Tag: drama
Le Havre
Saturday, April 7th, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,Some films are too good to be saddled with that paralysing epithet, “heart-warming”. One thinks of smiling, rosey-cheeked children, poor but honest parents, perhaps a loveable old codger, and a dog. Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre has the dog, it has the salt-of-the-earth characters, but it also has a vein of surreal humour that never allows […]
Goodbye, First Love
Saturday, March 31st, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,Goodbye First Love is one of those films that will polarise its audience in terms of personality. If you are a type A Alpha male, you will most probably find this tale of young love and lost innocence to be unbearably slow and insipid. If you are the sensitive type B, you may be charmed […]
Margin Call
Saturday, March 31st, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,Margin Call is a small drama about a very big topic: the ongoing exercise in wealth creation and global domination that is Wall Street. It has a fine ensemble cast and the compact atmosphere of a chamber opera played out during one long night in a Manhattan office block. For writer-director, J.C.Chandor, who had previously […]
The Kid with a Bike
Saturday, March 24th, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,While it has been a bumper season for terriers, with star appearances in no fewer than three major films, 2011-12 has also been a boom time for disturbed children. First there was the terrifying protagonist of We Need to Talk about Kevin, then hypersensitive Oscar in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Get ready to meet […]
Coriolanus
Saturday, March 17th, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing, Uncategorized,King Lear has some grim moments, but I’ve always thought of Coriolanus as the bleakest of Shakespeare’s plays. Ralph Fiennes has confirmed that impression with a film adaptation which adds ultra-violence to the singularly depressing view of human nature found in this story. Not only does Fiennes play the role of Coriolanus, the Roman general […]
A Separation
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012 Uncategorized,One should hardly be surprised that Iranian filmmakers are the world’s best exponents of the moral dilemma. The entire country is one big moral dilemma, inhabited by charming, sophisticated, intelligent people condemned to live under a system that many find abhorrent. In Iran, as every visitor discovers, the extremist state routinely denounced by western politicians […]
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Saturday, February 25th, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close benefited from a great title and arresting cover design, but as a piece of writing it was as calculated as an XL spreadsheet. The device of telling the story through multiple voices owed a debt to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The graphics and typographical […]
My Week with Marilyn
Saturday, February 25th, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,Before watching My Week with Marilyn I wasn’t aware that Colin Clark, the 23-year-old film flunkey whose memoir provides the basis of the story, was the son of Sir Kenneth Clark. Not only was Sir Kenneth a renowned art historian and cultural bureaucrat, he was the man who gave us Civilisation (1969) – the orginal […]
J. Edgar
Saturday, February 11th, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,Spare a thought for Leonardo DiCaprio. He gives a stellar performance as J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s bio pic of the infamous FBI chief, and doesn’t even score a best actor nomination at the Oscars. The problem, quite simply, is that Hoover – stitched-up, paranoid, obsessive and megalomaniac – is not what might be […]
Hugo
Saturday, February 4th, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,There is a lot to like about Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s homage to Georges Méliès and the early days of cinema. If only I hadn’t seen The Artist before writing this piece, I might have liked it even more, because Michel Hazanavicius, a relatively unknown director until now, has the magic touch that Scorsese admires but […]