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
Haunting: Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit McPhee in The Road
Venice Film Festival: A dark sky lowers over the wreckage of the modern world as two figures — a man and a boy — trudge through the ravaged landscape, pushing a trolley containing their meagre belongings.
Earthquakes rumble, firestorms rage and armed bands of cannibals with bad teeth hunt for human prey. No, it’s not Soho on a Saturday night. It’s the post-apocalyptic world of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, directed by John Hillcoat.
The Road is harrowing and beautifully composed. It aestheticises horror, thus getting away with ugly, disturbing, even ghoulish scenes by turning them into the cinematic equivalent of those Sebastiao Salgado photographs of Brazilian gold miners.
McCarthy’s novel worked partly because of what it left to the imagination. The film leaves nothing to the imagination — not even a cellarful of desperate human cattle who are being kept alive for slaughter. So although Joe Penhall’s script is remarkably faithful to the original, it doesn’t feel quite right. The film is bleak and visionary, but it leaves a faintly nasty taste in the mouth, as if it wanted to rope in the horror fans under its arthouse cloak.
Yet there’s no denying its raw power. Viggo Mortensen is good at doing haunted men, and his turn here is no exception. He plays a scooped-out shell of a man whose whole being is focused on his own survival and that of his boy. And yet he is uneasily aware that this obsession has already cost him his wife — Charlize Theron in a series of flashbacks — who took her own life because she needed more than survival for survival’s sake.
Thirteen-year-old Australian Kodi Smit McPhee is terrific as the son, and without that aura of preciousness that sometimes clings to talented child actors. At the end of the Venice press screening, there was a stunned silence. We had been well and truly pummelled — and then given an ending that seemed just a little trite, as if it had been imposed by accountants worried about the feelgood factor of a film that is about life being bad and then
getting worse.
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Morning:
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