Film
Jasper Rees
He may have already taken the film to Cannes, but West Yorkshire represents a quirky step away from the regular festival beat for a man who in his mighty heyday once found it hard to set foot beyond the Brooklyn Bridge. Plotwise, film-goers in Bradford will be greeted in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger by the usual focus on marital disharmony and renewal through infidelity. Anthony Hopkins is married to Gemma Jones, whose daughter Naomi Watts is married to Josh Brolin, who has a thing for Freida Pinto while Watts finds herself falling for Antonio Banderas. Here’s a taster of what Bradford Read more ...
carole.woddis
Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached home.That, of course, may have been due to the fact that we were confused and not willing to show it; on the other Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“When you write for film, the dialogue is like the voice, if you like, and I always consider that as part of the music,” said John Barry, who died on 30 January. “Certain orchestral textures have to match the texture of the scene. You deal with the lightness and darkness of the scene when you write music for cinema. The film is a part of the score, and you can't get away from that.A comprehensive list of soundtrack composers would run into several volumes, but among the elite handful which includes names like John Williams, Ennio Morricone or Maurice Jarre, John Barry stands as tall as any. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause an uproar. A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you, he had read some hostile comments on the internet. “Well ought to have been left alone,” he decreed.Joffe’s film has little hope of acquiring the mythic status of the 1947 John Boulting version, as he’s doubtless well aware. But Joffe’s line is that he didn’t set out to remake the Boulting film, but to shoot a new interpretation of Greene’s book. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As a child I lived for a while near the footings in Ortaköy of the Bosphorus Bridge, which was being constructed over the breathtaking straits of Istanbul. Our life as oil expatriates was many worlds away from the skinny hawkers, whistling traffic cops and sweating construction workers whom our car passed every day. Four decades later this magnificent bridge has brought a global political metaphor, an entire little commercial ecosystem, and a raft of deeply affecting human existences.Men on the Bridge, Asli Özge’s film which has been picking up awards on the foreign festivals circuit recently Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The depiction of a tsunami roaring up the beach and surging down the main street of an Indonesian seaside resort makes an enthralling opening to Clint Eastwood's latest creation. It's a terrifyingly visceral sequence that grabs you by the throat and forces you to confront the polarities of a comfortable life interrupted by sudden death.The scene introduces the first of Hereafter's multiple protagonists, French television journalist Marie Lelay (Cécile de France), caught in the disaster as she holidays with her boyfriend and TV producer Didier (Thierry Neuvic). Knocked unconscious in the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Of the other Best Picture Oscar nominees, David O Russell’s The Fighter has seven nominations, Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan six apiece, the animated Toy Story 3, directed by Lee Unkrich, has five, and two indies, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right and Debra Granik’s Winter's Bone, have four each.The King's Speech's growing momentum was indicated on Saturday when it unexpectedly won the Producers Guild of America’s top award. In the 21 previous years the PGA has awarded the prize, 14 of the winners (including the last three) have gone on to win the Best Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just to fill in that blank left by the title, how do you know when you’re in love? It’s the question posed by every romantic comedy ever made, satisfactorily answered only by the good ones. James L Brooks, who wrote, produced and directed Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets, has spent a lifetime in film looking at the problem from a variety of Oscar-winning angles. If he doesn’t know how to lead an audience to the promised land, then who the hell does? So it’s good he’s at the helm here, right?Just to fill in that blank left by the title, how do you know when you’re in Read more ...
neil.smith
Canadian writer Mordecai Richler’s eclectic contribution to film includes uncredited work on Room at the Top, the screenplay for Fun with Dick and Jane and the original book behind Richard Dreyfuss’s early success The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Like that 1959 novel, his final tome, Barney’s Version, dealt with the colourful history of a Montreal Jew. Where Richler was alive to see the 1974 film of Kravitz, however, his 2001 death makes this adaptation of Barney something of a memorial to an author one suspects would be better known had he been born on the other side of the world’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Miloš Forman’s second feature, from 1965, catches the absurd atmosphere of the director’s native Czechoslovakia with both quiet desperation and raw tenderness. Heroine Andula (Hana Brejchová) works in a shoe factory in a town where women outnumber men by 16 times – until it is announced that an army division is to be relocated there, to the excitement of the local girls. But it turns out they are reservists and considerably older and plumper than expected. Forman excels himself in the dance-party sequence which shows the clumsiness and vulnerability of both the would-be seducers and their Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s stunning, painfully sincere - if somewhat laborious - latest is a heartfelt paean to fatherhood, built around an agonising escalation of misery. It is bolstered by a mesmerising performance from Javier Bardem as a terminally ill man experiencing physical deterioration alongside spiritual elevation, who bridges the gap between this life and the next.Biutiful is set in Santa Coloma, a deprived district of Barcelona populated primarily by those on society’s fringes. Javier Bardem plays Uxbal, the father of two young children and one of the cogs in a criminal machine Read more ...
hilary.whitney
It’s a fairly safe bet that when director Beeban Kidron made her first film, the documentary Carry Greenham Home (1983), she never envisaged that 20 years later she’d be directing a whopping great blockbuster about a Chardonnay-swigging young woman’s desperate quest to get a ring on her finger - Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). But then Kidron’s career trajectory has never been predictable.Her CV ricochets from the classic television series Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1990) to a documentary about the sculptor Antony Gormley to the film Wong Foo! Thanks for Everything! Julie Read more ...