Hollywood
TrumboSaturday, 06 February 2016
Trumbo depicts the 13-year struggle by the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) to break the blacklist imposed on him and the other members of the Hollywood Ten in 1947. By continuing to get his scripts produced throughout the Fifties, Trumbo... Read more... |
Best (and Worst) of 2015: FilmMonday, 28 December 2015
The autumn cinema schedules of 2015 were assailed by the double whammy of Spectre and The Force Awakens– at times making it hard to find a screen showing anything else. Yet you’ll see that neither that latest instalment in the Bond... Read more... |
Bridge of SpiesFriday, 27 November 2015
Nostalgia for the good old days of mutually assured destruction? You’d have got long odds on such a thing on 9 November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall was breached. A quarter of a century on, the Americans and the Russians are entangled in a whole... Read more... |
Listen to Me MarlonFriday, 23 October 2015
To create this strikingly original portrait of the man some (though not Frank Sinatra) liked to call "the greatest movie actor of all time", writer/director Stevan Riley has plundered a remarkable trove of Brando's own audio recordings and used them... Read more... |
American UltraFriday, 04 September 2015
The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is... Read more... |
Terminator GenisysFriday, 03 July 2015
Oh Arnie. For two terms Arnold Schwarzenegger retooled himself as the Governator who could save California from debt, drought and Democrats. By the time his term ended, the Californian exchequer was reduced to rubble. A bit, in fact, like the Golden... Read more... |
Jurassic WorldFriday, 12 June 2015
Jurassic World opens on a close-up. The smooth creamy surface of an egg is shattered by a claw attacking it vexatiously from within. In no time at all a scaly little critter is peeping out at us. It took a mite longer for the latest in the Jurassic... Read more... |
The Truth About Your Teeth, BBC OneFriday, 05 June 2015
Teeth. Who’d have them? This documentary about the state of the nation’s gnashers came along at a timely moment for your reviewer. Earlier in the week I suffered my first ever extraction. Didn’t feel a jot of pain, of course, but by Christ you know... Read more... |
The Glass Protégé, Park TheatreWednesday, 15 April 2015
Hollywood has never met a cliché it didn’t love; unfortunately, neither has Dylan Costello. His peek behind the curtain of Tinseltown’s Golden Age employs every stock type imaginable, from the boorish, chain-smoking manager to a pill-popping Marilyn... Read more... |
AltmanWednesday, 01 April 2015
Ron Mann’s laid-back documentary about the career vicissitudes and family life of Robert Altman (1925-2006) takes its cue from the tone of the director’s films. It was Altman’s habit to observe his character’s crises, collapses, and deaths with the... Read more... |
Oscars 2015: Birdman soars, Boyhood plummetsMonday, 23 February 2015
I hope someone by now has told Neil Patrick Harris how to pronounce David Oyelowo’s surname, but if anyone wants to see how not to host an Oscars, Harris’s stewardship of the 87th annual Academy Awards can provide that service in spades.Sure, there... Read more... |
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part OneWednesday, 19 November 2014
Fortune, as a rule, does not favour Part Threes. Hollywood history is replete with sequels that outstrip their predecessors, but second sequels have an altogether patchier track record – for every Return of the King, there are five Spider-Man... Read more... |
