In the first minutes of a quick sitdown with Dustin Hoffman, the sprightly icon of 20th-century cinema – The Graduate, Marathon Man, Kramer vs. Kramer, All the President’s Men, Midnight Cowboy, Rain Man, Tootsie (come on, this is ridiculous!) – manages to reference Ireland, James Joyce, Ulysses, waiting tables, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and tortoise- shell glasses.
A hymn to adolescent self-absorption, Ol Parker’s Now Is Good stars Dakota Fanning as a teenage girl with one of those rare strains of terminal cancer which don’t make you look unhealthy.
DVD rental firm Blockbuster has announced plans to close 23 stores in Scotland with the loss of around 100 jobs as part of a phased Âclosure across the UK over the coming weeks.
New DVDs from VCI Entertainment resurrect the films of the British comedians Will Hay and Norman Wisdom.
Highly Recommended A pretty good B-Western featuring John Wayne, very early in his starring career, The New Frontier (1935) breaks no new ground but is well made for its budget level. Indeed, it’s fairly lavish by Republic Pictures’ standards, the studio then just getting started itself, the company having been founded earlier that year when Consolidated Film Laboratories president Herbert J …
Highly Recommended THE MOVIE: Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. William Wyler’s 1942 drama Mrs.
Forget the excellent John Thaw series. In Nick Love’s joyless take on Flying Squad hard-nuts Ray Winstone and Plan B play Regan and Carter, boozing, corrupt coppers who are being investigated by internal affairs (Steven Mackintosh) for their diabolical tactics: “There’s even talk of baseball bats”.
Will Ferrell plays Cam Brady, a sleazebag congressman who is a shoo-in for a fifth straight term until Zach Galifianakis’s klutz (he’s incapable of opening doors) Marty comes along, backed by two unctuous industrialists (John Lithgow and Dan Ackroyd, both wasted here).
James Marsh’s determinedly downbeat tale, set in 1993 during the Northern Ireland peace process, centres on Colette (Andrea Riseborough, excellent), an inept IRA terrorist who is captured by MI5 after bungling a London Tube bombing.
PROMETHEUS Directed by Ridley Scott Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba Distributed by Alliance Entertainment