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,
Evening Standard rating
Reader rating
Acting prowess: Colin Firth plays Joe in Genova
Trust Michael Winterbottom to make his family film an eerie and unsettling ghost story.
Genova, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, charts a voyage of despair.
Along with asylum drama In This World, the Thomas Hardy adaptation Jude and last year's A Mighty Heart, starring Angelina Jolie, depicting the kidnap and murder of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, it's yet another bleak Winterbottom study of how tragedy throws the human condition into turmoil.
Winterbottom might work within a variety of forms and genres but his extraordinarily prolific output remains a constant.
This is his sixteenth feature film since 1995; somehow he and producing partner Andrew Eaton are immune to the pitfalls - casting delays, financial hurdles - that face most other English directors.
One gets the sense that if on the first day of shooting his next film, Winterbottom were the only one to show up, he would happily enlist passers-by off the street in order to fulfil his self-imposed quota.
Quality does not always follow quantity as anyone who sat through 9 Songs can testify but happily Genova is top-drawer Winterbottom.
Colin Firth is Joe, a Chicago-based English academic and father of two girls who relocates his family to Genova, northern Italy, after the death of their mother (Hope Davis) in a car crash.
He begins teaching at a college in the city where he is re-acquainted with Barbara (Catherine Keener), a contemporary from Harvard, who helps him settle in and still holds a torch for him.
"You like pasta, you like ice cream? Then you'll be fine," Barbara misguidedly assures the family upon their arrival in Genova.
Whether it's the Eighties Manchester or war-torn Sarajevo, Winterbottom is one of the finest directors at capturing a landscape and here he does a fine job of showcasing Genova's cathedrals and beaches.
But the picturesque locale only heightens the emotional turmoil faced by Joe's two daughters. Kelly, 16, (Willa Holland) proceeds to go off the rails, often disappearing for late-night trysts with Italian boys.
Ten-year-old Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) is haunted by her mother's death, specifically by guilt over her role in causing the fatality by covering her hands over her eyes playing a game in the back of the car.
She is frequently confronted with the ghost of her mother, unable to feel alive in her new surroundings when the person she longs for is dead.
Genova, written by Winterbottom and Laurence Coriat, who last collaborated on the wonderful 1999 London character study Wonderland, owes an obvious debt to Nic Roeg's 1973 classic Don't Look Now.
As with Roeg's Venice-set chiller, narrow alleyways intensify the mounting claustrophobia. But while Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland were haunted in Venice by the apparition of their dead daughter, Winterbottom reverses the premise so that it is the daughter who witnesses visions of her mother.
Having submerged himself in spandex in the ABBA-fest Mamma Mia! and appeared in the dire swords 'n' sandals movie The Last Legion, it's nice to see Colin Firth reminding us of his acting prowess.
Clinging to the pretence of carrying on as normal following his wife's death, Firth's unpredictable eruptions of anger make him an ideal Winterbottom leading man. Howard and Haney-Jardine are also affecting as his daughters.
The climax of Genova in which Mary runs across a congested motorway in pursuit of her mother's ghost is particularly harrowing.
Michael Winterbottom films have always been embraced by critics, rather than audiences, and its downbeat subject matter makes Genova something of a hard sell commercially.
However, this gut-wrenching study of loss deserves to be found upon its release.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
The audience for the opening of Genova at TIFF seems to have been comprised mostly of women of a certain age pining for a reprise of his admittedly wonderful role as Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. No role could be further from Jane Austen's romantic hero. Winterbottom filmed Genova entirely without artificial light, creating a sombre and often opaque portrayal of what many would have expected to see as a sunny, Italian sea-side town. It was entirely in keeping with the subject matter. Firth's restrained, almost repressed performance is so different from Mamma Mia. The other actors are extraordinary as well. Perla Haney-Jardine, who was so poised onstage for Q&A afterwards, was astonishing as the young girl whose life is turned upside down by her mother's death and the guilt that she feels as a consequence.
- Wiseacre, Toronto, Canada
Tonight:
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