Film
Matt Wolf
Rebecca Hall gets slapped about - and more - during The Awakening, a putative ghost story that lands one of this country's most able and appealing actresses in many a tricky physical but also psychological spot. Whether audiences will go the distance with her may depend on individual tolerance for a film that plays like an overcooked British knock-off of the Nicole Kidman starrer The Others, complete with Dominic West on hand to contribute belated rumpy-pumpy and Imelda Staunton very visibly furrowing her brow.I suspect you'd be fretting, too, if you found yourself in the position of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Witchfinder General, along with The Wicker Man, has latterly been claimed as a pinnacle of a peculiarly British style of film. “Weird Britain” is a default description. It’ll do fine for these unsettling, intense horror films which draw from the British landscape and its history. This sparkling restoration of Witchfinder General can only enhance its status.Set during the English Civil War, 1968’s Witchfinder General centres on freelance witch detector Matthew Hopkins. Naturally, he’s corrupt. The Wicker Man featured Christopher Lee and Witchfinder General features Vincent Price as Hopkins. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In later years, when callow reporters would be sent to interview the wrecked legend Hunter S Thompson in his Colorado compound, at some point in the weekend, in between the drugs, booze and random gunfire that punctuated his days, the Gonzo journalist would betray unaccustomed nerves, and point his guest to a pile of typewritten pages. This was The Rum Diary, an attempted novel from the early Sixties he picked at for four decades. He never published a novel in all that time, instead making himself the lead character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and other, maybe fictionally extrapolated Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Wim Wenders’ fictionalised Dashiell Hammett biopic, the first of his six American films, was a critical and box-office failure, which, along with Francis Ford Coppola’s equally damned Vegas musical One From the Heart, brought down Coppola’s Zoetrope Studio. It almost goes without saying that both films - they starred the unstarry Frederic Forrest - are jewels: bracing, dream-like homages to old-fashioned sound-stage artifice. Where One From the Heart is a neon-crazy confection, however, Hammett is a dankly claustrophobic neo-noir.Seven years in gestation, it premiered at Cannes in 1982 after Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A glittering egg cracks open and, waving a magic wand, Andrew Logan emerges riding his sculpture of Pegasus, the winged horse. He flies across London to waiting friends and relatives and, with one touch of his miraculous wand, transforms them into sparkling glamour queens.The opening credits of The British Guide to Showing Off are a witty, Pythonesque riff on Logan’s extraordinary ability to inspire people. “He appeals to the child in everybody,” says fashion designer Zandra Rhodes. "He’s like your naughty aunty, putting a bit of gin in your tea,” observes artist Grayson Perry, best known for Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You can forget “I am Heathcliff”. And abandon hope of “I cannot live without my soul” and “I love my murderer” while you’re at it. Andrea Arnold’s newest addition to the canon of Wuthering Heights adaptations is the story flayed so raw you can see bone. Jettisoning such fripperies as dialogue, fixed cameras and even for the most part avoiding professional actors, she takes period drama by the wing-collared throat and throttles it with gonzo relish. Brooding and brutality is in generous supply, but when we get down to the sharp end of this blighted romance Brontë’s passion seems oddly dulled, Read more ...