They're revealed to be as flawed as the rest of us in this excellent and candid documentary.īrown bottles the original innocent impulse of the 50s surfing explosion, grabbing his camera and following two young board-riders as they hunt for tasty waves in uncharted territory. Onstage and in uniform on their almost never-ending tour, the Ramones gave away nothing of their private selves.
While it's no major surprise that musicians are people too, the music industry spends billions helping fans ignore this simple fact. With such strong source material - an autobiographical novel by JG Ballard adapted by Tom Stoppard - he can get his teeth into the complex and often mercenary morals of the characters in truth, he's more at home with the rousing set-pieces. One of Spielberg's early attempts to mark himself out as a mature director. More than 30 years later, director Richard Brooks and star Burt Lancaster fell upon Gantry and showed a new being - a media celebrity, patently fake yet deeply irresistible, and a model for immoral and moral leadership. Sinclair Lewis's dissection of an evangelist was published in 1927. A character study powered by passion and realpolitik, with Blanchett's supple transformation from princess to Gloriana, and Geoffrey Rush just as good as courtly fixer Sir Francis Walsingham. to England!" Cate Blanchett's closing-curtain announcement of the aloof monarch we all know from school textbooks is a thrilling moment, and Kapur's period thriller a sterling account of how she got there.
Lynch's imagination has not reached this level of emotional connection since. John Hurt deftly pushes the sweet soul of the deformed John Merrick through pounds of incredible prosthetics. With hindsight we can all see what a good fit Lynch was with this material, but back then, with only Eraserhead under his belt, producer Mel Brooks showed real vision in choosing his director.
There's no traditional central character to identify with through a series of long tracking shots, kids saunter about on a languid vibe, being jocks, cheerleaders, or like, whatever - en route to a grisly conclusion. Van Sant's "interpretation" of the Columbine high-school massacre defies a conventional reading of the horrible event at its core. Payne relocates What Makes Sammy Run? to the political battleground of the American high school, where a sad-sack teacher gets a bit too intimately involved in the face-off between a likeable slacker and a type-A go-getter, played to flinty, ruthless perfection by Reese Witherspoon. The incendiary lyrical battle scenes are elevated by Eminem's silver-tongued talent.
Meticulously put together on a nothing budget, the movie looks surprisingly sumptuous for Sayles, who never stints on the drama, and shoots good baseball too.Ĭapitalising on Eminem's phenomenal record sales, this loosely biographical, hip-hop aficionado's wet dream charts the rise of poor white trailer-trash B Rabbit, set against the backdrop of rundown, racially-tense Detroit at the birth of its hip-hop explosion. Still wonderful to look at.Īn incredible cast of character players brings to life the "Black Sox" baseball scandal of 1919, when gangster Arnold Rothstein bribed the Chicago White Sox to throw the World Series. Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder have true screen chemistry, but it's Burton's heady cocktail of design, image and harmless eccentricity that steals the show.Ī semi-autobiographical satire about Marcello Mastroianni's harried Italian film-maker, lost in a magnificently poetic, surreal narrative jumble wild dreams and a circus-like setting joyfully fuse together. Based on Marlowe's 16th-century play about the UK's only acknowledged gay monarch, it's an imaginative, anachronism-laden assault on homophobia, buoyed by some of his more outré performances and a pertinent contemporary edge.īurton's near-perfect fable somehow manages to yoke gruesome European fairy-tales with picket-fence America, and injects a dose of Hammer horror for good measure.
Derek Jarman's painterly queer-cinema stylings often overshadowed his investment in storytelling and, more importantly, character, but Edward II is his most potent amalgam of all three.