The Victorian Era is generally limited to Queen Victoria’s reign of the British Isles from 1837 to 1899. Outwardly, it was a triumphant period as the monarchy presided over a number of territories abroad and proudly extolled the virtues of its ruling classes. Beneath the pomp and circumstance were the millions of sickly poor who …
New Projects is a weekly round up of movies and TV shows recently announced and currently in development for the near future. Who’s that bad remake? (Shut your mouth!) New Line Cinema has reportedly acquired the rights to the Shaft franchise and intends to remake the ’70s blaxploitation classic yet again, following the 2000 remake …
20. Dead Man Walking Directed by: Tim Robbins Susan Sarandon earned herself an Oscar for her work in “Dead Man Walking,” a film directed by her then husband, Tim Robbins. She plays Sister Prejean, a nun who befriends a death row inmate named Matthew (Oscar nominated Sean Penn) as they confide in one another and …
Wes Anderson’s films evoke an unusual feeling, entirely separate from any other filmmaker working today and impossible to imitate. That style is refined still further in Anderson’s newest, ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, which may well be his most mature film made to date.
More than perhaps any other director, the work of Ernst Lubitsch has been the most noticeable influence on Wes Anderson’s style. Though the great German-American writer-director, most prolific in the 1930s and 1940s, was never quite so aesthetically bold in the look of his sets, he too was preoccupied with meticulous staging for comedy within his chosen locales, be they the titular Shop Around the Corner or the Parisian hotel of Ninotchka; The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in a fictional European country, the Republic of Zubrowka, another Lubitsch trait from works like The Merry Widow and The Love Parade, though The Shop Around the Corner happens to be set in the city Anderson’s mountaintop lodging house takes its name from. He garnered the descriptor of ‘the Lubitsch touch’ thanks to the moving sincerity that always made itself evident within even his more broad comedic premises, and Anderson’s own best work is that in which a recognisable humanism always makes itself known and potent even within the stylised stiltedness through which most of his characters are written and performed.
Wrath of the Titans Directed by Jonathan Liebesman Written by Dan Mazeau and David Leslie Johnson USA, 2012 As befits a sequel to a remake of a film that had absolutely no plot to speak of, Wrath of the Titans is all spectacle, a string of set pieces held together with the loosest connective tissue …
Coriolanus Written by John Logan Directed by Ralph Fiennes UK, 2011 Many of the more interesting Shakespeare adaptations in film history are those that tend to be furthest removed from the stage tradition of the plays; changing the settings and eras, applying different preoccupations, and even dispensing with the writer’s prose altogether in some cases. …
Coriolanus Directed by Ralph Fiennes 2010, UK, 122 minutes Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut is a worthy attempt to adapt one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known tragedies, which features one of his most ambiguously-heroic heroes, to the screen. This film has a lot going for it. Fiennes’ modern rendition is not only true to the play but enhances …