thu 28/03/2024

Vanessa Redgrave

The Secret Scripture review - Jim Sheridan's turgid homecoming

It's the church wot done it! That's the unexceptional takeaway proffered by Jim Sheridan's first Irish film in 20 years, which is to say ever since the director of My Left Foot and The Boxer hit the big time. But despite a starry and often glamorous...

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Call the Midwife: 2016 Christmas Special, BBC One

While Miranda Hart's Chummy is no more and Jessica Raine (who played Jenny Lee) has long since departed to perish in Line of Duty and pout crossly in Wolf Hall, Call the Midwife has evolved into a sort of Heartbeat with nuns, featuring antique pop...

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Richard III, Almeida Theatre

"I can add colours to the chameleon," Richard III remarks of himself early in his anguished, marauding ascent to the throne, and the description could equally apply to the electrifying actor, Ralph Fiennes, who is London's latest hedgehog/dog/toad/...

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DVD: Foxcatcher

As he died in 2010, we can never know what John du Pont was like in person, but if Steve Carell’s rendering of the maniacal American multi-millionaire with a wrestling fixation is even close to the real thing, the experience must have been...

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Foxcatcher

Steve Carell makes the move from the light comedy of the American workplace to the dark side of that country as delusional blue-blood John Eleuthère du Pont in a transformative and creepy performance that borders on the grotesque.Foxcatcher is based...

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Call the Midwife: 2014 Christmas Special, BBC One

The Christmas scoop was the first appearance of the authorial voice, Vanessa Redgrave, playing Jennifer Worth, writing Christmas cards, looking at the photographs of herself with her two midwife friends and plunging us into memory from 2005 to 1959...

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LFF 2014: Foxcatcher

There is loud Oscar talk surrounding the stellar performance by Steve Carell in director Bennett Miller’s genuinely unsettling Foxcatcher. Miller (Capote) tackles yet another true crime drama, this time following the steps leading to the murder of...

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The Butler

As a movie it’s a little too neat and a little too worthy but as a benchmark The Butler is a triumph with a strong cast. Director Lee Daniels doesn’t get arty with this story of racial divide and American unrest. Roughly based on the real-life story...

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Much Ado About Nothing, Old Vic

“What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?” Surely never before has Benedick’s opening quip cut so close to the literal, nor drawn such a laugh from its audience. With a combined age of 158, the romantic leads in Mark Rylance’s Much Ado About...

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Song for Marion

Are films for the senior demographic the new rock’n’roll? As the population ages and people keep their marbles for longer, entertainments for the grey pound, as it’s charmingly called, must be laid on. The job of films like The Last Exotic Marigold...

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LFF 2012: Song for Marion

Terence Stamp is rediscovered as a leading man once a decade. There was The Hit (1984), The Limey (1999), and now this. He reappears every time with his famous beauty weathered but more attractive, his masculine mystery deeper, steely dignity...

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Brighton Festival 2012: Interiors, Motor Show, Land's End

From theatre viewed through peepholes and camera obscuras to a dance piece you watch across a wasteland while wearing headphones, this year the Brighton Festival and Brighton Festival Fringe seem to be fixated with ways of seeing. Hot on the heels...

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