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
Julia
**
Sooner or later, foreign directors with successes to their credit in their home countries or at festivals are given projects in English with either British or American casts. It isn't always easy for them to maintain the same quality.
French director Erick Zonka, whose Dreamlife of Angels was much admired at Cannes some years ago, falls foul of the transition with Julia even though given the benefit of a superb central performance from Tilda Swinton, Oscar nominated this year as Best Supporting player in Michael Clayton.
She plays an alcoholic American woman who, sacked from her job and desperate for money, finds herself implicated in the kidnapping of a child for ransom. It's a cock-eyed scheme involving an escape with the young boy into Mexico and, of course, it goes badly wrong.
Zonka claims he has been influenced by John Cassavetes and certainly Swinton's performance reminds one of Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes wife, at her best. But the film looks more like a tale the Coen Brothers might have considered before rejecting as unfilmable. It is overblown, melodramatic and too long at well over two hours.
No one, however, could fail to admire Swinton's rampaging, acutely observed portrait in a part the director at first hoped to give to Julianne Moore. She is often amazing, even when the film twists this way and that between a study of one woman's alcoholic despair and all-out action thriller.
Elegy
***
Isabel Coixet, the Catalan director of the resonant My Life Without Me, is more successful with Elegy, an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel about an abortive romance between a young woman and a much older man.
She has Ben Kingsley as a charismatic and much admired academic who falls hook, line and sinker for Penelope Cruz's student and is suitably devastated when the affair ends.
With actors of this calibre, and Dennis Hopper cast as the lovelorn professor's cynical friend, you can't go far wrong. And Coixet's shrewd direction encapsulates something of Roth's ironic style.
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