Journey 2: The Mysterious Island – review
This new Jules Verne adventure yarn is a sequel to the ingenuous but surprisingly popular 3D version of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The morose Josh Hutcherson, the only survivor from the earlier film, receives a coded message from...
Patience (After Sebald) – review
This modest, immensely enjoyable documentary is about one of my favourite books, The Rings of Saturn by the German poet and critic WG Sebald, who was born in 1944, taught for much of his adult life in this country, mainly at the University of East Angl...
War Horse – review
The madness of war is exposed by a stallion in Spielberg's emotional, no-holds-barred moral epicSteven Spielberg has been working in Britain off and on for 30 years now, long enough in fact to have been awarded an honorary knighthood. But a few days ag...
Tatsumi – review
In this animated movie, Eric Khoo, a Singapore film-maker, pays tribute to the manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who in the 1950s created a new kind of serious Japanese comic, the "gekiga". The film artfully combines, though sometimes rather confusingly,...
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – review
Newcomer Rooney Mara makes a superb Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's faithful remake of the gritty Swedish crime thrillerIn 1936 the Hollywood mogul David O Selznick bought the Swedish movie Intermezzo, signed up its star Ingrid Bergman and remade i...
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One – review
The makers of this fourth film in the series based on Stephenie Meyer's vampire bestsellers follow the example of another lucrative franchise, the Harry Potter pictures, both in offering no helpful synopsis to newcomers and in filming the final novel i...
Then Again: A Memoir by Diane Keaton – review
Diane Keaton's autobiography is an endearing ramble that reveals more about her close relationship with her mother than it does about her filmsYou would not expect a memoir by Diane Keaton to be a conventional "as told to" or ghosted showbusiness autob...
Wuthering Heights – review
The Yorkshire landscape steals the show in Andrea Arnold's stark, uneasy adaptation of Emily Brontë's tragic romanceIn the version of Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" that he used in his Las Vegas nightclub act in the 1950s, Noël Coward included a celebra...
Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design by Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham – review
An epic survey of Saul Bass's career shows why he was the master of graphic film titlesThe 1950s in America are widely regarded as an era of dull conformity. In fact this was a period of considerable liveliness and innovation. The books that fuelled th...
Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer – review
Based on a series of American children's books, this piece of half-term fodder about a bright 10-year-old girl, a sort of Pollyanna with attitude, could be much worse. It's about trying to have a thrilling summer holiday while staying at home with a li...
Hamlet/ King Lear – DVD review
(Grigori Kozintsev, 1964/ 1971, PG, Mr Bongo Films)Grigori Kozintsev (1905-1973) was a prominent figure in Soviet cinema from his late teens until his death, making ambitious political films until after the second world war when he turned to literary a...
