adaptation
DVD: Reinventing MarvinMonday, 29 October 2018
You have to turn to the brief interview with director Anne Fontaine that is the sole extra on this DVD release to discover the real source of her film Reinventing Marvin. Though Fontaine and Pierre Trividic’s screenplay is credited as original, it... Read more... |
Juliana, Nova Music Opera, St John's Smith Square review - new version of a classic dramaTuesday, 23 October 2018
Joseph Phibbs is not the first composer to make an opera out of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, and it is not difficult to see the operatic appeal of this taut, passionate three-handed drama. But there are also hazards: my recollections of the play,... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The Comfort of StrangersTuesday, 16 October 2018
“There’s a lot of weirdness I didn’t want explained,” Paul Schrader reveals at one point in a new director’s commentary to his 1990 film. He certainly succeeded on that score: with its script by Harold Pinter (adapting Ian McEwan’s elliptical 1981... Read more... |
VOD: That Good NightThursday, 04 October 2018
The straw hat is surely the season’s requisite headgear for great actors embarking on their valedictory screen performances. It was there on the venerable Harry Dean Stanton’s head through much of Lucky, and the great John Hurt makes it his own in... Read more... |
CD: Echo & the Bunnymen - The Stars, The Oceans & The MoonTuesday, 02 October 2018
Releasing albums of re-recordings of an artist’s work is not a new concept, and it’s one that has been done to great effect in the past. Live albums, remix albums, new versions of poorly recorded songs and even stylistic re-imaginings have all been... Read more... |
The Wife review - Glenn Close deserves better from her latest Oscar bidFriday, 28 September 2018
Writers need to write, or so goes the unimpeachable argument that underpins The Wife, which is being strongly touted as the film that may finally bring leading lady Glenn Close an Oscar in her seventh time at bat. Close is terrific, as she almost... Read more... |
The Little Stranger review - the wrong sort of chillsSaturday, 22 September 2018
Domnhall Gleeson needs to watch it. In Goodbye Christopher Robin he played AA Milne, the creator of Pooh and co. To achieve the correct level of period English PTSD, it was as if he’d folded himself up into a neat pile of desiccated twigs. And now... Read more... |
Heathers The Musical, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - a sardonic take on teen angstThursday, 20 September 2018
This London premiere of Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s 2010 musical (based on Daniel Waters’ oh-so-Eighties cult classic movie, starring Christian Slater and Winona Ryder) had a development period at The Other Palace – no critics allowed... Read more... |
Wanderlust, BBC One review - an unflinching look at stale sexWednesday, 05 September 2018
What signals the end of a relationship? The loss of attraction? Infidelity? Or is it, as Wanderlust explores, something more innocuous? The opening episode of BBC One's latest show packed in enough domestic drama to sustain most series, but found... Read more... |
Vanity Fair, ITV review - seductions of social climbingMonday, 03 September 2018
Emcee Michael Palin, as William Makepeace Thackeray himself, introduces us to the show: “Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” All his major characters – or “puppets” – are riding a fairground... Read more... |
Yardie review - Idris Elba shoots straight in his directorial debutFriday, 31 August 2018
The first significant British film to explore the influence of Jamaican sound systems in London was Babylon. Shot in 1980, its street patois was deemed impenetrable enough to merit subtitles. Times change. Yardie revisits the same world and era – it... Read more... |
Blu-ray: A Gentle CreatureTuesday, 28 August 2018
“To our enormous suffering!” There are many macabre vodka toasts, accompanied by some appropriately gruelling visuals, in A Gentle Creature, but that one surely best captures the beyond-nihilist mood of Sergei Loznitsa’s 2017 Cannes competition... Read more... |
