An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Deadly ping-pong: Sir Michael Caine and Jude Law in Sleuth
"If you re-make a good film," says Michael Caine, starring with Jude Law in Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth, "you're on a hiding to nothing." He is almost always right. But Branagh's version of the Anthony Schaffer play, filmed in 1970 with Laurence Olivier, and presented in competition at Venice, is not your usual re-make. It has a new screenplay from Harold Pinter which is entirely different in emphasis.
This time around, Caine plays the famous writer of thrillers who takes his revenge on the man who has run off with his wife and Jude Law is in the part Caine originally played as the part-time actor and hairdresser who has cuckolded him. And though there is still the famous battle of wits between the two, the emphasis is both bleaker and blacker.
The writer is more like a real psychopathic killer taking his cue from the twisted plots of his own books than just a bitter games-playing eccentric. He lives not in an old country house but a vastly expensive contemporary mansion of steel, glass and concrete, the electronic controls of which he manipulates as shrewdly as he does the younger man who has so cruelly betrayed him.
Caine, given plenty of close-ups by Branagh, gives as complete a performance as Olivier did in the old film, while Law acts against him as the weaker actor with a sure touch, except when he has to impersonate the detective arriving to accuse the writer of attempted murder. That scene is the weakest in the film. Otherwise Pinter, allowing for plenty of spiked humour particularly in the opening sequences, ratchets up the tension in his inimitable spare style.
The result is still highly theatrical rather than truly cinematic, played out like a deadly game of ping pong between two men who are vulnerable in different ways.
But if it would look more comfortable on the stage, at least Branagh's 85-minute film is wise enough to keep things short and sharp.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Morning:
11°c
