable jail time “like a man”. It’s a setting grubbily familiar from the cinematic likes of Mystic River and The Departed, as well as Ben Affleck’s own directorial debut Gone Baby Gone; now it plays host to his sophomore effort The Town, a heist drama with a heart.Sadly, for all its macho posturing and gun-toting promise, The Town turns out to be as Read more ...
neil.smith
Julia Roberts takes a long time to find her centre in Eat Pray Love, a glossy adaptation of the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir that, while offering a respite from the usual cinematic diet of reboots, remakes and comic-book blockbusters, ends up being just as simplistic and facile as its box-office competition.Female audiences are traditionally starved of gender-targeted product, so some might regard Ryan Murphy’s gentle travelogue a welcome corrective to the prevailing trend. After nearly two-and-a-half hours of soporific navel-gazing, however, even the most ardent fan of Gilbert’s 2006 bestseller Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Middle-class family angst is this season’s theme at the Royal Court Theatre. And, in his new play about sex and intimacy, which opened last night, playwright Nick Payne puts the lust in Wanderlust and creates a contemporary tale of wandering hands and wandering affections. We are in a nice suburban part of England, and the mix of pain and pleasure will be all too familiar to most audiences, whether they are teenagers who can squirm at the antics of the youngsters, or middle-aged couples who might find the more mature characters shockingly recognisable.Alan and Joy are a professional couple Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Step aside Prince Charming – there’s a new fairy tale in town, and your only substantive contribution fits into a small plastic sample pot. At some point in the last few years the Shangri-La, the unattainable dream of romantic comedies, shifted from man to baby. Hollywood started asking itself what happened after Happily Ever After, and the answer – they started trying for a baby, went through several painful, unsuccessful courses of IVF before he cheated with a work colleague – wasn’t pretty. With Jennifer Lopez’s The Back-up Plan and lesbian artificial insemination drama The Kids are Read more ...
graeme.thomson
This quirky, compelling little Cutting Edge film never really worked out what it wanted us to think about what we were seeing, which in the end played to its advantage. Because it avoided the sorry fate – namely, shoehorning its participants into an ironic cul de sac then pointing at them and sniggering loudly - of TV programmes whose entire raison d’être begins and ends with the creation of a cynically arresting title, the results ended up being opaque, neatly observed and even rather moving.The premise, at least, was simple: to follow two teenagers from East Anglia who worked as undertakers Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Amid the cinematic dog days of late summer, François Ozon's Le Refuge comes aptly named: a character-led, intimate tale in the style of the late Eric Rohmer that will infuriate those who like their films more purely driven by plot even as it offers a refuge to moviegoers for whom the curves of a pregnant belly or a handsome young man's spine contain within them their own narrative.A meditation on the subtleties of tenderness and the legacy of pain, the film possesses something of the qualities of an exceedingly smart novella. Well, at least up until a final sequence that threatens to undo Read more ...
fisun.guner
We know we’re in cut-price Sex and the City territory when it’s not iPhones that are getting top product placement billing but Clearblue pregnancy tests. A box was held aloft between the trembling fingers of Jess as the camera slowly caressed its glistening cellophane surface for a lingering close-up. Just as well, since this was about all the shine, glitz and sensuality we were going to get in Series Three of Mistresses - as if there wasn’t enough doom, gloom and sobriety to go round in this recession-hit world they’d taken away the Prosecco, the frilly knickers and the killer heels. And Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director James Mangold says he "set out to create a world that feels completely real to the audience, yet is also deeply comic". Somehow he ended up with Knight and Day, which feels completely unreal and is modestly amusing in places. Tom Cruise, playing CIA super-agent Roy Miller, is so "real" that he can survive lethal assaults by swarms of assassins, plummet unscathed from high windows, swim underwater for miles and leap off flyovers onto speeding vehicles. Walking through gales of automatic-weapons fire, he suffers only a cut across his ribs.Somewhere on the travel itinerary any Read more ...
Jasper Rees
She glides on the arm of a tail-coated swain into an elegant Belle Epoque drawing room. Music swirls, eyes swivel. And no wonder. Her thin black dress hugs a gamine frame, a look of masculine confidence rests on her face. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, better known to all and sundry as Coco, is making an entrance. Another one.There’s been a lot of Chanel about recently. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinksy dramatises the couturier’s brief and possibly fictional dalliance with the composer in Paris in 1920. It is only the latest episode in the afterlife of the designer credited with changing the lives Read more ...
anne.billson
It's the eternal human-vampire-werewolf triangle, and at times it feels as though it really will go on for ever and ever. The story so far: in the small North-West Pacific town of Forks, where the sun hardly ever shines, a teenage girl called Bella loves Edward, a 100-year-old vampire who is perfect in every way, except of course that he drinks (non-human) blood, and has a tendency to sparkle on those rare occasions when the sun does come out. But, as we all know, girls like sparkly things, so that's OK.But hey, it's complicated, because Bella also loves Jacob, a Native American of the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It occurred to me halfway through Reunited that you could map the characters of This Life – the epochal house-share drama of the Nineties – on to those featured in Mike Bullen’s one-hour pilot feature and see little change in the terrain. All the tropes of modernity 2010-style – Google, Facebook, iPhones – were trotted into shot, but the premise was a dated one, while some of the supposedly edgy, zeitgeisty signifiers – white-painted bare walls, winking references to cocaine – were way off the pace. At least they didn't play any Portishead.Six former tenants of “a shared house in Stokey [ Read more ...