Film
theartsdesk
Competition alert! Start 2012 with a surprise arts trip. On theartsdesk we love crossing the borders - "Surprise me," was the edict of the great impresario of theatre, music, art and dance, Serge Diaghilev, and it's one we hold to here, because we believe in the pleasure of surprises. So please enter our competition, and a pair of tickets to one of the splendid events listed below could be coming your way, but you will take pot luck with which one you win, and who knows? You could discover a new passion.We will email winners on Sunday 1 January - New Year's Day - with details of how they Read more ...
hilary.whitney
This is probably cheating - because it was released in 1980 - but one of the cultural highlights of my year was the opportunity to revisit the film Bad Timing, which was screened as part of director Nicolas Roeg’s retrospective at the BFI in March.The story of a doomed relationship between the sexually liberated but emotionally vulnerable Milena (Theresa Russell) and cold, clinical Alex (Art Garfunkel) bears all the hallmarks of a Roeg production - the flashbacks and flashforwards, the lush cinematography – and hasn’t dated in the least although, admittedly, it’s not to everyone’s taste. An Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Many have dismissed 2011 as cinematically something of a disappointment, but while close inspection may have identified more cubic zirconia than bona fide diamonds, the year glittered nevertheless. The showstopping Mysteries of Lisbon was undoubtedly the real deal - what a teasing, sumptuous and gorgeously strange film that was (even with a running time in excess of four hours). Iranian domestic drama, A Separation, was similarly sublime - if less grand - and French silent (yes, silent) comedy The Artist (pictured below right) had hard-faced movie scribes grinning idiotically at the year’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
And what a year it was! Comedy was king on stages around town, while a variety of Shakespeare royals -- Richard III à deux courtesy Kevin Spacey and the lesser-known but far more electrifying Richard Clothier, Richard II in the memorably tremulous figure of Eddie Redmayne (pictured above) - kept the Bard alive, and how. That was literally so in the case of Michael Sheen's astonishing Hamlet at the Young Vic, a life force that wouldn't go quickly or gently into the good night, as the final image of Ian Rickson's production asserted to controversial effect: no problems in this corner whatsoever Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From his early establishing hit which located them on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Almodóvar has always displayed an obsessive interest in the inner world of women – mothers, daughters, wives, girlfriends. That obsession takes a striking swerve to the left in The Skin I Live In, whose release on DVD comes opportunely along as the French government is having to cope with a round of botched implant procedures.Although it features a wealthy, ground-breaking plastic surgeon played by an icy, poker-faced Antonio Banderas, this is rather more than a disquisition on the tyranny of body image. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The surprises linger longest. The things you’re not prepared for, the things of which you’ve got little foreknowledge. Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes was amazing, and she was equally astonishing live, too. Fleet Foxes's Helplessness Blues was more than a consolidation on their debut and The War On Drugs’s Slave Ambient was a masterpiece. But you already knew to keep an eye on these three. Things arriving by stealth had the greatest impact.This year, music again proved it has the power to surprise. Terrific albums from unknown quantities (of varying degrees) like Rayographs, Huntsville (from Norway Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We’ve been here already: with Stieg Larsson’s three posthumous Millennium books and the Swedish films based on them; and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In and its scrupulous, instant US remake. Though Hollywood assimilates global talent, American audiences won’t, it seems, sit through foreign-made or, worse, foreign-language films. So a release which seems redundant here, barely a year after large British audiences saw Niels Arden Oplev’s original, may be seen on its own terms across the Atlantic – as David Fincher’s follow-up to The Social Network, and return to Se7en and Zodiac’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
2011 was a year when the wheels of global history cranked noticeably forward, the news always full of images that will be in school text books within a decade. It was also the year when, for most of us, “a bit peeved” became “utterly livid” that greedy, over-privileged vermin had gambled and lost all our money and were clearly getting away with it, unhindered.On the other hand, such weighty affairs needed a preposterous counterpoint and there’s little in life more inconsequential yet excellent than Lady Gaga, who dominated the first half of the year with the release of her second album Born Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You're going to test your stomach and sweet temper to the maximum today - test your brain and memory too with our monster quiz about the arts covered by theartsdesk in 2011. Every artform is represented here in 12 dozen questions. Settle down between courses, films and presents and see how many you and your near and dear can do.There's a linkable clue to each question where you will find an article that furnishes the answer. All the answers are on another page here - which will become live at noon today to give you a start.In film, what is “the Great Whatsit?” ClueWhich shuttered cultural Read more ...
theartsdesk
Here are the answers to our monster Christmas arts quiz of 12 dozen questions on the year past, as seen by theartsdesk writers. There are clues in all the questions in the main quiz page. If you don't want to know the answers just yet till you've grappled with them, close this page now.A suitcase bomb in Kiss Me DeadlyThe Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, which reopened its main theatre in October, having lost its ballet director Gennady Yanin to scandal and its stars Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev to the Mikhailovsky Ballet"Everyday"29205Noel GallagherPhyllida Lloyd1980 Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Filmed and acted with suffocating intensity, Ben Wheatley’s second feature (after 2009’s Down Terrace) is a macabre mutation of horror and crime thriller. Stripped so bare exposition-wise that it’s jolting and intentionally enigmatic, Kill List is a ferocious, promising piece of filmmaking which drenches its audience in various shades of darkness.In Kill List Jay and Gal (Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley) are two soldiers turned hitmen, returning to their dirty work after an eight-month hiatus; we learn that their last contract, in Kiev, was unspecifically bodged. Jay has a volatile Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fifteen years after its debut edition, the fourth instalment of the Tom Cruise MI franchise is louder, higher, noisier and even more ludicrous. However, there are saving graces. Simon Pegg, playing the gadget-nerd Benji Dunn (pictured below), is given a surprising amount of scope to throw in episodes of tension-relieving farce, while Jeremy Renner brings both grit and wit as the secret service bodyguard William Brandt who finds himself roped into Cruise's crew.Even the notorious control freak Cruise occasionally gives the impression that he can see the funny side, as if he's murmuring to Read more ...