China
Jasper Rees
From The Bridge on the River Kwai onwards, the Japanese haven’t tended to come up smelling of roses in war movies. Kind of unsurprisingly. In recent years it was Clint Eastwood who moved the story on. In Flags of Our Fathers he painted the Japanese military as the yellow peril, but gave them the benefit of the doubt in Letters from Iwo Jima, the other half of his Pacific diptych. City of Life and Death attempts to do in one film what Eastwood split into two: a portrait of the Japanese war machine as a manifestation of pitiless amorality; and the component parts of that machine as Read more ...
theartsdesk
Two films with a East European flavour, Katalin Varga and Tales from the Golden Age, are among our March selection, which also includes the lovely, bittersweet Irish drama Kisses. Our US release (available worldwide, of course, by mail-order) is Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas with succulent extras. Alastair Sim stars in Guy Hamilton's 1954 film of An Inspector Calls, while the late Edward Woodward lives on in the Callan box-set. The footballer-producers Ashley Cole and Rio Ferdinand score a resplendent own goal in our stinker, Dead Man Running.Films we have covered previously, including Fantastic Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It’s a let-down when a new production of an opera that spends two acts feeling dazzlingly invigorating and clever collapses in a careless mess in the third. My guess is that a key scene for the concept of English National Opera’s Turandot is when Ping, Pang and Pong - three very grand court officials - turn out to be Chinese cooks sneaking smokes up the fire escape at the Emperor Palace restaurant. It's a sharp idea, generating a sensationally visual production, but that fire escape's got to lead somewhere, and in the end it's nowhere.The production is a debutants’ ball, with first-time ENO Read more ...