actors
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 ...
Nick Hasted
Patriotic Italian films set during the Fascist war effort are understandably rare UK releases. Submarine commander Salvatore Todaro (Pierfrancesco Favino) was, though, an honourable warrior-poet who director Edoardo De Angelis seeks to separate from wider currents.Roaming the Atlantic in October 1940, his lone wolf sub Comandante Cappellini sank a Belgian merchant ship during an exchange of fire. Contravening orders, maritime law and morality made him take 26 survivors onto his cramped vessel and sail them to neutral waters, staying on the surface and exposed to attack.De Angelis introduces Read more ...
David Nice
James Joyce’s Misses Morkan have gone up in the world for their Christmas gathering this year, from the upper part of a “dark, gaunt house” on the Liffey to the splendour of No. 86 St Stephen’s Green, now home to the Museum of Literature Ireland. Those of us with an "invitation" felt we were more in the grand house of the Ekdahls in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, but we “got” the Irish conviviality and just about every nuance of the masterly short story, with more besides.Site-specific theatre, in this case specially adapted by director Louise Lowe and scenographer Owen Boss, has never been Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Not just a backstage musical, a backroom musical!In the 70s, Follies and A Chorus Line took us into the rehearsal room giving us a chance to look under the bonnet to see the cogs of the Musical Theatre machine bump and grind as a show gets on its feet. But what of the other room, the writers’ room, where the ideas emerge mistily and the egos clang in conflict? [title of show] pulls back the curtain behind the curtain, behind the curtain.“More meta?” I hear you ask, a little wince in the voice. But, rather than an exercise in smartypants critiquing of cultural production from the inside-out ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Natalie Palamides doesn't do things by halves. Actually, the Los Angeles-based clown does just that in her inventive new show Weer – a hit at the Traverse Theatre at this year's Edinburgh Fringe – in which she plays the male and female partners in a fractious relationship. Simultaneously.Weer – the title is explained late on – tells the story of Mark and Christina. Palamides' costume and wig are divided into male and female halves, so as her left side is turned to the audience she is Christina, with her right side, she is Mark. It is, as you may imagine, a very physical performance, but Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Oblong Box is a phantom 1969 follow-up to Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, sharing star Vincent Price and much cast and crew, after the brilliant young British director’s OD forced his dismissal days before shooting. It also began replacement Gordon Hessler and co-writer Christopher Wicking’s own Price-starring horror sequence, notably the bizarre, Mod anti-fascist Scream and Scream Again (1970), placing this obscure film at a packed cult crossroads.Witchfinder General’s savage account of Matthew Hopkins’ 17th century East Anglian rampage had been dragooned into AIP’s Poe-Price cycle Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The once invincible superhero genre may have finally hit the skids, but Tom Hardy’s alien anti-hero stays intermittently fresh in his saga’s supposed finale, styled by writer-director Kelly Marcel as a partial romcom between parasitic, people-eating alien Venom and his reluctant human host Eddie Brock.Sony sparked the super-boom with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), only for their reliance on related properties to hasten its end with the calamitous Morbius and Madame Web. Venom’s ace is Hardy’s unlikely double-act as gloomy, whiny journalist Eddie and his capricious beast inside’s bombastic, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.We open on the Booth family kids rehearsing Julius Caesar (a motif that runs through the play) with John Wilkes Booth already displaying narcissistic tendencies in kids’ squabbles. That changes when their father, a successful British-born actor with a murky past, returns from touring to dominate the space, physical and mental. It’s easy to spot the damage done to Wilkes and one’s Read more ...
theartsdesk Q&A: David Morrissey on (among other things) the return of 'Sherwood' and 'Daddy Issues'
Adam Sweeting
Without ever getting embroiled in tabloid mayhem, even if he has confessed that he’d like to have a go on Strictly, David Morrissey has patiently turned himself into a quiet superstar.Having cut his acting teeth as a teenager at the Everyman Theatre in his home town of Liverpool (where he was born in June 1964), Morrissey has amassed a huge list of credits on stage and in TV and film, and if you can judge an actor by the writers, directors and fellow-thesps he’s worked with, Morrissey has achieved triple-A status. Mind you, one of his proudest achievements was being invited by his beloved Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lucie Shorthouse is enjoying some high-profile TV action with her roles in Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts, about the adventures of an all-woman Muslim punk band, and in BBC One’s reincarnated Rebus. In the former, she plays the band’s niqab-clad manager Momtaz, while the latter casts her as rookie cop DC Siobhan Clarke, trying to cope with the maverick behaviour of the titular John Rebus, played by Richard Rankin. Both shows have enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and have pulled healthy audiences, which must surely have got the phones ringing in the office of Shorthouse’s agent. And that’s Read more ...