Kenneth Branagh graduates from player to playwright this week for All is True, in which he plays an ailing Bard. But which big-screen Shakey is the greatest?
Despite its hey-nonny-nonny reputation, Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy, written during a time of immense social upheaval, has sharp edges. Or at least it does in this modern-dress version by director Christine Edzard, which makes it into a thinly veiled commentary on the inequalities of post-Thatcherite Britain. Arden becomes a cardboard city in London’s Docklands, while the “court” from which Rosalind (Emma Croft) and co are expelled is a glitzy bank. Heavy-handed but thought-provoking.
Despite its hey-nonny-nonny reputation, Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy, written during a time of immense social upheaval, has sharp edges. Or at least it does in this modern-dress version by director Christine Edzard, which makes it into a thinly veiled commentary on the inequalities of post-Thatcherite Britain. Arden becomes a cardboard city in London’s Docklands, while the “court” from which Rosalind (Emma Croft) and co are expelled is a glitzy bank. Heavy-handed but thought-provoking.
- 2/8/2019
- by Andrew Dickson
- The Guardian - Film News
Alec Guinness: Before Obi-Wan Kenobi, there were the eight D’Ascoyne family members (photo: Alec Guiness, Dennis Price in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’) (See previous post: “Alec Guinness Movies: Pre-Star Wars Career.”) TCM won’t be showing The Bridge on the River Kwai on Alec Guinness day, though obviously not because the cable network programmers believe that one four-hour David Lean epic per day should be enough. After all, prior to Lawrence of Arabia TCM will be presenting the three-and-a-half-hour-long Doctor Zhivago (1965), a great-looking but never-ending romantic drama in which Guinness — quite poorly — plays a Kgb official. He’s slightly less miscast as a mere Englishman — one much too young for the then 32-year-old actor — in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), a movie that fully belongs to boy-loving (in a chaste, fatherly manner) fugitive Finlay Currie. And finally, make sure to watch Robert Hamer’s dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets...
- 8/3/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Del Toro's haunted-house flick to get a new cast member? According to a Variety report, this year's Oscar-nominated actress Jessica Chastain (for Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty) is in "final negotiations" to become the latest addition to the cast of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro's haunted-house movie Crimson Peak. If her signature does end up in the dotted line, Chastain will be featured next to Pacific Rim / Queer as Folk's Charlie Hunnam, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug / Star Trek Into Darkness' Benedict Cumberbatch, and one of Chastain's The Help co-stars: Emma Stone. Needless to say, for that to happen all of the aforementioned names must actually end up in the film. As per Justin Kroll's Variety article, the plot of the Legendary Pictures horror film (possibly to be handled by Universal Pictures) remains unknown. Could GdT's latest turn out to be Robert Wise's The Haunting...
- 4/6/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
David Nicholls, author of the hit novel One Day, has always loved Dickens's novel. As the film version is about to be released, he reveals how he set about his adaptation
Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life. For some people it's Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, but for me it is Great Expectations. I first read it at 14 or so and, apart from some infatuations with Orwell, Fitzgerald, Salinger and Hardy, it has remained my favourite novel ever since. By some miracle, a story written in the mid-1850s had captured much of how I felt in a small provincial town at the end of the 1970s.
Yet if I saw myself in the book, it wasn't a particularly flattering portrait. It's clear why a young reader might aspire to be Elizabeth Bennet, but who would want to be Pip Pirrip?...
Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life. For some people it's Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, but for me it is Great Expectations. I first read it at 14 or so and, apart from some infatuations with Orwell, Fitzgerald, Salinger and Hardy, it has remained my favourite novel ever since. By some miracle, a story written in the mid-1850s had captured much of how I felt in a small provincial town at the end of the 1970s.
Yet if I saw myself in the book, it wasn't a particularly flattering portrait. It's clear why a young reader might aspire to be Elizabeth Bennet, but who would want to be Pip Pirrip?...
- 11/17/2012
- by David Nicholls
- The Guardian - Film News
Actor known for his roles as clergymen, favourite uncles and tragic-comic characters
There is a great tradition in the rotundity of actors, and Roger Hammond, who has died aged 76 of cancer, stands proudly in a line stretching from Francis L Sullivan and Willoughby Goddard through to Roy Kinnear, Desmond Barrit and Richard Griffiths, though he was probably more malleably benevolent on stage than any of them.
He reeked of kindness, consideration and imperturbability, with a pleasant countenance and a beautiful, soft voice, qualities ideal for unimpeachable clergymen, favourite uncles and tragic-comic characters such as Waffles in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (whom he played in a 1991 BBC TV film, with David Warner and Ian Holm), a man whose wife left him for another man on his wedding day but who has remained faithful to her and forgiving ever since.
Hammond grew up in Stockport, Lancashire. His chartered accountant father was managing director of his own family firm,...
There is a great tradition in the rotundity of actors, and Roger Hammond, who has died aged 76 of cancer, stands proudly in a line stretching from Francis L Sullivan and Willoughby Goddard through to Roy Kinnear, Desmond Barrit and Richard Griffiths, though he was probably more malleably benevolent on stage than any of them.
He reeked of kindness, consideration and imperturbability, with a pleasant countenance and a beautiful, soft voice, qualities ideal for unimpeachable clergymen, favourite uncles and tragic-comic characters such as Waffles in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (whom he played in a 1991 BBC TV film, with David Warner and Ian Holm), a man whose wife left him for another man on his wedding day but who has remained faithful to her and forgiving ever since.
Hammond grew up in Stockport, Lancashire. His chartered accountant father was managing director of his own family firm,...
- 11/14/2012
- by Michael Coveney
- The Guardian - Film News
There have been more than 400 film and TV adaptations so far, and counting, some brilliant, some memorably awful
The opening credits of BBC1's new three-part adaptation of Great Expectations (27-29 December) show a chrysalis cracking open to reveal a pair of trembling wings. A few seconds later this delicate emergence is replaced on screen by the escaped convict Magwitch (Ray Winstone) erupting from the stagnant waters of the Essex marshes. Covered in blood and slime, he is at once the monster of nightmares and a huge misshapen baby gasping its first breath.
In a single sequence, the director Brian Kirk gets to the heart of Dickens's novel as a fable of rebirth and renewal. Together with Sarah Phelps, the screenwriter, he has created a world in which characters are forever seeking to transform themselves – or each other. A spookily young Miss Havisham (Gillian Anderson), still cocooned in her tatty wedding dress,...
The opening credits of BBC1's new three-part adaptation of Great Expectations (27-29 December) show a chrysalis cracking open to reveal a pair of trembling wings. A few seconds later this delicate emergence is replaced on screen by the escaped convict Magwitch (Ray Winstone) erupting from the stagnant waters of the Essex marshes. Covered in blood and slime, he is at once the monster of nightmares and a huge misshapen baby gasping its first breath.
In a single sequence, the director Brian Kirk gets to the heart of Dickens's novel as a fable of rebirth and renewal. Together with Sarah Phelps, the screenwriter, he has created a world in which characters are forever seeking to transform themselves – or each other. A spookily young Miss Havisham (Gillian Anderson), still cocooned in her tatty wedding dress,...
- 12/24/2011
- by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
- The Guardian - Film News
Versatile actor and writer often called upon to play toffs and bumbling clerics
The actor Jonathan Cecil, who has died of pneumonia aged 72 after suffering from emphysema, spent much of his career playing upper-class characters. That is hardly surprising since his father was Lord David Cecil, Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford University, and Jonathan's grandfather was the 4th Marquess of Salisbury. Although often typecast as a comic blueblood, there was infinitely more to Jonathan than that. He excelled in Chekhov and Shakespeare, and four times played Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, always investing the character with a silvery pathos. In 1998 he had an outstanding season at Shakespeare's Globe, where he appeared in As You Like It and Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters, in which he played Sir Bounteous Progress – "gazing benignly", as John Gross wrote, "on almost everything, even his own undoing".
I...
The actor Jonathan Cecil, who has died of pneumonia aged 72 after suffering from emphysema, spent much of his career playing upper-class characters. That is hardly surprising since his father was Lord David Cecil, Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford University, and Jonathan's grandfather was the 4th Marquess of Salisbury. Although often typecast as a comic blueblood, there was infinitely more to Jonathan than that. He excelled in Chekhov and Shakespeare, and four times played Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, always investing the character with a silvery pathos. In 1998 he had an outstanding season at Shakespeare's Globe, where he appeared in As You Like It and Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters, in which he played Sir Bounteous Progress – "gazing benignly", as John Gross wrote, "on almost everything, even his own undoing".
I...
- 9/25/2011
- by Michael Billington
- The Guardian - Film News
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