actors
James Saynor
Somehow both rugged and smooth, embodying American values yet often turning up his collar against them, Robert Redford – who died on 16 September, aged 89 – was one of the biggest movie stars of the post-war period, as well as a stalwart, transformative supporter of independent film.These two sides to his movie career seem strangely at odds, for many of the Young Turk directors his Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival heroically fostered were unlikely to want to cast him in many of their films. Square-jawed, blue-eyed and bronze-haired, with an impossible-to-resist grin and a limited Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In this strangely dreary recreation of 11th century history, it’s not just grim oop north, it’s grim everywhere. King & Conqueror purports to be the story of how the Norman monarch William (the titular Conqueror) and England’s King Harold found themselves locked in a battle to the death at Hastings, each having negotiated a fearsome labyrinth of plots, treachery, ambition and murder in order to become top dog on either side of the English Channel.But somehow, despite its rather distinguished cast, the drama obstinately refuses to catch fire. Where The Last Kingdom brilliantly evoked the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
The German actor Leonie Benesch has an issue with erratic pacing in films. "I find it awful when a character talks and then there's a two-second pause before the dialogue continues," she says.Benesch's portrayal of a committed night nurse working in an understaffed hospital in Petra Volpe's Late Shift doesn't allow for such awkward silences. The taut medical drama plays out as a nerve-wracking thriller.The Guildhall-trained Benesch is probably best known to British audiences for co-starring with David Tennant in the Around the World in 80 Days miniseries and for playing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Readers of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel will be familiar with its themes of war, extreme suffering, ageing, memory, fidelity and infidelity, as it roves over the decades from World War Two to the late Eighties.Flanagan based much of the book on his father’s experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, forced to work as a slave labourer building the Burma railway, and his experiences are rendered in hellish detail by director Justin Kurzel in cahoots with screenwriter Shaun Grant. Kurzel’s younger brother Jed composed the show’s haunting and regretful soundtrack, a key Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Emma Mackey might have had her breakthrough role as a teenage tough cookie in Netflix's hit Series Sex Education (2019-20223), but there is also a disarming softness in her; a balanced mix of femininity and subtly fierce determination that made her the perfect choice as Emily Brontë in Frances O'Connor's 2022 biopic about the author’s journey to womanhood.In the same year, the French-British actor starred in Death on the Nile, the second of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot mysteries. She is currently filming a fantasy drama with JJ Abrams. But what pushes Mackey back into the centre of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I think my problem is that when I should have been listening in school assemblies or RE lessons, I had the Tom Tom Club’s joyous “Wordy Rappinghood” buzzing through my mind. That experience has given me a lifelong aversion to phrases like “The Word was made flesh”, the gospel of St John proving somewhat less than indispensable for me so far. Curiously, that quote, coming very early, marked a high point for two reasons: the novelty of the lip-synch approach had yet to wear off and genuinely interesting insights into the origins, power and unique qualities of speech communication were offered. Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Gary Oldman has always lived life to the fullest, on screen and off. Maybe that's why he is often at his best in his pitch-perfect portraits of real-life personae such as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour and Herman J Mankiewicz in Mank. He now stars as the bibulous middle-aged American author John Cheever in Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino's latest lush homage to Italy's recent past. Oldman's Cheever is little more than a cameo, but his performance is genuinely touching – poignant and witty, appreciative of the beautiful young protagonist (Celeste Dalla Porta) but detached from her. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Many know that the actor Richard Burton began life as a miner’s son called Richard Jenkins. Not so many are aware of the reason he changed his name. This film directed by Marc Evans explains how it came about.PH Burton (played by Toby Jones) was the teenage Richard’s English teacher in Port Talbot, a wannabe playwright who, on the brink of fame when the war broke out, was deployed as a teacher instead. His tutelage turned the raw material that was Richard (Harry Lawtey) into the 1950s stage star with the burnished voice. The name change was suggested by an RAF friend of PH’s who was Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Creatives – or creatures? In the 1660s, women – having been banned from working as actors in previously more puritanical decades – finally arrived on the stage in London theatres. Although they were sometimes scorned as “playhouse creatures”, often condemned as monsters and whores, they were also seen as demi-goddesses, capable of enchanting their audiences.Their multi-faceted world is well evoked in April De Angelis’s 1993 play, now revived at the Orange Tree Theatre, which gives a robustly feminist account of thespians in the Restoration reign of the Merry Monarch, Charles II Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In his first weeks in office, Harrison Ford’s US president survives an assassination attempt inside the White House, goes to war with Japan and mutates into Red Hulk when he gets mad, trashing said White House with a Stars and Stripes flag-holder. How unrealistically reasonable this looks, you may wistfully think. If only Ford, or a 10-foot monster, was in charge.Captain America has often been a political figure, sharing his comic’s title with black superhero the Falcon in the Seventies while uneasily confronting black civil unrest and Vietnam, the simply patriotic World War Two hero bearing Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller probes post-war morality in a Tokyo whose ruins and US occupation mostly remain just out of shot, in a heatwave causing mistakes and madness. The theft of callow detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune)’s police pistol on a crowded trolleybus and his guilty hunt for what becomes a murder weapon provide the narrative, and sharp-featured young Mifune’s coiled performance, alternating mimed grace with feline fierceness, is the arrow carrying it to its bruising conclusion.Kurosawa and Mifune are still defined in the West by Rashomon and Seven Samurai, breakthrough Fifties Read more ...
John Carvill
It might be a push to call this documentary a feminist slant on Humphrey Bogart, but it wouldn’t quite be a shove. Northern Irish filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson’s work has often concerned itself with identity and gender politics, and her narrative here is framed around the women in Bogart’s life, starting with his aloof, undemonstrative mother, Maud. Proper consideration is given to Bogart’s first three wives, Helen Mencken, Mary Philips, and Mayo Methot. In particular, Mayo is rescued from the cipher status to which many previous accounts of Bogart’s life assigned her: she was a former Read more ...