Shaun De Waal

Vladimir Nabokov’s <i>The Luzhin Defence</i> has been translated to screen by Director Marleen Gorris writes, Shaun de Waal.

The way narrative is embedded in time is a fascinating subject, and one with which storytellers have experimented in many interesting ways. Martin Amis’s novel <i>Time’s Arrow</i> tried to tell a life-story backwards, from death to birth, and it made powerful reading, but what the book really proves is that you can’t actually tell a story backwards.

The producing/directing team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory has been mocked for being exponents of "the Laura Ashley school of film-making", which is apt in some ways but also rather unfair. They have a meticulous eye for period detail and a beautifully understated way with a story, though there is the danger of blandless in that very reticence.

It’s not often you get animated movies with as much appeal for adults as they have for children. It must be a difficult tightrope to walk, especially given Hollywood’s extremely restricted, even distorted, sense of what children want or need.

The Mummy was one of the most enjoyable pieces of hokum of the mid-1999 season, and a huge hit. Now writer-director Stephen Sommers has followed it up with <b>The Mummy Returns</b>.

<i>Sweet November</i>, the biggest release of the week, is so bad that there is very little to be said about it. It’s not even worth pulling apart, since it falls apart anyway as you watch it, if it was ever together in the first place.

Crime is one of the major streams of film narrative. Some movies – such as <i>Pulp Fiction</i> or this week’s release <b>The Mexican</b> – even exist in a criminal world apparently altogether free of police personnel. <i>The Mexican</i> must have put tears of joy into the eyes of its Hollywood producers.

The bestselling success of Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel <b>All the Pretty Horses</b> was somewhat surprising – his work is bleak and bloody and his writing has the kind of knotty grandiosity not often smiled upon in the videogame-Internet age.

Two things emerge from seeing <b>Hannibal</b>, the sequel to <i>The Silence of the Lambs</i>: one is that Hannibal Lecter – "Hannibal the Cannibal" – is not as interesting a character as he used to be, and the other is that Ridley Scott is a very uneven director

Neil LaBute’s first two films, <i>In the Company of Men</i> and <i>Your Friends and Neighbours</i>, were the blackest of black comedies – labyrinths of sexual betrayal that showed men and women (but particularly men) at their lowest and nastiest. His new film, <b>Nurse Betty</b>, has a different tone altogether; it is offbeat and edged with darkness, but is lighter, sweeter and gentler than one might have expected.

This is the kind of review that tells you more than you may wish to know about the movie. So, if you want to see <i>In the Mood for Love</i> without preconceptions, read no further. No offence taken. You will, naturally, save this review to read after you’ve seen it.

Anglo-French writer Joanne Harris’s lovely novel Chocolat attracted much praise and has been something of a bestseller; now it has been made into a film by director Lasse Hallström (responsible for last year’s <i>The Cider House Rules</i>) and scriptwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs.

The Coen brothers (Ethan produces, Joel directs, nominally at least; both write the scripts) have always had a quirky take on things, so it’s not an enormous surprise to find that their new movie, <b>O Brother, Where Art Thou?</b>, is based on Homer’s <i>Odyssey</i>. James Joyce did the same thing with his novel <i>Ulysses</i>, so there is precedent, but the Coens, naturally, make the transposition in their own inimitable way.

Philip Kaufman’s film <b>Quills</b>, scripted by Doug Wright from his play, is set in the same time-frame as Peter Weiss’s revolutionary theatrical piece <i>The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade</i>, for short – whew – <i>Marat/Sade</i>.

The news that Cameron Crowe’s film <i>Almost Famous</i> has won a best-movie Golden Globe does not surprise. One is puzzled, though, that it won in the comedy/musical category, when it is a fine dramatic piece that is also very funny and just happens to contain musical sequences.

The Out-in-Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival may be short of cash, but it’s still the hottest ticket in town, writes Shaun de Waal.

Still playing in the minor key of last year’s <i>Sweet and Lowdown</i>, Woody Allen has neatly tossed together the good-hearted comedy that is <i>Small Time Crooks</i>. He plays a rather dim-witted criminal whose cunning masterplans are surpassed by his wife’s skill at making cookies – and life takes a whole new turn into nouveaux riches.

With <b>Dancer in the Dark</b> it is as though Lars von Trier set himself the challenge of making a musical from the most unpromising materials possible. Here we have the tragic or melodramatic story of Selma Jezkova (Björk), a Czech immigrant, a single mother with a young son, working in a factory somewhere in middle America.

Ang Lee’s career as a director displays a remarkable variety – from the investigation of Taiwanese family matters in <i>Eat Drink Man Woman</i> to the sweeping American Civil War drama <i>Ride with the Devil</i>; from the delicate social mores of Jane Austen’s <i>Sense and Sensibility</i> to the martial arts fantasy of his new film, <b>Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon</b>.

Talk show host Larry King often asks his actor guests if they derive their professional enjoyment from being other people for a while, and they usually answer yes. Actors can do it regularly, but ordinary people seldom get the chance – a chance I suspect many of us would take, just for the thrill of it, were it offered.

This time last year we got Arnold Schwarzenegger’s apocalyptic action picture <i>End of Days</i>, in which he had to battle the devil himself to save the world from … well, from the devil himself. This Christmas his big-budget offering is <b>The Sixth Day</b>, in which he has to battle evil would-be world-dominators who have mastered the science of cloning people.

No chicken escapes from Tweedy’s farm," says an ominous voice as we look over the confines of that farm. It looks very much like a prisoner-of-war camp. In fact, <b>Chicken Run</b>, the delightful new animated feature from the makers of TV hit <i>Wallace and Gromit</i>, has a lot in common with those old prisoner-of-war films in which our courageous heroes keep trying to escape.

With school holidays and the festive season looming, the kids will need to be entertained. Two films released this week promise such entertainment, though anyone over 14 may find them a little trying.

One of the first things to be shown on South African television after its inauguration in the mid-Seventies was <i>Charlie’s Angels</i> – the post-Farrah Fawcett-Majors version, though I’m sure I recall that, too, from earlier shorts shown along with home movies. What I definitely do remember is that every opportunity was taken in that programme to get the girls doing karate-style kicks while wearing bikinis.

Sometimes the choices presented in terms of movies in any one week make the film critic’s job rather difficult. The well-made, worthy, but still rather dreary drama? The caper flick that is more enjoyable, but not really very good?

Sofia Coppola was given an extremely hard time when her father, the once great Francis Ford Coppola, put her in the third and very disappointing instalment of his Godfather trilogy. "Nepotism" was the word used, though, oddly, it’s seldom mentioned when successful – no one complained about nepotism when Tim Robbins cast his longtime-love Susan Sarandon in <i>Dead Man Walking</i>, for instance.

<b>Review: Saving Grace</b>

<b>Review: Time Code</b>

<b>Review: Wonder Boys</b>

The makers of the movie of X-Men, based on the bestselling Marvel comic-book series, faced the proprietory expectations of a fanatical fandom; Internet debate among X-philes began as soon as the film was announced. Who would play whom? And would the film betray its source? Comic-books, despite the visual element of the medium, are not […]

<b>Review: High Fidelity</b>

<b>Review: Galaxy Quest</b>