Mirror Mirror – review
Julia Roberts's Queen is neither funny nor villainous enough in Tarsem Singh's feeble retelling of the Snow White storyThis odd film has been billed as a "spectacular reimagining" of the Snow White story. It is mostly a spectacular buggering up of the ...
The Raven – review
A satirical nightmare about a washed-up Edgar Allen Poe taking on a serial killer inspired by his stories has some nice touchesLiterary journalism and celebrity are the subjects of this satirical nightmare fictionalising the last days of Edgar Allan Po...
Trishna – review
Michael Winterbottom transplants Hardy perennial Tess of the d'Urbervilles to Jaipur, but she fails to bloomMichael Winterbottom is such a restlessly, brilliantly prolific and unparochial film-maker, declining to be limited either conceptually or geogr...
John Carter – review
The fantasy-romance adventures of a civil war veteran transported to Mars made for a giant, suffocating doughy feast of boredomJohn Carter is one of those films that is so stultifying, so oppressive and so mysteriously and interminably long that I...
Rampart – review
Woody Harrelson's bent Los Angeles cop rules over a tense study in corruption co-written by James EllroyThe dirty LAPD cop is a much love-hated figure in American cinema, in movies like Internal Affairs, LA Confidential and Training Day. (Abel Fer...
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – review
Stephen Daldry's preposterous adaptation of the Jonathan Safran Foer novel belittles the impact of 9/11A meaty whiff of phoney-baloney rises from this extremely contrived and incredibly preposterous movie, a mawkish, precious and bizarre fant...
A Dangerous Method – review
A droll undercurrent of black comedy underlies David Cronenberg's drama about Freud, Jung and male hysterics"These modern analysts! They charge so much!" declares a character in Woody Allen's collection Getting Even, "In my day, for five marks Fre...
War Horse – review
Spielberg's version of the equine first world war yarn is an unconvincing attempt at summoning up the spirit of the timeSuffused in a buttery-digital glow, as if shot on special film made of liquid fudge, Steven Spielberg's disappointing, coercively se...
Despair – review
Dirk Bogarde is on superb form in Fassbinder's eerie adaptation of Nabokov's novel about a Russian émigré's breakdownVladimir Nabokov's novel is adapted by Tom Stoppard into an icy, psycho-melodramatic nightmare in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 fil...
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – review
David Fincher has given Stieg Larsson the Hollywood treatment, and created a sleek but chilly thrillerDavid Fincher has given The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a very serious software and operating system upgrade. This new English-language remake, – ba...
Gilbert Adair: a man of letters for the cinema age
In another era, Gilbert Adair would have written on Herodotus. As it was he focused his energies on an exciting young mediumGilbert Adair was a unique and wonderful writer: a critic of elegance, brilliance, and unquenchable intellectual energy and curi...
