Tag: drama
Hyde Park on Hudson & Silence in the House of God
Saturday, March 30th, 2013 Film Reviews,Hard on the heels of Lincoln comes another movie about a great American President. But if Steven Spielberg seemed to be sending a message to Barack Obama about being steadfast and determined, it’s hard to know what Richard Michell is telling us about Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson. Allowing for its Spielbergisms, […]
Hara-Kiri & The Loneliest Planet
Saturday, March 23rd, 2013 Film Reviews,Takashi Miike is the cinema’s man of a thousand faces. He is astonishingly prolific for a contemporary filmmaker, having directed more than 60 movies since his debut in 1991, as well as stage and TV productions. Miike is notorious not only for the quantity of his films but for their bewildering variety. He is probably […]
Great Expectations & Performance
Saturday, March 16th, 2013 Film Reviews,In making the umpteenth version of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, British director, Mike Newell, resisted doing something ‘bold and audacious’ just for the novelty value. So far, so good, because the greatest crimes against the classics are committed when directors allow the preoccupations of our own age to disfigure those stories that have become part […]
Cloud Atlas & The Paperboy
Saturday, March 2nd, 2013 Film Reviews,Watching a movie can occasionally inspire us to adopt that quaint old-fashioned pasttime of reading a book. The new adaptation of Anna Karenina sent me back to Tolstoy, if only to confirm that a terrible film may be made from a great novel. Over the past year I’ve found myself re-reading Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, […]
Amour & Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir
Saturday, February 23rd, 2013 Film Reviews, Uncategorized,As a Valentine’s Day promotion this year, Madman Entertainment put together a package of eight DVD releases intended to take the “guesswork” out of finding a gift for one’s nearest and dearest. The selection was decidedly off-beat, including A Declaration of War, about a couple whose child has cancer; A Royal Affair – an historical […]
Anna Karenina & West of Memphis
Saturday, February 16th, 2013 Film Reviews,William Faulkner, Nobel prize winning author and sometime Hollywood scriptwriter, was once asked to nominate the three greatest novels of all time. He replied: “Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina and Anna Karenina.” The problem with making a film adaptation of a literary masterpiece is that it is impossible to translate the complexity of the book into […]
Lincoln & Elles
Saturday, February 9th, 2013 Film Reviews,It’s impossible to watch Lincoln without thinking how little, and how much, American politics has changed since the days of the Civil War. The same ramshackle cast of opportunists, ideologues, yes men and non-entities sits in the House of Representatives, but nowadays the radical thrust comes from the right not the left. The radicals of […]
Zero Dark Thirty & The Impossible
Saturday, February 2nd, 2013 Film Reviews,Zero Dark Thirty arrives at our cinemas with a readymade controversy: “Should director, Kathryn Bigelow, and scriptwriter, Mark Boal, have included the scenes of the CIA torturing prisoners?” Although it was driven home by the scandal of Abu Ghraib, surely noobdy will be surprised to learn the Americans practised torture. Indeed, it would have been […]
Django Unchained & The Guilt Trip
Saturday, January 26th, 2013 Film Reviews,A typical Quentin Tarantino film combines relentless bloodshed with a dry humour that releases the tension whenever the tide of gore starts lapping at one’s ankles. This formula has enjoyed such critical and popular success that a new Tarantino flick such as Django Unchained arrives on a tidal wave of anticipation. Like Tim Burton, Tarantino […]
Gangster Squad & You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Saturday, January 19th, 2013 Film Reviews,Rarely has a film ‘based on a true story’ seemed more like a fairy tale than Gangster Squad. If you go looking for the book behind the movie, as I did last week, then head for the True Crime section. Veteran journalist Paul Lieberman has penned a racy account of the real Gangster Squad – […]