Entertainment
Joyce Glasser reviews Broken (8th March 2013)
- Friday, 08 March 2013
Broken, adapted from Daniel Clay’s novel by Irish playwright (Howie the Bookie, 1999) and scriptwriter (Intermission, 2003) Mark O’Rowe is the feature film directorial debut of British theatre director Rufus Norris (
Set in a contemporary suburban close that looks like a stage set, Broken is a coming-of-age story that links three very different, ‘broken’ families, each of which express love in different, fatally conflicting ways.
Looking at it in another way, Broken is a distorted carbon copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, but stripped of most of what made that book a classic.
Joyce Glasser reviews Robot and Frank (8th March 2013)
- Friday, 08 March 2013
If 2012 were a bumper year for films about, by, and starring older people, the year 2013 began with a Best Foreign Film BAFTA and Oscar for Amour, a film about a long-married octogenarian couple facing death.
Since then we’ve seen the disappointing A Song for Marion and now, Robot & Frank, a gentle comedy set ‘in the near future’ starring the 74 year-old stage and screen actor Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon, Good Night and Good Luck).
Langella plays Frank, a retired jewel thief with a touch of dementia whose feelings for a robot housekeeper he’s given gradually change from resentment to love.
Lucy Rawlins reviews The Full Monty at the Bristol Hippodrome
- Friday, 08 March 2013
The Full Monty
Bristol Hippodrome
4th March 2013
Having extremely high expectations of this play, (we all know what happens in the end!) I was on tenterhooks from the moment I sat in my seat waiting for it to start. As so was everyone else in the auditorium it seemed.
Joyce Glasser reviews Fire With Fire (8th March 2013)
- Friday, 08 March 2013
Fire with Fire seems determined to show that the handsome, gangly American actor Josh Duhamel can carry a film that isn’t Transformers as an action hero and romantic lead. It’s also a breakout film of sorts for the stunt designer and stuntman-turned Director, David Barrett, and first time script writer Tom O’Connor.
Last week Duhamel co-starred as a shop owner with two kids in Safe Haven, a Nicholas Sparks’ romance, and in Fire with Fire he’s a fireman turned vigilante. What the public might be curious to know, however, is does Josh have a thing about pulling helpless girls out of burning buildings, is this recurring motif just a coincidence?
Robert Tanitch reviews Paper Dolls at Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn
- Friday, 08 March 2013
Five Filipino transsexuals emigrate to Israel to work as carers for elderly Orthodox Jewish men during the day and as drag artists during the night in Tel Aviv. The expected dramatic clash of cultures never materializes.
Joyce Glasser reviews The Guilt Trip
- Thursday, 07 March 2013
The Guilt Trip is one of those high-profile American films that lands on our shores with so much bad publicity that you can find yourself pleasantly surprised when you actually see it.
That’s not to say that a film sending Barbra Streisand’s widowed Jewish mother across America with her obdurate, bachelor son, Seth Rogen (Knocked Up, Superbad, Pineapple Express), as shouldn’t be a whole lot funnier than it is. But the chemistry between the pair and their undeniable star power is strong enough to carry us on their journey.
Robert Tanitch reviews Fences which is touring Britain
- Thursday, 07 March 2013
August Wilson (1945-2005), the great African-American playwright, is up there with Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. He wrote a cycle of award-winning plays, which chronicled the American-Black man’s experience in the twentieth century, one play for each decade, an amazing and unique achievement.
Joyce Glasser reviews Arbitrage (1st March 2013)
- Wednesday, 06 March 2013
Like his counterpart, Gordon Gekko, hedge fund guru Robert Miller (Richard Gere) knows that on Wall Street, money never sleeps. Juggling a savvy wife (Susan Sarandon), two mistresses and struggling to cover-up a bad foreign investment until his company is sold, Miller isn’t sleeping much either.
Arbitrage might be an old-fashioned thriller, but it’s packed with moral dilemmas and throws us an unexpected little twist.
Joyce Glasser reviews Sleep Tight (1st March 2013)
- Tuesday, 05 March 2013
It’s not surprising that what might be the best film of the week, Sleep Tight (Mientras Duermes), is a Spanish psychological thriller/horror movie, a genre in which the Spanish excel.
In addition to such critical and box office successes as The Devil’s Backbone, The Orphanage, The Others, Pan’s Labyrinth and Julia’s Eyes, Spain has given us Rec and Rec 2 (arguably the two best films of the ‘found footage’ genre), both of which were co-written and directed by Jaume Balagueró, the Director of Sleep Tight.
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