ireland.com - The Ticket

Friday, March 21, 2008

The last emperor

He ran his film sets like a military commander and was despised by both his leading actors and the film-makers who succeeded him. But Sir David Lean was also responsible for some of cinema's greatest moments, argues Donald Clarke on the centenary of the director's birth.
Five indisputably great David Lean pictures

THIS HAPPY BREED (1944) Though set in a humble south London household in the inter-war years, Lean's adaptation of Noël Coward's play has unexpected aspects - its scope; its ambition of the later epics - about it. Mike Leigh admits that the film was an influence on his Life is Sweet.
Child's Eye

12-year-old Tom O'Byrne gives his impressions of two current children's films

Remembering the talented Mr Minghella

Reel News was saddened to hear of Anthony Minghella's death last week. Nobody who encountered this intelligent, articulate, friendly film-maker had a bad word to say about him.
Enough Potter for two movies

The clamour of desperate rationalisation emanating from Castle Potter has become deafening over the past week.

Lars and the Real Girl

Lars and the Real Girl is a funny and humane comedy-drama, writes Michael Dwyer
The Spiderwick Chronicles

SORRY? What was that? Who's he? Why has everything gone dark? Who let Nick Nolte in the building?
Meet the Spartans

NO PUN is too feeble and no gag too puerile for Meet the Spartans, an embarrassingly laboured attempt at comedy that failed to generate a single laugh at its Dublin media screening last week. I will admit to one smile: of relief, when the closing credits appeared.
The orphanage/El Orfanato

IT IS a measure of the brilliance of this singular Spanish horror film - a jaw-dropping feature debut from Juan Antonio Bayona - that it calls to mind a dozen classics of the macabre while still remaining very much its own sinister beast.
Love in the time of Cholera

WHAT do comedies starring Nicole Kidman and mainstream adaptations of magic realist fiction have in common? Simple. They are two endeavours that, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much talent you throw at them, will always, always end in catastrophe.
Step up 2 the Streets

THE contemporary dance flick seems to have just one story. Blame Saturday Night Fever: virtually every hoofer drama since has had something to do with a talented kid from the wrong side of the tracks trying to get it on with classically trained virtuosi.

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