Posts Tagged ‘Ralph Fiennes’

Mythic

Things have certainly come some way since the last time your reviewer donned an extra pair of glasses to complement his own for a movie – writer Stephen King, who is very short-sighted, once declared that if 3D ever came back to cinemas in a big way, he was going to invest in a pair of prescription lenses, one red, one blue.

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The right combination…

Jeremy Slater takes a look at Kathryn Bigelow’s latest – she’s a woman who knows about men, it seems..

The Hurt Locker (2008) is the latest from high-octane director Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break (1991), Strange Days (1995)), and it’s an intense portrayal of a group of elite soldiers who have a very dangerous job to do, namely disarming bombs in the heat of the desert and combat.

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‘One more person. A person, Stern.’

There are some films that bypass critical carping and can lay claim to being perhaps the greatest ever made. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) is one such work, and it is my privilege to talk to you about it.

The legend began back in 1982, when Australian author Thomas Keneally finally succeeded in publishing his account of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who managed to save some 1,100 Jews from the death camps in The Holocaust, or Shoah, as the Jewish race refers to mankind’s darkest hour.

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Reading between the lies

Objectively assessing a film that’s drawn from Bernhard Schlink’s book about how reading changes lives, for good and ill? An interesting situation.

Given the theme of The Reader, and the frequency with which cinema been cited as a medium that is so different from print as to make comparisons invidious (but, as everyone knows, it’s the points on which they cross that make both art forms what they are), director Stephen Daldry’s well-used filmic mode of flashback to assess the emotional distance between a Germany barely a decade past the Second World War, and a society living in an almost universal sense of disillusionment and in many cases ignorance, is a fascinating device.

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Raking up trouble

This is one I re-watched by accident the other night (and by ‘accident’ I mean that I was too lazy even to change the channel so saw it through to the end). A horrifying movie – in the truest sense of the word – it’s nonetheless a compelling and enlightening view.

With a cast that includes Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Pete Postlethwaite and Bill Nighy to name but four, this could have so easily been a complete luvvie-fest, devoid of any sentiment or narrative. Not so, luckily. Bolstered by some very accomplished direction by Brazilian Fernando Meirelles (Cidada de Deus (City of God) (2002)), and written for the screen in collaboration with the original author (John le Carré), this is a fully rounded story with a lot to say, and it’s very well played by all concerned.

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Heartache and a thousand natural chocs

Having made my home here in the sunny city of Brussels, I was naturally curious to find out what sort of film Martin McDonagh (Six Shooter (2004)) had made involving Bruges (it’s not that far from here), as well as because a friend of mine lives near there, and reckons that everyone found Colin Farrell “down-to-earth and charming”. Of course, this may be a biased viewpoint – for a start, she’s female.

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