George Clooney has already scooped a Golden Globe for his performance as Matt King in Hawaii-set The Descendants (cert. 15), itself the winner in the drama category. (The Artist won best film in the comedy or musical category, but this has not stopped some British cinemagoers demanding their money back when they realised it was [...]
Nazareth have certainly had their ups and downs over the last four decades, but this re-mastered live collection is one of the highlights. With Spirit keyboard player John Locke and especially guitarist Billy Rankin added to their number, the Scottish riff-rockers have vital extra torque that they missed in their heyday (although Locke under-uses the [...]
J Edgar (cert. 15), in constant and occasionally annoying time-shifting, charts the career of founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, John Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio). Having (it says in the film) devised a card index system for the Library of Congress in his early 20s, he became obsessed with the threat of radicalism (real [...]
While a Russian version of Shakespeare classics may sound like a cultural anomaly, these two discs are well-worth investigating. Since their originally releases in 1964 and 1971, they have rightly gathered a reputation for being among the very best filmed accounts of these works. Because both stories are set in very old times, their monochrome [...]
War Horse (cert. 12A) gets the Steven Spielberg treatment. Michael Morpurgo’s children’s story was published in 1982 but it took the National Theatre’s play to attract the filmmaker’s attention, and that was partly because the stage version abandoned the novel’s Black Beauty style of first person narration by the horse. It’s a magnificent story, but [...]
The world was a little slow in catching on to John Martyn’s contribution to music and this generous tribute goes some way to recognising his legacy. The first white act signed to the Island label, Martyn stood out too for his use of Echoplex tape delay and his idiosyncratic guitar-playing and singing styles. He also [...]
It’s not often that a young actor in his first lead role matches the performance of a great, but Leonardo DiCaprio shines as brightly as Robert de Niro in this story of a rebellious teenager suffering at the hands of his step-father. Single mother Caroline (Ellen Barkin) moves around America in different relationships with her [...]
January is packed with good new films. Catching up with Christmas and New Year releases there’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and the English-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but let’s contrast and compare two biopics about female political leaders. The Lady (dir. Luc Besson, cert. 12A) tells the story of [...]
By Anna Matthey An impressive documentary on Stalin’s great famine of 1932 and 1933 and the very contrary fates of two journalists who wrote about it – one genuinely, one euphemistically – will be transmitted on Radio 4 next Friday. It was produced by award-winning journalist John Sweeney who travelled to the Ukraine in [...]
Commissioned as a highlight of last year’s BBC Christmas output, The Nativity is a well-informed and superbly-judged account of the events leading up to the birth of Christ. It centres on the palpable tension between Mary and Joseph as he struggles to deal with the shame that her pregnancy has brought upon those who know [...]
