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,
Harrowing war drama: Lebanon
As the 66th Venice Film Festival reaches its final weekend, the feeling on the Lido is that it has been a good vintage, if not a classic one.
Star presence has been significantly up on last year, with George Clooney, Matt Damon, Tilda Swinton, Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Viggo Mortensen, Ewan McGregor, Ethan Hawke and, er, Hugo Chávez all gracing the red carpet.
President of Venezuela and scourge of the former Bush administration, Chávez paid a surprise visit to promote — sorry, support — Oliver Stone’s documentary, South of the Border, which aims to redress the balance of anti-Chávez information in the US by being rather too uncritically upbeat about the populist leader and the six other South American reformist premiers who allowed themselves to be interviewed.
Stone’s rambling fan letter makes Michael Moore’s stirring Capitalism: a Love Story — in which the Michigan mauler took on the financial crisis and its root causes with his usual brilliant mix of partisan passion, irony and showmanship — look like a beacon of objective journalism.
Though he signed autographs and kissed admirers outside the Palazzo del Cinema like a pro, Chávez is not in the running for one of the awards, announced tomorrow. Among the favourites for the Golden Lion so far, Lourdes — a sensitive, sceptical drama of religious faith by Austrian director Jessica Hausner — is the one most critics would stake their festival passes on.
Tucked in just behind are a trio of strong runners: Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz’s most humane and hilarious critique of American social and moral dysfunction to date; Israeli director Samuel Maoz’s harrowing war drama, Lebanon, almost entirely set inside a tank as it crosses the border on the first day of the 1982 invasion, and Claire Denis’s austere but also resonant post-colonial tale, White Material, which centres on a French family who refuse to budge from their coffee plantation when civil war breaks out in an unnamed African country. Isabelle Huppert, who can do cold, steely focus like few others, is in with a shout for best actress for her performance here as the mother trying to hold it all together.
The best actor title could go to Viggo Mortensen for his mesmerising turn as the gaunt, driven father living only for the sake of his young son in the blasted landscape of The Road, the long-awaited film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s dour post-apocalypse parable.
Out of competition, two upcoming UK autumn releases gave their A-list players licence to enjoy themselves hugely. In Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, Matt Damon, carrying two stones of excess weight and a nerdy moustache, plays a corporate whistleblower who turns out to be not quite the reliable witness we expect. And in The Men Who Stare at Goats, George Clooney and Ewan McGregor headline in a likeable though not particularly resonant black comedy about an undercover New Age unit of US army soldiers with psychic superpowers.
Still to screen at the time of going to press is Tom Ford’s Isherwood adaptation A Single Man, starring Colin Firth as a gay college professor struggling to come to terms with the death of his partner. Could the fashion designer do for world cinema what he did for Gucci? Watch this space.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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