film directors
stephen.walsh
Two 1950s Mozarts in one weekend might seem like pressing the contemporaneity of great art unnecessarily far. But Jonathan Kent’s Glyndebourne Don Giovanni, revived on Sunday, is a much less crude update than the WNO Così. True, the dramatis personae might have wandered in from a Fellini film set vintage 1960, with Giovanni recast as Marcello Mastroianni, but the setting itself, by Paul Brown, is at least quasi-classical, columned and arcaded, with a whiff of Hellfire Caves and, in the end, a sort of Chirico-esque fragmentation, none of which conflicts too drastically with the social and Read more ...
David Nice
Don't go expecting the "But ya are, Blaaanche, ya are" Gothic of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. After all, crazy Bette Davis and even phoney Joan Crawford must have been human behind the sacred-monster facade. Anton Burge's new play tries to show us just that in a two-hander set during one day of rehearsals for Robert Aldrich's shlocky B-movie in 1962. The premise that while Crawford tried to project one-dimensional film-star niceness, Davis was a practical actress who kept it relatively real gives Greta Scacchi as Baby Jane's creator one hell of a part. Would you be surprised to learn that Read more ...
lucien.castaing-taylor
I grew up in Liverpool, but my grandmother was from the Lake District - Wordsworth country, and about as rural and remote as could be. We used to stay with her on weekends, and I still remember the sense of freedom as we escaped the post-industrial detritus of Merseyside and Lancashire, and approached her cottage in this Arcadian paradise. But my bucolic fantasy was of course the projection of an urban child, who knew next to nothing about what it was like to actually inhabit this landscape, whether as a farmer, a sheep, a cow, a fox, or any other animal I spent my weekends gazing at.Decades Read more ...
james.woodall
Wim Wenders (b 1945) is one of the great travellers of contemporary cinema. Multi-disciplinary and theme-driven, his work often asks questions about memory and identity, and pulsates with the strong spirit of very particular places. The worldwide success of Paris, Texas (1984), winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, made him a bankable director in the transatlantic movie business, but he’s always remained very European, if not necessarily in topic and location, then certainly in sensibility: sombre, quite slow, metaphysical on occasion – the latter displayed no better than in his famous portrait Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Within the space of a single year - 1979 - Barrie Keeffe wrote two scripts which together summed up the very essence of the East End on the eve of Thatcherism. The first, which barely needs introduction, was the now-classic The Long Good Friday. The other was Sus, an explosive play about a black man detained by two racist police officers on the night of the General Election. Sus has since been performed worldwide and a screen version receives its premiere at the East End Film Festival on Saturday, prior to release on 7 May - the day after a certain other election. Meanwhile, a new stage Read more ...