The Summer Book review – Glenn Close powers sweet-natured take on Tove Jansson’s kids’ classic

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This sensitive adaptation of Jansson’s 1972 novel, set in the beatific Gulf of Finland, is a quiet treatise on life and death Glenn Close brings her totemic presence to this gentle movie – as well as a makeup-enhanced grandmotherly face. This is a sweet-natured adaptation of Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel; it has charm, though it’s sometimes becalmed in its own sensitivity. Close plays a tough, wise, humorous-yet-cantankerous eightysomething woman who likes cigarettes and walking around outside stark naked when there’s nobody else around. She brings her recently widowed son (Anders Danielsen Lie) and six-year-old granddaughter Sophia (newcomer Emily Matthews) to a tiny, idyllic island in the Gulf of Finland, where they have a summer cottage. The grandmother may, incidentally, have unresolved feelings for local man Eriksson, in a fleeting cameo for veteran Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurdsson. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/Byd3OvG via IFTTT
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William Tell review – limbs fly as Claes Bang’s medieval hero rallies a Swiss army

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A classy cast plays it straight in this enjoyably daft action epic about the crossbow sharpshooter forced to shoot an apple from his son’s head

Nick Hamm lets rip with some gonzo Game of Thrones craziness in his retelling of the William Tell myth with a blue-chip cast. Limbs get chopped off in a style I haven’t seen since the days of Monty Python’s Black Knight. It’s the story of the 14th-century Swiss folk hero and crossbow artist, a peaceful farmer and huntsman who has endured continual tyranny and humiliation at the hands of his Austrian Habsburg masters, and finally rises up against them on a coward-of-the-county basis; the flashpoint being made to shoot an apple from his son’s head for the sneering amusement of the Habsburg nobleman Gessler.

It’s adapted by Hamm from the 1804 play by Schiller (not many action movies can boast that), but gives Tell a Muslim wife and adopted son that Schiller didn’t imagine; a flashback reveals this to be the result of Tell’s experiences in the Crusades, a time of bigoted cruelty. Hamm inserts into his movie some outrageous and enjoyable cod-Shakespearean dialogue.

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