Film
The career of Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona began with The Orphanage (2007), a gothic drama godfathered by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006) that shared his interest in the imaginative life of children, and in ghosts. In the 2012 survival pic The Impossible and his latest film ...
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An account of the life of Emily Dickinson can, like that of a saint, be reduced to its elements of spiritual and physical suffering. She was acutely sensitive, frequently ill, and when she died she left behind thousands of unpublished poems. It would be easy to portray her as a ...
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Does anyone read Daphne du Maurier (1907–89) these days? An immensely popular novelist for some decades, she was much filmed, for screens large and small, most famously by Alfred Hitchcock, who filmed Jamaica Inn and Rebecca in 1939 and 1940 respectively, and ...
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The Sense of an Ending is an intelligent and thought-provoking adaptation of Julian Barnes’s novel of the same name, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Director Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox) and screenwriter Nick Payne (Constellations) have created a sensitive film ...
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In 1948, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and Chilean senator, Pablo Neruda, proud member of his country’s Communist Party, accused his government of treason for forging an alliance with the United States. Shortly after, Neruda went underground to escape arrest. For thirteen months ...
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In 1980, Brett Whiteley completed his famous portrait of Patrick White, Patrick White at Centennial Park 1979–1980, disagreements over which caused a terminal rupture in the friendship between the two men. Of his intentions for the painting Whiteley said ...
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Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) is a married professor of philosophy, with two adult children, a sunny, book-lined Parisian apartment, and several published works to her name. Success has granted her self-assurance, at least in public. Early in Things to Come (or L’Avenir, to ...
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Australian director Cate Shortland has made three feature films about young women who find themselves out of their depths. Her first, Somersault (2004), set in wintry Jindabyne, featured Abbie Cornish in an early and memorable role as a troubled teenage runaway ...
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The opening scene is a stunner. David Irving (Timothy Spall), top of the pile of Holocaust deniers, is giving a lecture. He is framed by darkness, we do not see the audience. ‘I say to you quite tastelessly,’ he says, ‘that more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car ...
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Martin Zandvliet’s Land of Mine is unsettling from the very outset. During the credits a recurring sound becomes audible, then consuming: the sound of heavy, ragged breathing. Sergeant Carl Rasmussen, sitting in Danish army fatigues and a maroon beret, he is watching a column of ...
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