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Five of the Best...Films
1. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
Andy "Gollum" Serkis is astonishing as the late polio-afflicted punk Ian Dury
2. Precious
Lee Daniels’s astonishing film, beautifully acted by Gabourney Sidibe
3. A Prophet
A stone-cold masterpiece from French director Jacques Audiard about an Arab convict in with the Corsican mafia
4. Avatar
James Cameron's epic is unsubtle but the technical achievement is awesome - see it in 3D if you can
5. Youth In Revolt
Well-scripted comedy of adolescent longing

Critics' Choice

Film

Andrew O'Hagan

quotePrecious is a new-style weepie but one that is much more bracing than depressingquote

Andrew O'Hagan Precious Theatre

Henry Hitchings

quoteIan McKellen is captivating throughout. He delights in the play’s gallows humour, yet is also maudlin and poignantquote

Henry Hitchings Waiting for Godot Theatre

Fiona Mountford

quoteSlight quibbles notwithstanding, this will set the West End’s stock riding highquote

Fiona Mountford Enron

Reader reviews

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Simon, London

quoteUtterly, utterly brilliant. You really are in for a treatquote

A Prophet Theatre

Ella, London

quoteThough 'Trilogy' has won rave reviews, I personally found myself exasperated after about an hourquote

Trilogy Restaurants

Dave A, London

quoteWe went on a quiet sunday evening and the food was excellent, but the experience let down by the service and ambiancequote

Mansons

Film news and reviews London,

Into the Wild

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Penn becomes master

Nick Roddick, Evening Standard 11.09.07
 
Sean Penn

Directing: Sean Penn makes one of the year's great films

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With Into the Wild, his fourth feature as director, Sean Penn joins the ranks of the masters. A brave, beautiful and totally satisfying adaptation of the cult book by Jon Krakauer, it tells the (largely) true story of Christopher McCandless, who dropped spectacularly out after graduating college in 1990.

Donating all his money to Oxfam and cutting up his social security card, McCandless rechristened himself Alexander Supertramp, vanishing into the wilds of the South-West and, eventually, Alaska.

It is one of those peculiarly American odysseys, with echoes of Huck Finn, Woody Guthrie, Kerouac and Easy Rider, in which the true heart of America is found still beating among its drifters and outcasts. But the film, like the book, also speaks to a younger generation, for whom the word "career" is more threat than aspiration.

Penn's eye for landscape is unashamedly poetic, and he draws a powerfully nuanced performance from Emile Hirsch as Chris/Alex.

It's a long (148 minutes) but totally confident film, pulling off challenge after challenge - a hippy colony in the desert; a hilltop epiphany with veteran Hal Holbrook as a retired soldier who becomes a surrogate father; and above all, the extraordinary, shattering finale in Alaska.

Quite simply one of the year's great films.

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