Sense and Sensibility review – blue-chip cast decorates Emma Thompson’s pleasurable Austen adaptation

Thirty years later, this richly enjoyable film is back with its quality lineup including Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant alongside Thompson herself Emma Thompson won a screenplay Oscar for this buoyant, vibrant, richly enjoyable adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Released in 1995, it was directed by Ang Lee and is a movie with the pleasures of a golden age studio picture of the kind made by William Wyler. It was the second half of Thompson’s Oscar double – she won her first one in 1993 for acting in Howards End – and she is still the only person in Academy Award history to win for acting and writing. With marvellous lightness and gaiety, Thompson found a response to Austen’s comic register, expertly marrying it up to the romance, and 1995 now looks like the golden age of Austen adaptation, having also seen the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice on television and Amy Heckerling’s Emma-homage Clueless at the movies. Thompson paid due attention to Austen’s unique and toughly real...

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars review Bowie bids farewell to an icon in legendary gig

DA Pennebaker’s documentary offers moving moments and raw immediacy as the musician takes on his final performance as Ziggy Stardust

DA Pennebaker’s record of David Bowie’s final concert on the Ziggy Stardust tour at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in 1973 (Bowie is part of the reason we will never be reconciled to saying “Eventim Apollo”) is rereleased after a restoration. It was the legendary “all killer no filler” gig at which, in the presence of the Spiders from Mars – Mick Ronson (guitar), Trevor Bolder (bass), Mick Woodmansey (drums) – he retired his Ziggy Stardust persona, announcing to a stunned crowd that it was the last time he would ever play (as Ziggy).

The show itself, in which Bowie and band members appear starkly key-lit in darkness, with the crowd glimpsed briefly and almost stroboscopically, looks intriguingly intimate, like something at a much smaller club venue. The concert is straightforward and almost minimalist in its staging and Bowie’s cheeky theatrical genius and rackety exotica has something panto about it. Often, the piano and sax lines in Changes give the event a Vegas-residency feel, although no Vegas residency, even in 1973, would be so austerely presented. (Aladdin Sane is incidentally, along with “the Beatles”, a phrase which has transcended its own wordplay origins.)

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