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...

Power review – damning documentary traces the history of US policing

Sundance film festival: Yance Ford’s followup to Oscar nominated documentary Strong Island is a visually elegant, if a little dry, look at a problematic instituion

Power, documentarian Yance Ford’s clinical inquiry into US policing, isn’t trafficking in new information. The 86-minute project billed as an “essay-film”, which premiered at Sundance and will stream on Netflix later this year, has clear eyes on the past, synthesizing the work of several academics with a robust archival record to examine the origins, structure and impact of police power in the United States.

That doesn’t mean it’s unnecessary; the film makes cogent, sweeping sense of the record for perhaps the most illuminative, swift and damning case against the institution of policing – the real fourth estate, as one subject puts it – of the many investigations conducted in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. But there’s a dryness to its procedure. Though more visually elegant and poetic (almost to a fault, owing to Ford’s at times ponderous narration) than a Netflix Explained entry, Power basically has the same function as a nonfiction explainer. Perhaps owing to its ample use of academics to supply the exclamation points and through-lines to a truly remarkable collage of archival footage, the film has the feel of a very deluxe college lecture. (A visual metaphor linking policing power to an atomic bomb, while mesmerizing to look at, never fully lands.)

Power is screening at the Sundance film festival and will be released on Netflix later this year

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/UThfSLH
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

EXCLUSIVE: Mona Singh gears up for an intense role in an upcoming web series; Deets inside!

The Fans Were Silent As 64-Year-Old Sharon Stone Appeared Topless