“A Monster Calls” offers a child’s-eye view of cancer. Patrick Ness’ children’s novel, the winner of the 2012 Carnegie Medal and adapted into a 2016 film that starred Felicity Jones, sits with a 13-year-old boy trying to make sense of the disease laying waste to his mother — a disease that rarely, if ever, makes sense. Visited nightly by a storytelling monster, he slowly comes to appreciate that life isn’t a fairytale; it follows no plot. It’s a story about complexity that’s staged, in Sally Cookson’s Old Vic production, with the utmost simplicity.
That is, in the end, its great strength: it allows a sentimental story to cut through with sincerity. For a long while, however, it merely looks slimline: a stock gallery of school bullies, sleepless nights and scary monsters that speak in deep, echoing booms. Childhood, at first, seems the stuff of cliché: all messy bedrooms and deskbound daydreams.
That is, in the end, its great strength: it allows a sentimental story to cut through with sincerity. For a long while, however, it merely looks slimline: a stock gallery of school bullies, sleepless nights and scary monsters that speak in deep, echoing booms. Childhood, at first, seems the stuff of cliché: all messy bedrooms and deskbound daydreams.
- 7/18/2018
- by Gordon Cox
- Variety Film + TV
You've got less than three weeks to catch The Wild Bride, the latest splashy, genre-braiding fantasy from visionary Emma Rice and Britain's Kneehigh Theatre (Brief Encounter, The Red Shoes). In supersaturated color and wraparound sound, Rice and composer Stu Barker have created a blues-inflected take on The Handless Maiden, one of the Brother's Grimm's grimmer fairy tales. There's mud, there's blood, there's amputation — there's even a Tim Burton-ish pair of crude hand-replacements, made out of rusty farm tools. The Wild Bride is a stylish, pop-art bricolage that pits the Maiden — played in three stages of life by three mind-blowingly talented dancer/singer/musician/actresses (Audrey Brisson, Patrycja Kujawska, Etta Murfitt) — against The Devil (formidable tenor and dapper gremlin Andrew Durand). Caught between them is a clueless father-husband figure, amusingly and poignantly assayed by Stuart Goodwin. The band is hot, the atmosphere is charged with comic-book energy — we're in some...
- 3/1/2013
- by Scott Brown
- Vulture
An art deco oasis with a warm personality in the heart of Letchworth Garden City is the subject of our ninth cinema review
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On location: The last building at the end of a high street containing – among other things – a Wilkinsons, Poundstretcher and Pizza Hut. You get to City Kebab and Pizza, and suddenly, towering above you on your left, is the magnificent art deco Broadway Cinema.
It's walkable from the train station, and has plenty of parks and other green areas on hand to demonstrate Letchworth's garden city status. It's only a couple of minutes' walk from the local Morrisons, should you fancy a pre- or post-screening scotch egg.
Crowd scene: A typical daytime weekend queue at the box office will consist of some students, a family of four, two early teens deciding whether or...
• Check out our Google map and flickr group
• Tell us where to go next
On location: The last building at the end of a high street containing – among other things – a Wilkinsons, Poundstretcher and Pizza Hut. You get to City Kebab and Pizza, and suddenly, towering above you on your left, is the magnificent art deco Broadway Cinema.
It's walkable from the train station, and has plenty of parks and other green areas on hand to demonstrate Letchworth's garden city status. It's only a couple of minutes' walk from the local Morrisons, should you fancy a pre- or post-screening scotch egg.
Crowd scene: A typical daytime weekend queue at the box office will consist of some students, a family of four, two early teens deciding whether or...
- 8/16/2011
- by Stuart Goodwin
- The Guardian - Film News
Boy loses girl, boy loses sleep, boy finds new girl. The trajectory of "Cashback" is boiler-plate basic, but writer-director Sean Ellis infuses it with an imaginative sensibility that engages the viewer -- to a point. Stripped of its flourishes, there's not much going on beyond a routine tale of growing pains, dressed up -- or undressed -- with philosophical fillips and wet-dream fantasy. Lead actor Sean Biggerstaff, who played Quidditch captain Oliver Wood in the first two Harry Potter films, is a definite asset here. Twentysomething male viewers can connect with his character's art-school sensitivity, romantic yearning and comedic fumbles, while enjoying the statuesque females on display.
Taking his feature bow, fashion photographer Ellis has expanded a 2004 short (contained within the feature), and the polished result demonstrates a facility for filmmaking, with able contributions from his production colleagues. Ellis' script, in particular the voiceover narration he's written for his protagonist, is exceptionally literate. Essentially, though, he doesn't have much to say.
Biggerstaff plays genial art student Ben, who's devastated by his breakup with Suzy (Michelle Ryan, soon to topline "Bionic Woman" on the small screen), an event seen in waggish operatic flashback, complete with an Ikea lamp brandished as a weapon. Suzy moves on without pause while Ben, unable to sleep, studies the-way-we-were photos at 4 a.m. by the light of the dented lamp. Thanks to Ellis' eye for offbeat quotidian details, we get a glimpse of the processing lab's quality-advisory label on an out-of-focus snapshot. Ben also receives advice from lifelong friend Sean, a good-looking guy with a talent for being slapped within the first minutes of chatting up any female; he's played with terrifically droll understatement by Shaun Evans.
Turning his extra waking hours into "cashback," the sleepless Ben joins the night shift at the local Sainsbury's supermarket, where he can suffer amid the packaged goods and withstand the idiocy of the self-important manager (Stuart Goodwin) and scooter-racing staffers (Michael Dixon, Michael Lambourne). Increasingly, he's drawn to Sharon (Emilia Fox), a pathologically bored cashier.
In the cold fluorescent atmosphere, the unhinged Ben discovers that he can put the world on pause, the better to indulge his fascination with female beauty. For a few striking -- and mildly creepy -- moments, he turns a shoppers' aisle into a living museum of unclad beauties and wanders, awed, among them. His play with time involves the past, too. Childhood memories seep into the sleep-deprived present, none more indelibly erotic than an incident involving a Swedish au pair.
All of this is quite less than it seems. For all the film's style and energy, its supposed insights are as soft and bland as its romanticized notions of the artist. And in this post-"Office" era, the deadpan workplace comedy feels familiar and overdone. Among Ben's co-workers, only Fox's Sharon nears three dimensions, convincingly coming into focus from put-upon drone to spirited dreamer. Even with his explorations of suspended time, Ben is a standard, barely interesting character, but Biggerstaff's charm and sincerity go a long way, lending flashes of depth not found in the material.
CASHBACK
A Left Turn Films presentation in association with Daphne Guinness of a Bausager/Ellis production
Magnolia Pictures
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Sean Ellis
Producers: Sean Ellis, Lene Bausager
Executive producers: Daphne Guinness, Vijay Thakur, Peter Hampden, Norman Merry
Director of photography: Angus Hudson
Production designer: Morgan Kennedy
Music: Guy Farley
Costumer designer: Vicki Russell
Editors: Scott Thomas, Carlos Domeque
Cast:
Ben: Sean Biggerstaff
Sharon: Emilia Fox
Sean: Shaun Evans
Suzy: Michelle Ryan
Jenkins: Stuart Goodwin
Barry: Michael Dixon
Matt: Michael Lambourne
Brian: Marc Pickering
Rory: Nick Hancock
Running time 102 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Taking his feature bow, fashion photographer Ellis has expanded a 2004 short (contained within the feature), and the polished result demonstrates a facility for filmmaking, with able contributions from his production colleagues. Ellis' script, in particular the voiceover narration he's written for his protagonist, is exceptionally literate. Essentially, though, he doesn't have much to say.
Biggerstaff plays genial art student Ben, who's devastated by his breakup with Suzy (Michelle Ryan, soon to topline "Bionic Woman" on the small screen), an event seen in waggish operatic flashback, complete with an Ikea lamp brandished as a weapon. Suzy moves on without pause while Ben, unable to sleep, studies the-way-we-were photos at 4 a.m. by the light of the dented lamp. Thanks to Ellis' eye for offbeat quotidian details, we get a glimpse of the processing lab's quality-advisory label on an out-of-focus snapshot. Ben also receives advice from lifelong friend Sean, a good-looking guy with a talent for being slapped within the first minutes of chatting up any female; he's played with terrifically droll understatement by Shaun Evans.
Turning his extra waking hours into "cashback," the sleepless Ben joins the night shift at the local Sainsbury's supermarket, where he can suffer amid the packaged goods and withstand the idiocy of the self-important manager (Stuart Goodwin) and scooter-racing staffers (Michael Dixon, Michael Lambourne). Increasingly, he's drawn to Sharon (Emilia Fox), a pathologically bored cashier.
In the cold fluorescent atmosphere, the unhinged Ben discovers that he can put the world on pause, the better to indulge his fascination with female beauty. For a few striking -- and mildly creepy -- moments, he turns a shoppers' aisle into a living museum of unclad beauties and wanders, awed, among them. His play with time involves the past, too. Childhood memories seep into the sleep-deprived present, none more indelibly erotic than an incident involving a Swedish au pair.
All of this is quite less than it seems. For all the film's style and energy, its supposed insights are as soft and bland as its romanticized notions of the artist. And in this post-"Office" era, the deadpan workplace comedy feels familiar and overdone. Among Ben's co-workers, only Fox's Sharon nears three dimensions, convincingly coming into focus from put-upon drone to spirited dreamer. Even with his explorations of suspended time, Ben is a standard, barely interesting character, but Biggerstaff's charm and sincerity go a long way, lending flashes of depth not found in the material.
CASHBACK
A Left Turn Films presentation in association with Daphne Guinness of a Bausager/Ellis production
Magnolia Pictures
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Sean Ellis
Producers: Sean Ellis, Lene Bausager
Executive producers: Daphne Guinness, Vijay Thakur, Peter Hampden, Norman Merry
Director of photography: Angus Hudson
Production designer: Morgan Kennedy
Music: Guy Farley
Costumer designer: Vicki Russell
Editors: Scott Thomas, Carlos Domeque
Cast:
Ben: Sean Biggerstaff
Sharon: Emilia Fox
Sean: Shaun Evans
Suzy: Michelle Ryan
Jenkins: Stuart Goodwin
Barry: Michael Dixon
Matt: Michael Lambourne
Brian: Marc Pickering
Rory: Nick Hancock
Running time 102 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 7/20/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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