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...

A Man and a Camera review – doorstep prank movie is pass-agg psychological study

Film-maker Guido Hendrikx goes house-to-house in a Dutch suburb, ringing doorbells and then mutely filming – we see what people will say and do to fill the silence

Dutch film-maker Guido Hendrikx has given us a funny but also somewhat slippery and disingenuous bit of pass-agg provocation, somewhere between documentary cinema and conceptual art. For just over an hour, we get his point-of-view as he troops about a bland Dutch suburb, ringing on people’s doorbells and just mutely filming them when they appear. We never see the cameraman himself.

Some people are baffled, some bemused, some alarmed. Most, having waited in vain for to him to explain himself, are unwilling to be the first to make an aggressive or disapproving move, and certainly unwilling to be filmed doing so, so they are trapped into a kind of smiley stare-out contest. Some are very annoyed; one threatens to trash his camera and another appears to carry out the threat. The cops are called, but they don’t seem too bothered and then go away after which the cameraman resumes his house-to-house calls; well, that’s how it looks in the edit. And throughout, Hendrikx never says anything, and we see how people will politely say and do almost anything to fill the excruciating silence: therapists and cops use the same technique.

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