Love and Hisses: National Society of Film Critics Sound Off on the Hottest Movie Controversies
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 22/11/2009
No. 75: Shirley Temple 1928- The daughter of a bank clerk, she was born in Santa Monica, a bus ride from Hollywood, and thrust into the movies at the age of three by a fanatically ambitious mother. In her sixth year, she went from supporting to starring roles, had two hit songs ("Baby Take a Bow", "The Good Ship Lollipop"), and was the eighth biggest box-office attraction in America....
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 22/11/2009
Tati (1907-1982) was the screen's most fastidious director of comedy and the greatest visual humorist since the silent days of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd whom he revered, and this comic cornucopia contains all his feature films except Trafic (1971). The first four are increasingly ambitious masterpieces generally using onomatopoeic sound rather than dialogue. The last, Parade (1974), is an anthology...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 22/11/2009
Matt Damon gives the best performance of his career so far in this true story of Mark Whitacre, an overweight, moustachioed, highly paid, high-flying executive for a major agri-business corporation in the American Midwest who, in 1992, blew the whistle on his employers for worldwide price fixing. For the next three years, he worked closely with the FBI and the Justice Department gathering evidence...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 22/11/2009
This is a funny, deeply affecting and often painfully truthful movie about families, parenthood, growing up, growing old and dying, devoid of sentimentality, acquiescence in Larkinesque cynicism concerning the horrors of family life, or any Gallic equivalent of Hollywood's "I love you, Dad", "I love you too, son". It covers five days between 1988 and 2000, each one seen from the...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 22/11/2009
This is an enjoyable conspiracy thriller in the manner of John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May , starring the fetching Romola Garai as Anne, politically naive movie star and adopted daughter of a rich Tory MP with a country estate in Norfolk, who, in the long hot summer of 1939, stumbles across an establishment plot involving the SIS and the aristocracy. They'll stop at nothing, including blackmail...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 20/11/2009
The UK-based film company plans a sequel to the 2003 Rowan Atkinson-starring spy spoof, as well as a new adaptation of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Bad news for anyone who thought that Johnny English's licence had been revoked. The Guardian can exclusively reveal that the bumbling British spy is set for another mission, with Rowan Atkinson in talks to reprise his role from the...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
Michael Caine does his diamond-geezer, heart-of-gold cockney bit as Harry Brown, a recently widowed, former Royal Marine driven to despair by the young thugs terrorising the sink estate he lives on in south London. The last straw comes when his elderly best mate is beaten to death by vicious, unemployed teenagers high on drugs. Before you can say Asbo or Bronson, Harry has acquired a little arsenal...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
With two great bodies of work, the first in the German silent era, the other in Hollywood talkies, Lang (1890-1976) bestrides the history of cinema, arguably the most original, innovative and influential figure in film history. He virtually invented several movie genres, including the paranoid conspiracy thriller, and running through his oeuvre over three decades is the mysterious figure of the megalomaniac...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
In this amusing, intelligent, well-acted picture, Paul Giamatti, playing a troubled actor called Paul Giamatti currently appearing in Uncle Vanya , goes to a New York surgery called Soul Storage and exchanges his soul for that of a Russian artist. It's a combination of the Faust legend, John Frankenheimer's Seconds and Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich , but curiously flimsy. Philip French guardian.co.uk...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
Amelia Earhart, the great pioneer aviatrix, has been impersonated on screen by numerous actresses, among them Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Diane Keaton and Amy Adams. But never as convincingly as she is by Hilary Swank in this immensely enjoyably biopic from the Indian director who made her name with Salaam Bombay! . With the right short haircut, some orthodontic effects and sporting her regular...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
Michael Haneke's Palme D'or winner offers a spellbinding tale of bigotry and brutality in a pre-Great War rural German community, says Philip French Numerous novelists, dramatists and film-makers have been attracted to the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War to give their work a touch of nostalgia, irony or historical resonance. JB Priestley, whose life had been transformed...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
In The Ice Storm , Ang Lee turned a sharp, compassionate eye on affluent ex-urban New England at Thanksgiving 1973 where, as the Watergate scandal escalates, the president's bad faith is echoed in the life of an adulterous Wall Street analyst. He now goes back four years earlier to Nixon's first term in the White House and the reaction against the Vietnam War, and the expression of the new liberation...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
In this vivid, visually striking film, the naive 22-year-old Asa returns to the steppes of Kazakhstan from service as a rating with the Russian pacific fleet. He's full of tall tales and determined to find a wife and put together his own flock of sheep, but neither aim, he discovers, is easily attained. The movie belongs to the tradition of staged ethnographic features that began in the silent era...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 08/11/2009
There's a peculiar fascination about ambitious unfinished works that listeners, viewers and readers are left to complete in their minds. In cinema there are a string of pictures left in tantalisingly fragmentary form due to illnesses, accidents or deaths, among them Eisenstein's Que Viva México! , Renoir's Une Partie de Campagne , Von Sternberg's I, Claudius , Welles's Don Quixote and Munk's...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 08/11/2009
This gang warfare movie is set in Birmingham's black community. With aggressive hip-hop figuring as a kind of chorus commenting on the action and raising the emotional ante, it tells the familiar story of a drug dealer threatened with death if he doesn't repay within three hours the £500,000 he's been holding for a fellow criminal just released from jail. The Birmingham police have attempted...
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