If there's a screen performance in 2008 that comes anywhere near to matching Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning turn in There Will Be Blood, then we've come nowhere near to seeing it. A tour-de-force of acting and a career high for Day-Lewis, it's the highlight of an extraordinary, really quite daring piece of cinema. That said, we've come to expect nothing less from writer/director Paul ...
After a slow beginning, in which the complex tangle of relationships is initially confusing, this BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's last novel, Persuasion, develops into an elegant romantic comedy. Austin combines a subtle dissection of the folly of class with a slow-burning, intensely passionate love story. Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) has loved Captain Wentworth (Ciaran Hinds) ever since she ...
In the sensible yet elegant hands of actresses Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, Calendar Girls walks a fine line between sappiness and snickering and ends up both wonderfully funny and gently touching. When her best friend Annie (Walters) loses her husband, Chris (Mirren) cooks up a scheme to commemorate him: they and their friends--all fiftysomething women--will make a nude calendar to ...
Family dysfunction. Treachery. Betrayal. Coarse profanity. Brutal violence. Graphic (and sometimes brutal) sex. No, it's not The Sopranos, it's Rome, HBO's madly ambitious series that bloodily splatters the glory of Rome just as savagely as Monty Python and the Holy Grail soiled the good name of Camelot (but with far fewer laughs; very few funny things happen on the way to ...
Family dysfunction. Treachery. Betrayal. Coarse profanity. Brutal violence. Graphic (and sometimes brutal) sex. No, it's not The Sopranos, it's Rome, HBO's madly ambitious series that bloodily splatters the glory of Rome just as savagely as Monty Python and the Holy Grail soiled the good name of Camelot (but with far fewer laughs; very few funny things happen on the way to ...
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is both adored and detested for its combination of sumptuous beauty and revolting decadence. Few directors polarise audiences in the same way as Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker as influenced by Jacobean revenge tragedy and 17th-century painting as by the French New Wave. A vile, gluttonous thief (Michael Gambon) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant ...