By Ray Bennett
Quentin Tarentino’s ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’ is a lazy, self-indulgent and violent story about the unrequited love of a movie stuntman for a two-bit action star. Set in 1969, it’s a laboured bromantic comedy in which Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt, swans about trying to catch the eye of his employer, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is too self-involved to see. It’s as if Richard Gere doesn’t notice Julia Roberts in ‘Pretty Woman’. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Working Title’s 19th-century biopic “Radioactive”, starring Rosamund Pike (pictured) as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, will have its world premiere at the closing gala of the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 14.
Organisers announced a first raft of 18 galas and 38 special presentations including 29 world premieres and six international debuts for the 44th TIFF, which runs Sept. 5-15. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – The documentary feature ‘Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band’ will have its world premiere at the Opening Night Gala of the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 5, TIFF announced today. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – American filmmaker Sidney Lumet, who was born 95 years ago today and died in 2011, made a series of fine and gripping social dramas from the 1950s through the 1980s but he was a big fan of high comedy and the performers who could carry it off.
He told me, “I think there’s a large underestimation of high-comedy. For years, they kept saying, oh, Cary Grant, he’s charming but he can’t act but, by Jesus, that’s acting, let me tell you. It’s very hard acting, it’s wonderful acting. People equate seriousness with quality and that isn’t so.” Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Great news! Roger Spottiswood’s excellent 1983 political thriller ‘Under Fire’ starring Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman, Joanna Cassidy, Ed Harris and Jean-Louis Trintignant is out today on Blu-ray Disc in the U.K. from Eureka Entertainment. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett / The Windsor Star / Feb. 19 1972
When eating a lobster, don’t break open its body on a boat in the Bay of Passamaquoddy, you may never eat lobster again.
Don’t misunderstand, the lobster in New Brunswick is as fine you’l get anywhere. There were members of our party, as we gently rode the Atlantic waters off southern New Brunswick in the the good ship Bo-peep, who devoured their lobsters with the nonchalance of a galloping gourmet. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
TORONTO – Just as in ‘Jackie’ two years ago, Natalie Portman gives a scintillating performance of a driven and complicated woman in a not very successful picture. Director and screenwriter Brady Corbet’s ‘Vox Lux’, which opens today in the United Kingdom, tells of a pop superstar named Celeste who survived a mass murder as a teenager, is a bit of a mess but even though she enters the picture late, Portman is mesmerising. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
Today is St. George’s Day named for the patron saint of several places such as Aragon, Catalonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal and Russia. Oh, and England. We English, of course, don’t mark April 23 in the boozy way the Irish do on St. Paddy’s Day. That would never do. It happens also to be Shakespeare’s birthday and we’d much rather honour our Will. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Argentinian composer Daniel Tarrab, who has had a long and successful career writing film scores, has released an album of jazz-influenced tango pieces titled ‘Otra Mirada (Another Look)’ on Silva Screen Records. Continue reading
Film Review Brief: Trevor Nunn’s ‘Red Joan’
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Trevor Nunn’s slightly old-fashioned espionage drama ‘Red Joan’, which opens in the United Kingdom today, won’t set any box-office records but it is an absorbing drama.
Sophie Cookson (pictured above with Stephen Campbell Moore) is very impressive as idealistic young physicist Joan Stanley who gets involved with a group of intellectual communists at Cambridge just before World War II and ends up in a plot to share the secrets of the atom bomb with the Soviet Union. Tom Hughes and Ben Miles co-star.
The story is told in flashbacks with Judi Dench as the older Joan. Theatre legend Nunn shows he knows about film too. George Fenton’s score is typically evocative. It screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018.