Judi Dench
Jasper Rees
These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right sort of party. For the National Theatre's golden jubilee, therefore, the stops were jolly well pulled out and the invitations damn well accepted from the actors who, striplings at the Old Vic in the Sixties, are now our own Oliviers and Ashcrofts and Scofields. And it was almost all impeccable.Of course the greatest frissons were reserved for those Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In 1998, Judi Dench slayed audiences on the London stage in Filumena, playing a former prostitute who learns belatedly to cry. The tears come more quickly - both for Britain's best-loved acting Dame and her public - in the comparably titled Philomena, the Stephen Frears film that tells an otherwise entirely dissimilar story about a doughty Irishwoman determined to locate the son wrenched from her a half-century or more before.The working-class widow's accomplice in a quest that turned the real Philomena Lee into a publishing sensation is onetime BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
What becomes of children “born out of sadness and loneliness”, exiled from Wonderland or Neverland, longing for remembered golden afternoons, but forced to confront the chilly twilight of adulthood? This new play by John Logan brings Alice Liddell and Peter Llewelyn Davies – the real-life inspirations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and JM Barrie’s Peter Pan – face to face, not just which each other, but with their creators and their fictional selves. Like the repressed, incomplete men who created them, they hopelessly pursue happiness, along topiary-lined avenues, across mermaids’ lagoons Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's Bond number 23, and if you were to suggest to me that it was the best of the lot, I might very well agree with you. This is a terrific James Bond movie, thoughtfully written, shrewdly cast and taking stock of everything that the 50-year-old franchise has come to mean. But even if it wasn't a Bond film, it would still be darn good.In this year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, it's also surprisingly and rather touchingly British, right down to Adele's stridently Bassey-esque theme tune. In a staggering feat of cross-marketing, they even got the Queen to appear in that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In many respects it's hard to fault director Cary Fukunaga's take on the Charlotte Brontë classic. Fast-rising Australian actress Mia Wasikowska brings appropriate strength and moral clarity to the title role, while Michael Fassbender makes a mocking, sardonic Mr Rochester (albeit a rather too photogenic one). The lovelessness of Jane's early years with her unfeeling aunt, Mrs Reed (Sally Hawkins), is wincingly drawn, and her time at the grim Lowood school leaves the viewer feeling as beaten and abused as the heroine herself.Chuck in a quietly sparkling turn by Judi Dench as Mrs Fairfax Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Travel, health permitting, knows few age barriers (if it did, there would be no Elderhostel), nor does charm, so there are two reasons up front why The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel fully deserves to win over the so-called "grey pound" market and much more besides. The story of a septet of British retirees abroad who need to leave home in order to learn any number of home truths, John Madden's film provides a welcome corrective to our youth-obsessed celluloid age without going to the opposite extreme and offering up an Anglo-Indian Cocoon, schmaltz and all.In fact, the film's flintiness is one Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's interesting to consider at what point in someone's career does he or she become a national treasure - as Alan Bennett once so scathingly remarked, “If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel prize” - but there can surely be no debate about whether Dame Judi Dench deserves her status.Geoffrey Palmer said of his co-star for several years on the BBC sitcom As Time Goes By, “She's everything that everyone says about her” - and what they had to say about her in Charlie Stuart's The Many Faces of Dame Judi Dench was overwhelmingly nice Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As fresh and enchanting as the first flushes of spring, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s imaginative retelling of Charlotte Brontë’s 19th-century proto-feminist novel captures the thrill of attraction with rare perception, sweep and tenderness. It foregrounds the book’s Gothic elements and the lovers’ links to the natural world, showing love itself as both a benign and devastating force of nature. Rochester’s voice is carried to Jane on the wind, their passion burns like fire and Jane’s heartbreak is as bone-chilling as the blanket of cold earth she weeps upon.Screenwriter Moira Buffini (Tamara Drewe) Read more ...
carole.woddis
Seems we’re living through a silly season. There are rumours afoot that our PM’s Big Society is nothing other than a fig leaf for a chaos theory of how to run society, ie let the devil take the hindmost. And in the arts we’ve got theatre’s esteemed trade paper declaring, in a much-publicised puff - organised through a star-studded panel of the Great and the Good and “hundreds of readers voting from a list of 10 actors” - that Dame Judi Dench is The Greatest Stage Actor of all time.Well, good on The Stage. Nothing like stirring up debate to draw attention to yourself, and heaven knows Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s the pretext that reunites Judi Dench and Peter Hall to collaborate on Shakespeare’s comedy nearly five decades after they first ventured into the Athenian woods together at the RSC. But the conceit of conflating the fairy queen Titania with Gloriana doesn’t come close to lending Hall’s workaday production the necessary sense of enchantment. It’s performed on Elizabeth Bury’s sparse and decidedly mundane monochrome set, with its cardboard cut-out trees and a shiny black floor, which lacks any flavour of the sylvan and, thumped across by heavy-footed, boot-shod actors, is sometimes Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It's sometimes referred to, just a bit dismissively, as bonnet drama. Whenever television visits the 19th century, the headwear of the female characters does indeed play its part. Of no adaptation of Victorian fiction is that truer than Cranford. The actresses wearing the bonnets are fairly resplendent too. This Christmas they are queueing up to appear in Heidi Thomas's new dramatisation set in Mrs Gaskell's quiet Cheshire town. Our gallery celebrates the bonneted British actresses of Cranford, to amplify director Simon Curtis's description elsewhere in theartsdesk of working on the new Read more ...