adaptation
Tim Cornwell
One emotional high point in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the much-lauded Simon Stephens adaptation that is back in our midst once more, comes when the teenage Christopher Boone is floated in the air as part of his dream of being an astronaut. It's a touchingly improbable, escapist fantasy – that a teenager with autism would be launched in a spacecraft – and it comes via a piece of stage magic when he is borne aloft by the rest of the ensemble cast, his pet rat, Toby, flying in tandem. Perhaps space is the solitary place where he won't panic and Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
After Sam Raimi’s original mixed-bag trilogy, Andrew Garfield’s all too familiar outing as the webslinger, and last year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, it would be fair to say we’ve had enough Spider-Man films. Despite the potential fatigue from yet-another-origins story, we now have Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Whilst the cynic might see it as another attempt by Sony to tighten their grip on their IP before inevitably relinquishing it to Marvel, the reality is that, whatever the motivations, they’ve created something spectacular.This should come as no surprise given the talent in charge of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Was The Little Drummer Girl commissioned by algorithm? Those who liked The Night Manager might reasonably have been supposed to enjoy another le Carré adaptation. The two dramas had DNA in common. Both steered away from the Cold War, and told of a rogue spy adopting a role to infiltrate a network and bring it down from within. There the overlap ended. Where The Night Manager exerted a vice-like grip, The Little Drummer Girl has caused much scratching of heads. Twitter's one-word review was “Huh?”So there was much audience depletion. By halfway through the series had haemorrhaged more than 40 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
And now for something completely different from The Fall. The nerve-shredding drama from Northern Ireland was written by Allan Cubitt and featured, as its resident psychopathic hottie, Jamie Dornan (pictured below). It seems the two couldn’t get enough of each other because here they are again in Death and Nightingales (BBC Two), adapted from Eugene McCabe’s 2002 novel. The setting is rural County Fermanagh and to blend in Dornan has cultivated some exuberant shrubbery about that chiselled jaw.The year is 1883, when on the occasion of her 23rd birthday young Beth Winters (Ann Skelly) plans to Read more ...
Heather Neill
Forget the cloak in the puddle. Never mind potatoes and tobacco. The children's book cliché of Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh as he seems to have preferred in an age of changeable spelling) represents little of the real man and is at best misleading. The cloak incident was a later invention and potatoes and tobacco were already known before Ralegh's adventures in the New World. He did, however, popularise the smoking of tobacco at court.Good-looking and courageous, Ralegh was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth. He fought with the Huguenots in France, helped quell rebellion in Ireland, attempted to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The enthronement of Claire Foy has been quite a spectacle. Perhaps some of Her Majesty’s mystique has rubbed off, as she is now entering that territory known to few young actors, where you’ll happily pay to see her in anything. Should that policy extend to her newest incarnation?In The Girl in the Spider’s Web Foy becomes the latest actress to give her Lisbeth Salander, the super-damaged Swedish gender-neutral vigilante boffin. First off it was Noomi Rapace, then Rooney Mara. Now Foy wears the tats, the piercings, the leathers and the semi-shorn side-crop and steps astride a throbbing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This opening episode of My Brilliant Friend was a stunning symphony in grey. For any viewers concerned that HBO’s long-awaited Elena Ferrante adaptation might be tempted to sweeten the visual experience of the writer’s impoverished 1950s Naples world to suit the expectations of an international television audience, the sheer subtlety of colouring here was the first sign that everything was going to be right.Director Saverio Costanzo will be receiving a whole range of plaudits for his work with the wide ensemble cast (including many non-professionals) that surrounds his two remarkable young Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A revelatory moment comes hallway through Wildlife when frustrated American housewife Jeanette Brinson (Carey Mulligan) is observed standing alone in her family’s backyard by her 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), the film’s anxious, steadfast protagonist. Wearing curlers, an off-white sweater and jeans, her face made-up to go out, Jeanette has a harsh, fatalistic look on her face that is new. Initially optimistic, she has been steadily souring on her marriage since her husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), too proud to take back the golf pro job from which he was sacked, departed to fight a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a story of a mad old man who imagines himself to be a knight errant. On his quests he sees virgins in prostitutes and castles in roadside inns. His adventures have spawned an adjective that describes delusional idealism, typified by the activity of tilting one’s lance and charging at windmills one has mistaken for an army of giants.For Milan Kundera, the modern era – “and with it the novel”, he adds – is born when Don Quixote rides forth on his nobbly nag Rocinante. The Adventures of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes was published in two parts, the first in 1605. By the time the second Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You have to turn to the brief interview with director Anne Fontaine that is the sole extra on this DVD release to discover the real source of her film Reinventing Marvin. Though Fontaine and Pierre Trividic’s screenplay is credited as original, it draws heavily – Fontaine calls it a “free interpretation” – on Edouard Louis’s bestselling 2014 autobiographical novel The End of Eddy, which told the story of his growing up in the French provinces in an environment profoundly hostile to his emerging gay identity.It’s an undeniably powerful picture of a youthful outsider, one for whom lack of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Joseph Phibbs is not the first composer to make an opera out of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, and it is not difficult to see the operatic appeal of this taut, passionate three-handed drama. But there are also hazards: my recollections of the play, reinforced by this operatic interpretation, were that for all the emotional huffing and puffing, not much actually happens, and the final, shocking denouement comes somewhat out of the blue.Juliana, premiered this summer at the Cheltenham Festival, updates the action from 19th century feudal Sweden to the present day. The off-stage presence of the Count Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“There’s a lot of weirdness I didn’t want explained,” Paul Schrader reveals at one point in a new director’s commentary to his 1990 film. He certainly succeeded on that score: with its script by Harold Pinter (adapting Ian McEwan’s elliptical 1981 novel), you sense that explanation – in any standard sense, at least – was indeed never going to be much of an issue in The Comfort of Strangers.If the novelist had offered little dialogue in his investigation of the irreconcilability of the sexes, and the playwright riffed on his favourite theme, that “language is a tool we use not to communicate Read more ...