The Humans is an adaptation of the 2016 Tony award winning drama written by Tony award winning playwright Stephen Karam. The film reworks many of the familiar tropes of the dysfunctional family gathering sub-genre – a favourite theme of many productions, such as Tracy Letts’ August Osage County. Karam makes his feature film directorial debut…
Although Cyrano de Bergerac was a real person, most of the works that bear his name stem from Edmond Rostan’s 1897 play. Film versions of the story date back to 1900, but recent efforts include Roxanne (1987) with Steve Martin, and Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) with Gerard Depardieu. But the latest has a more circuitous…
Don’t mess with the classics, they say. But when something has been through as many iterations as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who knows what the definitive “not to be messed with” version is anyway? Even in the film canon, versions of this story go back as far as the early 20th Century. You’ve got Orson Welles’ traditionalist…
Chloe Gong’s YA debut These Violent Delights is a fairly violent fantasy set in 1920s Shanghai with very deliberate and obvious echoes of Romeo and Juliet. The mix of influences and styles seems like an attempt to mash all of Gong’s loves into a single narrative. And when it is not too distracting, it works….
Quick test – who was L. S. Lowry? If you’ve got no idea, I suspect you’re not alone. Lowry went from obscurity in the suburbs of Manchester to become one of the most revered British artists of the 20th Century. Director Adrian Noble explores the artist’s life in microcosm in Mrs Lowry and Son. Lowry…
Friends and family gather for a weekend in the countryside in Michael Mayer’s version of Chekhov’s The Seagull. While everyone is caught up in passionately loving someone who loves somebody else, a tragicomedy unfolds about the eternal desire to live a purposeful life. Sorin (Brian Dennehy), a retired government employee, and his sister Irina (Annette…
Do you like your movies light and fluffy? Maybe with a little romance thrown in? Yes? Then stop reading now, because The Killing of a Sacred Deer is not for you. Director Yorgos Lanthimos is best known for his magnificently bizarre The Lobster (2015). Now he brings his particular (and peculiar) vision to one of…
Merrily We Roll Along is based upon a 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. George Furth (book) and Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) retained the basic structures and themes of the play but updated it to cover the period from 1957 to 1976. The musical starts in New York…
A slow-moving, intense jigsaw puzzle, a mood of unease permeates nearly every scene in UNA. Based on David Harrower’s Olivier Award-winning one-act play Blackbird, the film follows a young woman’s journey to reclaim her past. Fifteen years ago, 13-year-old Una ran away with and had sex with an older man, Ray – a crime for which…
The history of the cinema is littered by well-intentioned but ill-thought-out attempts to bring stage plays to the big screen. The inherent contradiction between the theatre – where dialogue is the focus – and the cinema – where the emphasis is on visuals – sometimes does both the play and the movie in question a…
