by Susan Patterson

Ex-cop Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) checks into a room with a view in the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City, under a assumed name, eats a last meal, wipes the room clean of his finger prints, writes a note, and steps out the window and asks for police negotiator Laura Mercer (Elizabeth Banks) by name. A swift flashback sets up his relationships with his former partner Mike Ackerman (Anthony Mackie), who, like every fictional cop partner, believes in his innocence, and his no good brother kid brother Joey (British actor Jamie Bell not looking very much older than when he was Billy Elliot). A graveside altercation at his father’s funeral sees Cassidy overpower his guards, punch out Joey, steal his car, and crash into a train.  Wouldn’t any of us be standing on a ledge after a day like that? Continue reading Man on a Ledge →

by Gareth Negus

Filming Shakespeare successfully is a bit of a trick, especially if you want to reach an audience who would normally run screaming from the idea of watching a 16th century play in a theatre. Not only do you face the challenge of transferring a work from one medium to another, but of encouraging the audience to see past the artificial language and view the play in a contemporary light. Do you keep the story in its original period, or go for a modern setting? Do you favour fidelity to the text, or do you give yourself license to chop and change scenes and dialogue to keep things moving?

Get it wrong, and you have a film like Julie Taymor’s the Tempest (2010), in which actors wander on, do their party piece, and then wander off stage again without any sense of how they are relating to the other characters in the story. Get it right, and you have something like Baz Luhrmann’s version of Romeo + Juliet (1996), a thrillingly modern crowd-pleaser that remains faithful to the source. Continue reading Coriolanus →

By Niall Anderson

The first problem with auteur theory is that it made everyone want to be an auteur. The second is that auteurism made versatility a matter of special regard, rather than an essential part of a director’s make-up. As auteurism took hold in the 70s, the salaried DIY wizards of Hollywood’s middle years must have wondered what was suddenly so impressive about people directing and writing their own movies. Not long before, writing and reworking scripts had once been an essential facet of the director’s job: you just didn’t get a credit for it. And yet here was someone like Robert Altman doing the same thing, and being called a genius. Continue reading I Don’t Like Loose Ends: Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire →

by Emma Dibdin

Michael Shannon has officially become Hollywood’s go-to Man On The Edge. Ever since he literally drove Ashley Judd insane as a disturbed war veteran in William’s Friedkin’s paranoid skin-crawler Bug, he’s played an impressive range of notes on the scale of crazy. From his Oscar-nommed performance as Leo and Kate’s outspoken, fresh-from-the-asylum neighbour in Revolutionary Road to buttoned-down federal agent Nelson Van Alden in HBO’s mobster drama Boardwalk Empire, “intense” is too quaint a term for the brand of simmering, quasi-alien danger Shannon conveys: there’s a sense that any of his characters could snap at the drop of a hat.

What’s surprising about his bravura turn in Take Shelter, then, is how completely human and recognisable it is, how un-alien. Much of the Shannon canon has fascinated and repelled in equal measure – you wouldn’t be best pleased to run into Van Alden, or Bug‘s Peter Evans, down a dark alley. Running into Take Shelter‘s tortured blue-collar family man Curtis, on the other hand, you’d probably be fine with. You might even be inclined to offer him a pint and a sympathetic ear.

And God knows he could do with one. We’re introduced to Curtis in the midst of what appears to be an apocalyptic storm: ominously dark clouds gather, a harsh wind blows, and (in case you’re thinking that sounds like a pretty average British summer’s day) viscous brown oil begins to fall in the place of rain. And though he wakes up, this is no “it was all a dream” cop-out – the sense of impending dread lingers with us, and with Curtis, from those haunting opening shots onwards.

Continue reading Take Shelter →