Dramedy Reviews | Picturenose

My Week with Marilyn (2011)

Mar

2012

Waste of talent In 1956 Colin Clark, who is now a British documentary film-maker, spent some time with Marilyn Monroe while she was working on The Prince and Showgirl (1957) in England. He later published a book, which has now been brought to the screen by Simon Curtis in My Week with Marilyn (2011).

La nuit américaine (Day for Night) (1973)

Feb

2011

Reel life? A chance to savour (in the UK) the re-release of a François Truffaut classic. Films about the film-making process, such as Federico Fellini’s wonderful 8½ (1963), Richard Rush‘s excellent The Stunt Man (1980) and David Lynch’s sublime Inland Empire (2006), have tended to offer a unique (and frequently disturbing) perspective, both literal and cinematic, on what ...

The Terminal (2004) 2

Jan

2011

Terminal decline? SPIELBERG-LITE: (Noun). Intelligence-insulting work produced by a great director choosing to rest on his laurels. See Always (1989), Hook (1991), The Lost World (1997), Minority Report (2002), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and this mess, The Terminal (2004).

As Good as It Gets (1997)

Jan

2011

Good as gold Here’s that rarest of treats – a genuinely funny, sincere and moving ‘rom-com’ (and I normally hate the genre), with Oscar-winning performances from Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. Seriously, though, what more could you ask for? It probably comes as no surprise to learn that director James L. Brooks (he of The ...

City Lights (1931) 10

Nov

2010

When silence is golden… I have struggled with the films of Charlie Chaplin down the years – perhaps because I have always considered his contemporaries Laurel and Hardy, or even Harold Lloyd, to be in fact much funnier, I by and large avoided closer inspection of much of Chaplin’s body of work – which was ...

Greenberg (2010)

Jun

2010

Doing nothing well Screenwriter-director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale (2005)) offers an insight into the human mind, the human soul and the human ‘nothingness’, writes Otilia Ilie.

Sex and the City 2 (2010) 9

May

2010

Screw this Seriously, though, what is it with the Sex and the City adaptations and their incredibly well-endowed…running times? I mean to say, men do account for some 49% of the western world’s population and, no matter how much modern women may bang on about asserting their independence, there’s no way that most of them ...

Notting Hill (1999)

Mar

2010

British, warm and human Recent favourable talk of The Bodyguard (1993) and, God save us all, Dirty Dancing (1987) has forced me also to indulge in more praise for another guilty pleasure. I have never been a huge fan of writer Richard Curtis’s rosy views of London, such as Love, Actually (2003) (which he also ...

Juno (2007) 3

Jan

2010

Flame on! I’m going to take a different tack on this one. I liked Juno (2007) for numerous reasons. It was not the best movie ever made, but it had all the elements of a good movie. Well cast, strong script, well shot. As I came late to it, I thought I’d check the lay ...

What Just Happened? (2009)

Apr

2009

Not-so picture perfect… It’s time for Hollywood to get all introspective again – thankfully, director Barry Levinson is something of an old hand at being scurrilous about Tinseltown. His genuinely scathing and frequently hilarious Wag the Dog (1997) takes its rightful place among ‘films about filmmaking’ classics that include Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Robert ...

Breakfast on Pluto (2006)

Aug

2008

Picturenose would take this opportunity to pay tribute to Hélène Noël, late of Brussels – a good friend of Colin’s and the love of James’s life, who was taken from us way too soon, at the age of 42, on 16 June 2008. Hélène was a woman of much love and many gifts and talents, ...