Looking over the skulls at the Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples in The Trip to Italy, Steve Coogan begins to quote Hamlet to his companion in travel and comedy, Rob Brydon: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow/ of infinite jest…Where be your gibes now? your/gambols? your songs?’”. This famous speech could be the thesis […]
Film Festivals
Sundance Review: Hong Khaou’s film Lilting explores grief with Ben Whishaw
Hong Khaou’s feature film debut, Lilting, is an exploration of grief, family, and the trauma of immigration. The film premiered at Sundance. Is there anything Ben Whishaw can’t do? He played Hamlet in the West End at twenty-three, Keats in Bright Star, Q in Skyfall, a timid but potentially dangerous young man in Criminal Justice, and […]
Sundance Review: Boyhood, or how to grow a masterpiece
By far the best film I saw at Sundance this year was “Boyhood”, the second consecutive masterpiece from writer-director Richard Linklater (“Before Midnight”). Shot in 3-4 day periods over twelve years, it captures the growth of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), from boy to teenager to young adult, in real time. Although the title suggests this is […]
TIFF 2013 Review: The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him and Her tells both subjective sides of the dissolution of a relationship
The modern relationship movie has more and more become an attempt to acknowledge that any relationship story has two subjective sides, which must be told. In Hans Canosa’s Conversations with Other Women, the film finds objectivity through a split screen that ensures a camera is on both its characters at all times: it’s a different […]