Film
graeme.thomson
Martin Scorsese’s mammoth, authorised survey of the life of George Harrison is a strange old thing. Deeply moving, poetic, full of love, wit and warmth, it's also at times oddly assembled and, at a shade over three and a half hours, runs wide but not always terribly deep. Using archive footage - including much unseen film and photography - and music that's both instantly familiar and previously unheard, the film's narrative voice is stitched together from old interviews with Harrison and the comments of other principals: the two surviving Beatles, wife Olivia, son Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Waiting for Woody Allen to turn in a half-decent movie is bit like inching through a recession. The green shoots of recovery are constantly hoped for, but slow to show. Now and then the new one will come along and seem marginally less dire, but prove all too chimerical. How many of the films in the last decade does anyone remember for the right reasons? And don't say Vicky Cristina Barcelona with its atrocious voiceover and pervy lesbo snog. So unremittingly abject were Allen’s preceding European films set in London that anything would have looked like the Venus de Milo standing next to them. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Saying that seven-year-old Sally Hurst (Bailee Madison) is experiencing a nightmare childhood would be a whopping understatement. An anxious child, medicated into submission by her mother, she’s been sent to live with her father in a spooky mansion where tiny teeth-snatchers call to her from the shadows. In Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, first-time director and comic-book artist Troy Nixey - working under the tutelage of fantasy maestro Guillermo del Toro, who produces and co-wrote the screenplay - weaves haunted-house horror with Grimm fairytales and adds an all-American heroine in Scientology Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Because Humphrey Jennings was a director of documentaries, he is never spoken of in the same breath as the greatest British directors of the past - Chaplin, Hitchcock, Powell, Lean and Reed. Another reason is that his career was short, compressed into the 16 years before his death at 43 in 1950 from a cliff fall in Poros, Greece, where he was scouting locations for a film about postwar healthcare in Europe. Yet Jennings was a visionary whose best films were touched with oddness and poetry - he was a poet and a painter, a champion of Surrealism - and chronicled more movingly than any Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Barclaycard? This man's in no state to go shopping!" Thus we remember the credit card commercials which formed the "origin story" of blundering secret agent Johnny English, then known as Richard Latham. Better name in fact, but no matter. Eight years after his big-screen debut, English is back, older and even more stupid.Here's the set-up. Six years earlier, Johnny English was sacked in disgrace by his employers, MI7, following his bungled effort to prevent the assassination of some president or other in Mozambique (we catch a glimpse of the tabloid headline "Doh-Zambique!"). He retired in Read more ...