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This Season: Nicholas Barber selects "Prometheus", Ridley Scott's bid to save the "Alien" franchise from its sequels...   read more »

This Season: Nicholas Barber recommends Michael Winterbottom's new film, which sets "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" in contemporary Mumbai...
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~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 25th 2012  read more »

Is Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" still relevant? Ralph Fiennes makes a powerful case. Ian Jack is almost convinced ...  read more »

Nicholas Barber picks his highlight from the next two months at the movies: a gleaming showcase for Felicity Jones ...   read more »

~ Posted by Nicholas Barber, December 23rd 2011

David Fincher’s new film of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and not just the question of why Rooney Mara attempts a Swedish accent all the way through, while Daniel Craig gives up on his after ten minutes. Here are a few of those questions. Why do we learn so little about the tattooed heroine, considering that she’s the title character? Why do we have to witness her being raped by her legal guardian when he’s got nothing to do with the film’s central mystery? How come such a significant event as her setting fire to her own father is merely mentioned in passing? And will she ever see Craig’s character again?

If you’re one of the zillion people to have read Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, or seen the Swedish film adaptations, then you’ll know that the answer to all these questions is, in three words: wait and see. A large proportion of the first novel is spent setting up situations that aren’t resolved until book two or book three, which means that Fincher is simply being faithful to his source material, even if he is presenting us with a fundamentally unsatisfying narrative. But is that really OK? One of the virtues of the feature-film format is that it lets us experience a complete story from beginning to end in two hours.  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 22nd 2011  read more »

~ Posted by Nicholas Barber, December 20th 2011

Glance at the films being released in Britain in January and early February, or in America in November and December, and you’ll notice a glut of Oscar contenders. You know the type. They’re middle-brow, grown-up dramas, often biopics or literary adaptations, with a sheen of Hollywood gloss over a base of indie intelligence, and with one or two juicy roles played by actors who have already won their share of prizes. If you vote for the Baftas or the Academy Awards, but you can’t decide which movies to support, they’re the films which say: relax, this is what quality cinema looks like. The 2012 crop includes “The Iron Lady”, “Shame”, “Coriolanus”, “J. Edgar”, “The Descendants”, “Carnage”, “Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close”, “Martha Marcy May Marlene”, “A Dangerous Method” and “Young Adult”. In Britain, every one of those films comes out in the first six weeks of the year. In America, they’re released about a month earlier, but they’re almost as tightly packed.  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 9th 2011

The movie version of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" opens in the United States today, 22 years after the TV version of John le Carré's novel was first broadcast on the BBC and PBS. The movie runs 127 mins, the TV series runs 290 mins, but for some critics, the sprint through the story seems to pass more slowly than the leisurely jog. In this week's New Yorker, the film critic Anthony Lane says the TV series was,

bovine of pace, often ugly to behold, and content to meander along byways that petered out into open country or led inexorably to dead ends, yet I was tensed and transfixed by every minute... 

The movie version, he writes, feels "purposeful, unbaffled, artfully composed." Many movie-goers might perk up at the prospect of seeing George Smiley solve the puzzle of who is the Soviet mole in the "Circus" with 163 minutes to spare. But Lane writes,

something in the drama has been dulled, and I was almost bored. 

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 9th 2011

Over at Economist Debates the theme is Women & Work and the motion is: "This house believes that a woman's place is at work." At the moment 45% agree with the motion and 55% disagree. Those who agree with the motion believe that women belong in the work place "so that they can live to their full potential as productive and self-reliant individuals". Those who disagree say women "do not have an assigned place. In free societies, they choose where they wish to be". Of course it's not always an "either/or", sometimes it's an "and/and". One extreme example appears in the Daily Telegraph where Meryl Streep discusses preparing for the role of Mrs Thatcher in "The Iron Lady". Streep spent months watching videos and broadcasts and met many people who knew her. The detail that really amazed her was that Mrs Thatcher cooked supper each evening.

She wanted to make dinner for Denis every night, and even when it was take-out from Marks and Spencer’s they would sit down and have it together.

Streep employs a cook, and says she hasn't made her own supper when working since "Sophie's Choice" (1982). 

"The Iron Lady" is released in Britain on January 6th and in America on December 30th