Film
From first-time director and screenwriter duo Charlie McDowell and Justin Lader, The One I Love is a film that confronts just how hard it can be to love someone. Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) and Ethan (Mark Duplass) are married and in counselling when their therapist (Ted Danson) suggests that they go on a weekend retreat together, just the two of them. He sends ...
Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–93), a screenwriter, producer, and director of films in Hollywood for over forty years, is the latest to receive repertory profile treatment at the 52nd New York Film Festival. Entire-career retrospectives are always interesting events; they are at once a celebration of auteuri ...
In David Fincher’s slick adaptation of Gone Girl, an attractive white woman, Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary and her husband, Nick (Ben Affleck), quickly becomes the prime suspect.
Left behind at their Missouri McMansion are signs of a violent struggle – glass coffee ...
U nder the Skin is adapted from Michael Faber’s eponymous speculative fiction novel (2000) in which an alien disguised as an attractive woman hunts hitchhikers in the Scottish highlands. Once she has determined that a man is appropriate prey, she drugs him and delivers him to a subterranean abattoir hidden beneath a farm where, in a disturbing allegorisation of factory farming, he is castrated, fattened up like foie gras, and prepared for shipment back to the alien home planet where human flesh is an expensive delicacy. This adaptation of Faber’s novel is the long-anticipated third feature film from director Jonathan Glazer.
... (read more)Orson Welles once described himself as a ‘king’ actor. Ralph Fiennes seems born to play dukes: nearly all his screen characters, even the crooks and madmen, share an imperious quality that goes with a kind of stony reticence. It felt natural that he should make his film directorial début with an adaptation of Coriolanus (2011), one of Shakespeare’s most misanthropic tragedies, in which he played the lead role of a Roman general with a frank contempt for the mob.
... (read more)
Dallas Buyers Club is the latest and largest in a growing number of period and documentary films about Aids in America. It envisages a time in the 1980s when people living with HIV/Aids existed in a socio-political combat zone in addition to the battles being waged in their own immune systems. Dallas Buyers Club is allegedly a different kind of Aids fi ...
Capturing the essence of Robyn Davidson’s journey across 2700 kilometres of Australian desert was a visual challenge for National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan. Convinced the magazine would misrepresent her, Davidson knew that the challenge was coming to terms with her decision to ‘sell out’ (her words) in agreeing to let an American photographer ...
P.L. Travers (1906–96) did her best to keep her private life private. Perhaps her reservations harked back to the days before she penned Mary Poppins (eight novels, 1934–88) when she was a human interest columnist for a daily newspaper. As a writer of both journalism and fiction she knew as well as anyone that hearsay and speculation were quite different ...
When a film is created by an equally renowned cast and crew, it can be difficult to identify the most notable contributors. In praising or blaming, we often focus on the director or the actors. In this instance, however, it is the screenwriter’s efforts that command our interest and ultimately reorient what could have been a straightforward narrative.
It ...