Jennifer Lawrence
Adam Sweeting
As it turns out, the slashed-to-the-hip Versace dress with which Jennifer Lawrence provoked controversy (synthetic or otherwise) on a freezing London rooftop was an accurate barometer of what to expect from Red Sparrow. It has the nostalgic accoutrements of a Cold War thriller, and calls upon Ms Lawrence to bare provocative expanses of flesh at strategic intervals.It’s helmed by Francis Lawrence (no relation), who has previously directed Jen in three Hunger Games movies, but tonally it’s an odd mixture. Based on the similarly-named novel by retired CIA veteran Jason Matthews, it can boast a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Breathing through an oxygen mask with a busted diaphragm and rib after shooting a single scene in mother!, Jennifer Lawrence had rarely suffered more for her art. Nor have we. Darren Aronofsky's latest begins as an enjoyably enigmatic, Polanskiesque waking nightmare, as the Mother (Lawrence) and her beloved Poet (Javier Bardem) find creepy strangers barging into their happy home. It ends in ineffectual, flailing chaos.The blurring of mythic dreams with supposed reality begins in the first minutes, as a fire-razed mansion reconstitutes itself around Lawrence as she sleeps. Big close-ups and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite being kitted out with a full-scale intergalactic spaceship and all known computerised effects, Passengers is essentially a two-hander for its stars Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Or you could maybe stretch that to a two-and-a-half-hander, if you include Michael Sheen's oily and obsequious bar-tending android.Perhaps it's part of director Morten (The Imitation Game) Tyldum's point that even if you're surrounded by the most lavish futuristic technology, space is still an infinite and soulless wasteland of nothingness, into which all human life might easily vanish without trace. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's getting mighty crowded in the superhero lounge. After the underwhelming Batman v Superman and the overwhelming Captain America: Civil War, here's the X-Men posse back on the warpath, once again under the bombastic helmsmanship of Bryan Singer.The extended opening sequence is a mesmerising standalone episode. It sets up the action by whisking us back to ancient Egypt and introducing the infinitely ancient Apocalypse, a self-styled god who has spent aeons gathering ever-increasing powers by transplanting the gifts of assorted mutants into himself. As pyramids tumble, Singer zooms us back Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Look what they make you give," as Clive Owen's dying assassin puts it in The Bourne Identity, and the way that success is as much a matter of taking the blows and dragging yourself to your feet again as it is about inspiration or even perspiration is part of the message of Joy. It's based on the real-life story of Joy Mangano, inventor of the self-wringing Miracle Mop, and not the least of the film's accomplishments is the way it manages to turn the QVC shopping channel into a cockpit of high drama.Whether the real Ms Mangano is able to radiate the same aura of self-belief, tolerance, Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Fortune, as a rule, does not favour Part Threes. Hollywood history is replete with sequels that outstrip their predecessors, but second sequels have an altogether patchier track record – for every Return of the King, there are five Spider-Man 3s.The Hunger Games’s third instalment has a lot of things stacked against it, from the cynical bifurcation of an already slow-paced story into two parts, to the fact that Mockingjay is by far the least loved of Suzanne Collins’ novel trilogy. It’s a prickly, bleak war story with no actual Hunger Games to speak of, its once gutsy heroine Katniss ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
If you make a film about logging, you better be sure the audience can see the wood for the trees. When Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper lead a cast, usually they can do no wrong. Alas, where Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle offered wit, surprise and characters to root for, such qualities are in meagre supply in Serena. Timber!Cooper plays Pemberton, a logging entrepreneur in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, and, as played by the Czech Republic, they do indeed smoke and shimmer in many a lingering panoramic shot. It’s the start of the Depression, so Cooper is Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Frankly, the idea of a female superhero flying solo at the front of a modern movie is becoming a bit of a joke. Despite there being a Wonder Woman film in the pipeline, that this relies on the success of "Batman vs. Superman" (both of whom have had their fair share of reboots) is disheartening. But going into an X-Men film there’s always the hope of both sexes having gripping storylines - a trend we’ve also seen play out in Captain America: The Winter Soldier - so step forward Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique. In a film that’s all about righting past wrongs you can't do much better than casting Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's surely among the most grotesque factoids in the history of Hollywood that despite being nominated for 10 Oscars, American Hustle won a grand total of none. Its big mistakes were presumably being too entertaining and failing to concern itself with a historic social issue. My own theory is that the cast was just too good - the flick boasted five potential gong-winners, and perhaps it was beyond the capabilities of the Academy to choose wisely between them.Anyway, even compressed to TV-sized viewing, Hustle is a wild ride and a non-stop hoot, a crime caper with buckets of soul. In the DVD's Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The exquisitely eclectic David O. Russell is fast becoming the go-to director for Oscar hungry actors. His last two films, 2010's The Fighter and 2012's Silver Linings Playbook, garnered their respective casts an astonishing seven Academy Awards nominations between them, including three wins. His latest, American Hustle, combines key cast members from those two films, creating an awards monolith (the New York Film Critics Circle would agree - they named it Best Picture earlier this month). But if the cast might make it seem impossibly worthy, the best thing about American Hustle is that it's Read more ...
Angie Errigo
The Hunger Games franchise is blessed with Jennifer Lawrence as its heroically defiant protagonist Katniss Everdeen. No matter how much darker, more drastic and deranged developments get in the world of these Games, Lawrence is a touching, authentic and watchable focus for our sympathetic attention.This second instalment — in what will be four films from the phenomenally popular Suzanne Collins book trilogy — finds Katniss, haunted by the ordeal of her inspirational victory in the 74th Hunger Games, back in dystopian, post-Apocalyptic Panem’s miserable mining community District 12 with her Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David O Russell's multi-Oscar-nominated film is a romcom with a difference, dealing as it does with mental-health issues. Bradley Cooper, more usually found parlaying characters with arrested adolescence, here plays Pat Solitano, a man with a condition for which he hates taking his meds because they make him both physically bloated and mentally foggyPat returns home after a spell in an institution, having lost his marriage, his home and his job, and he hopes to win back his adulterous wife. But Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), herself troubled after the death of her husband and who has been self- Read more ...