This fourth novel by poet and novelist, Tobias Hill is as illuminated and finely crafted as you would expect from a writer who can move between both forms with equal success. This is a novel that delivers, perhaps too well: one is conscious of the writerly-ness of this, and at times the technical joins and […]
Archive | March, 2009
Macbeth, The Royal Exchange
Taut, precise and horrifically exacting; an up-to-the minute rendition of this bloodiest of plays, where the weird sisters are the ghosts of young women raped and murdered in the opening scenes and McDuff’s Nintendo playing son is slaughtered, real time, over the kitchen sink as his mother watches. She fights and screams as we know […]
Let the Right One In – Låt den rätte komma in (2008), dir. Tomas Alfredson
For many years, two things associated with Sweden – the prospect of assembling flat pack furniture, and anything to do with ABBA – have been enough to make me break out into a cold sweat. So I approached the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In with some trepidation, especially as the average horror […]
L’Empreinte de l’Ange – Mark of an Angel (2008), dir. Safy Nebbou
L’Empreinte de l’Ange is due to be released in the UK on May 22nd this year, but it was shown on 16th March as part of Bradford International Film Festival’s programme of Premieres and Previews. Billed as ‘one of the coming year’s outstanding French dramas’, the film features outstanding performances from Catherine Frot (The Page […]
Mother, Mine (2008), dir. Susan Everett
Mother, Mine is a short film by Leeds-based director Susan Everett. In November, it won the ‘Best Yorkshire Short Award’ as part of the Leeds International Film Festival. Now, it is showing at the Cubby Broccoli Cinema in Bradford as one of six films shortlisted for the Shine Short Film Award (part of the Bradford […]
Three Monkeys (2008), dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
On the eve of an election, politician Servet (Ercan Keysal), falls asleep at the wheel and kills a pedestrian. He asks his driver, Eyup (Yavuz Bingol) who wasn’t with him at the time, to take the fall. So Eyup goes to gaol with the promise of his salary paid every month, and a lump sum […]
The Flying Troutmans, Miriam Toews
The Flying Troutmans is a quest novel in which the narrator, dysfunctional Hattie, takes her dysfunctional niece Thebes, and dysfunctional nephew Logan, on a journey in a van across America in a bid to find their dysfunctional father Cherkis, because their dysfunctional mother Min, has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. That’s a lot […]
The Pillowman, Leicester Curve
“Writers stopped telling you stories but instead told you how their stories would be told; architects made buildings where all the plumbing was on the outside,” so observed Martin Amis recently concerning postmodernism’s tendency to draw attention to its own artifice, “this turned out not to be such a productive side road for literature.” […]