romantic comedy
Jasper Rees
Getting on for three decades ago Lasse Hallström was introduced to audiences outside his native Sweden with My Life As a Dog. An emotionally continent, directorially restrained picture of the pains and pleasures of a rural childhood, it was Hallström’s ticket to Hollywood. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, featuring a coltish young Leonardo di Caprio, retained some of Hallström’s snappy weirdness when he moved into English, since when he has wandered into the mainstream and can’t seem to locate the exit. His signature is to take a popular work of fiction and coat it in a thin film of simplifying Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its near-simultaneous cinema and DVD release ringing alarm bells to rival Big Ben, The Decoy Bride takes talent and stuffs it into a GM turkey of a film. This insincere romantic comedy from director Sheree Folkson is replete with wobbly accents, head-slapping clichés, cardboard characters, preposterous plot developments, all flanked by a distractingly dire TV movie score. That it’s such a shambles will be a particular disappointment to (the innumerable) fans of David Tennant, for whom this represents his first filmic foray as romantic lead.Writers Sally Phillips and Neil Jaworski give us Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's a rare ballet where the culmination you hope for is that the young guy gets to take over the business (an idea for a Murdoch ballet there, one day?). David Bintley's Hobson's Choice is surely his very best work, unmitigated pleasure for the spectator - an innocent, beautifully executed period comedy full of atmosphere, good characters, a perfect emotional arc and a perfectly brilliant musical score. None of this is simple to carry off.Made in 1989 for Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet - as Birmingham Royal Ballet used to be - it takes Harold Brighouse's 1915 play, and possibly more famously Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Since the departure of Friends and Frasier from our screens, fans of the genre have been waiting for the next generation of mates-based US sitcoms. A few - including Two and A Half Men and The Big Bang Theory - have crossed the Atlantic and found a niche on British television, but this latest offering comes with instant audience and critical acclaim. New Girl, which began in the States in September, gained more than 10 million viewers (making it Fox’s highest-rated autumn sitcom debut in a decade), its run was doubled after two episodes and it has been nominated for a couple of Golden Read more ...
emma.simmonds
One of film’s most inspiring artists, Walt Disney, once said, “Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” With the seemingly anachronistic The Artist, French director Michel Hazanavicius proves this to be as true as ever - even in this technologically adventurous age with its all too frequent bombastic sound. Hazanavicius boldly strips cinema back to its wordless, monochrome days and, boy, does the end result sparkle.More than 50 years after the French New Wave both celebrated and defied the Hollywood filmic formula, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like a fist to the face of the traditionally insipid, female-fronted rom-com, Bridesmaids marks a departure from the oft-derided norm, not by being brassy or crude (OK, there might be a sizeable helping of the latter) but because of its authentic humour, credible character dynamics and the foregrounding of female friendships over romance. It is also wildly funny.Kristen Wiig (who co-wrote the film with Annie Mumolo, who appears as “Nervous Woman on Plane”) is Annie, a thirtysomething singleton asked by her childhood chum Lillian (Maya Rudolph) to be her maid of honour. Despite her outstanding Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Saul Rubinek is an established actor in American television programmes such as LA Law and Frasier, where he played Daphne's fiancé Donny. Now the Canadian has turned his hand to playwriting and the result – Terrible Advice – receives its world premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London.Rubinek subtitles his work “A Dark, Dirty and Dangerous Play” and there are certainly nods to the first two elements, but its dangerousness rather escapes me. It concerns the story of two middle-aged men, now living in what is presumably Los Angeles, who met at college; child-man Jake (Scott Bakula, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I'm going to help you rediscover your manhood," a self-described sexual "tomcat" called Jacob (Ryan Gosling) tells his new friend, and project, Cal (Steve Carell). And with that, the awkwardly titled Crazy, Stupid, Love sets off on its none too surefooted way. Might some equivalent to Jacob's confidence and expertise have been of use behind the camera, as well? Without a doubt, and one worries only that there may be those who actually do take this film as some sort of sexual and social primer for our troubled age.On the other hand, no movie with Gosling's singular charisma and insouciance Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A time-tested formula gets tantalisingly tweaked in Friends with Benefits, in which Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis attempt to confine their relationship to the purely sexual without the ick factor of emotions getting in the way. Here's a Hollywood film confident enough to poke fun at Hollywood conventions - take that, Katherine Heigl! Kunis lets cry at one point - while following a not hugely dissimilar path. The difference is that this one benefits from actually being sparky and entertaining. Can you imagine that?In fact, it's not hard to guess at the good will generated by the two leads, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The early gurglings of love, full of vulnerability and risk, thrill and discovery, are the very stuff of the movies. Romance is cinema’s basic currency. Whenever the familiar heroic faces of the big screen are not firing pump action weapons from the hip at CGI baddies, they are falling head over heels. So it is in Beginners, but with one or two eye-catching variants. Hal, just widowed after 44 years of marriage, now wishes to play the field. He’s 75. And as he informs his son Oliver, he is keen to give free rein to his long-repressed homosexuality.Beginners is the semi-autobiographical second Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What is it with Hollywood and education? Hot on the heels (shamelessly come-hither pumps, in fact) of Cameron Diaz in the lamentable Bad Teacher, we now get Julia Roberts as a disaffected babe who, we're told, is a teacher even though she spends precious little time in actor-director Tom Hanks's new film doing anything of the sort. Still, at least Roberts's unquenchable radiance lends Larry Crowne some measure of class; otherwise, here's another movie that merits detention for failing to make more than a passing detour in the direction of real life.You might be forgiven briefly at the outset Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Foodies will have a good laugh at Love's Kitchen, the British rom-com that casts Simon Callow as a bibulous restaurant critic and Gordon Ramsay as, well, himself. But cineastes are likely to chuckle, as well, at the filmmaking-by-numbers predictability of it all. Small wonder the movie makes a big deal over the trifle served up by Dougray Scott, playing a chef who gets a fresh start in both the kitchen and the bedroom. On the pudding front, it takes one to know one.That this is so trifling a film comes as a genuine shame, at least for those of us who salivate at the idea of venison fillet Read more ...