Hollywood
Knight and DayFriday, 06 August 2010
Director James Mangold says he "set out to create a world that feels completely real to the audience, yet is also deeply comic". Somehow he ended up with Knight and Day, which feels completely unreal and is modestly amusing in places. Tom Cruise,... Read more... |
The A-TeamMonday, 26 July 2010
As played by the late George Peppard in the original A-Team TV series, Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith was wont to say he loved it when a plan came together. Alas, whatever plan that might have justified this botched retread of the Eighties small-... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Los Angeles: Dennis Hopper (RIP) On ShowSunday, 25 July 2010
While most will be familiar with him as an actor, and some will know him also as a photographer and painter, few will be aware of the full extent of the late Dennis Hopper’s artistic practice. Hopper, who died in May of this year, did everything... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Actress Julianne MooreSaturday, 24 July 2010
Julianne Moore (b. 1960) is a true rarity. It’s not just that her hair flames like no other star since Katharine Hepburn. Or that alone of her generation she seems impervious to middle age’s indignities. There’s something else. Having worked with... Read more... |
The ReboundTuesday, 20 July 2010
Let me lay a friendly fiver that many critics will rubbish this film, for the following reasons. It’s a romcom, and a Hollywood one at that, the lowest form of cinematic life for many (most often male) critics; it stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose... Read more... |
InceptionFriday, 16 July 2010
Inception is as lucid and heartfelt as summer blockbusters get these days. It is a rigorously built action spectacle about the persistence of memories and ideas, with an intelligent, committed cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio. It returns writer-... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Sting InterviewMonday, 12 July 2010
The location is Sting's beachside house in Malibu the morning after the night before: another night, another venue - the Hollywood Bowl - another three-hour Concert of his songs. That's concert with a capital "C" because this time Sting has brought... Read more... |
PredatorsTuesday, 06 July 2010
The original Predator from 1987 is perhaps best remembered for taking Schwarzenegger’s borderline homoerotic body-fetishism to new heights, as he stripped naked to mud-wrestle the titular alien hunter. It was among the more efficient of the big,... Read more... |
HeartbreakerWednesday, 30 June 2010
Oh, how we like to moan when the inevitably grubby world of Hollywood gets its mitts on one or another European "classic". The Birdcage, we're told, wasn't as good as La Cage aux Folles (actually, I preferred it), and the 2001 Tom Cruise vehicle,... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Los Angeles: Twilight in Tent CitySunday, 27 June 2010
The Los Angeles Film Festival would seem to have everything going for it. There's the perfect Californian weather, the vast number of stars who live and work in the city, and this year there’s been a glamorous new venue in downtown Los Angeles. The... Read more... |
TetroTuesday, 22 June 2010
Creative rebirth or belated midlife crisis? That is the question that hovers over Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to turn his back on lucrative studio fare in favour of personal pet projects with an arthouse bent. The director of The Godfather... Read more... |
KillersWednesday, 16 June 2010
As cinematic landmarks go, Kutcher Speaks French may not quite be up there with Garbo Talks. But there's a certain pleasure to be had in the opening sequences of the otherwise dismal Killers to find that so quintessential a movie dude can actually... Read more... |
