Features
Adam Sweeting
Though this 1966 comedy was a light and fluffy thing, it was gazed upon benignly by the critics, mostly because it was a late vehicle for the well-oiled Cary Grant charm machine. It proved to be his last film, in fact. Others viewed it equally fondly because it contained scenes of Grant in his boxer shorts, a challenge he tackled with panache despite his 62 years.The flick's Olympic connection is central, though ludicrous. British industrialist Sir William Rutland (Grant) makes a business trip to Tokyo, but arrives two days early. The city is hosting the 1964 Olympics and all available Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Within hours of the opera buffs leaving town, having had their fill of Buxton Festivalia, the old spa changes gear for operetta. For three weeks, the town becomes the jolly international capital for Gilbert & Sullivan. Enthusiasts and performers from all over the country and foreign parts gather to celebrate the seemingly never-ending attraction of those old familiar tunes, characters and satirical send-ups.Year after year, the town brims with them. And some get in the mood by slipping into costume and character. You are as likely to bump into Ko-Ko, the clowning Lord High Executioner of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When we think of the 1972 Olympics in Munich, we do not think of US swimmer Mark Spitz’s record-breaking seven gold medals, or Finland’s Lasse Virén making his extraordinary comeback from a fall in the 10,000 metres to a record-breaking win. No, the 1972 Olympics will always be remembered for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes (and coaches) by Palestine’s Black September organisation. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich takes this act, portrayed in a gripping opening sequence, as its starting point.Those who wish for a detailed perspective on the events of 5-6 September 1972 are advised Read more ...
ronald.bergan
It was Lenin who realised early in the Russian Revolution that “of all the arts, film is for us the most important” and Hitler and Goebbels perceived the immense propaganda potential of the Olympics through the medium of film. The 1936 Olympic Games took place in Berlin a few months after Hitler’s armies occupied the Rhineland. Hitler spared no expense in making it the best organised and most efficiently equipped in the history of the Olympics.After Triumph of the Will (1935), the documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, the director Leni Riefenstahl became established as Germany’s foremost “ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Making fictional movies about sport is the devil's own job. They generally don't appeal to non fans while those who follow the game in question spend their time mocking the action scenes as actors pretending to be sportsmen and women usually fail to convince - as is the case with the stars of Wimbledon (2004) and Match Point (2005).In Wimbledon, Paul Bettany is a thirtysomething middling British tennis pro who is sliding well past 100 in the world rankings. He gets a wild card for Wimbledon, where he meets fellow player Kirsten Dunst. They fall in love, boff a bit - which enhances his game no Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Rio Ferdinand did four years' ballet training as a child, England manager Graham Taylor sent the national squad to dance classes, while the Royal Ballet once ran an active football team. Ballet and football have long been secret lovers backstage. But they have only been rarely seen out together in public.The tidy formations and rehearsed moves that please in dance theatre aren't compatible with the unpredictable spontaneity of football, and while kings of grace such as Ronaldinho, Zinedine Zidane or Dennis Bergkamp bring tears to the eyes with their individual flair, it's the overall arc of a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the original Games featuring Athenians and Spartans and the like, they would of course have done it all in the buff. The sporting costume – the thin end of the wedge that is the singlet - was a tawdry Olympic neologism foisted on the pure ideals of the athletic contest in the first modern Olympiad in 1896. Just what naked wrestling would have looked like is of course something one has to imagine - dreamily or otherwise. Alternatively, of course, you can have another peep at Ken Russell’s Women in Love.The film itself, a hippy-trippy Sixties take on the Lawrentian quest for much more sex Read more ...
Steve Clarkson
As a giggling toddler posed for a photograph next to a pink sheep, a man in a Barbour jacket moaned about losing his garlic-crusher. On the lake, smitten newlyweds enjoyed a gondola ride, while, somewhere else, an elderly couple watched a show so moving it made them cry. Yes, this could have happened in one place only – the leafy surroundings of Henham Park, near Southwold in Suffolk, at Latitude Festival.The arts event has just enjoyed its seventh July, and retains a vibrant cultural miscellaneousness. In fact 750 music, theatre, art, comedy, cabaret, poetry, politics, dance, literature and Read more ...
howard.male
Rather unjustly, this underrated 1976 thriller is best remembered for the dental torture scenes in which Laurence Olivier’s shiny-headed, shiny-spectacled Nazi, Dr Christian Szell, repeatedly asks Dustin Hoffman’s petrified and pain-crazed Levy if it’s safe or not, and Levy has no idea if the answer required is yes or no. But the rest of this movie is a much subtler, more involving affair than is suggested by a scene that is truly painful to watch . As an Olympic event, the marathon is about endurance as much as speed. For poor Levy the whole of John Schlesinger’s film is a test of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Reason dictates that Britain should win the four archery competitions at the Olympics, although we have accrued only two gold medals (both in 1908), two silvers, and five bronzes in the 14 Olympiads in which the sport has hitherto been included. So why the confidence? It is dictated by the aura of Robin Hood. One only has to turn to the opening verse of the poem Arthur Conan Doyle (himself a Scottish footballer, first-class cricketer, and golfer) included in The White Company, his 1891 novel of the Hundred Years War:What of the bow?The bow was made in England:Of true wood, of yew wood,The Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Faster, higher, stronger - and more graceful. There is a handful of top athletes and sportspeople who are the beautiful people, who have some divine extra dimension to their movement that makes you smile to see them. They're winners, but they're seraphic dancers too, and they make all the other winners look tough and effortful.Grace is something extra, an excess over necessary talent, a luxury bonus, an unfair advantage. Just as the majority of dancers, despite all their skills and perfect training, lack - unfairly - that indefinable something, so in sport certain winners never look schooled Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a peculiarly boundless quality to Istanbul – a city where private domestic life sprawls publicly out across pavements and parks, the bustle of the city seeps out beyond land onto the commercial waterways of the Bosphorous, and cats stroll casually in and out of concert halls. Borders here are porous, a symptom of those greater national divisions that set Turkey in an ongoing tug of war between Europe and the Middle East – a frontier territory, one of political, religious and cultural dialogue but also of conflict.It’s a dance enacted nowhere more vividly than in Istanbul’s annual Read more ...