Remembering
Austin Wright’s sleeper hit Tony & Susan, first published in 1993, received high praise from a new generation of readers and reviewers when it was re-released by Atlantic Books in 2010. Now it’s coming to a cinema near you in Tom Ford’s gripping adaptation Nocturnal Animals, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams. Here’s how it...
The day of reckoning
US District Court, Tampa, Florida March 26, 1990 Armed guards led me into a tiny, windowless room in Tampa’s US District Courthouse. Through the glossy mahogany walls came the muffled voices of lawyers arguing and the response of an unruly crowd. On the other side of the door, I was about to do battle with...
Matteo Garrone: Bigger than life
So are you leading a revival? Yes, I’m very happy that the movie helps give the stories the attention they deserve, to create curiosity like happened to you to go to the source, because there are so many beautiful tales. Any prospect of a Tale of Tales 2? I don’t know. At one point I...
Whit Stillman: All there
You’d be forgiven for not exactly jumping with joy at the news that yet another Jane Austen adaptation has hit the big screen. This year alone has seen the release of both Burr Steer’s irreverent and rather dubious Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the publication of Curtis Sittenfeld’s contemporary reimagining of the original, Eligible....
An assignation
The Tale of Tales by Giambattista Basile is the first authored collection of literary fairy tales in the Western European canon, predating the work of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. An inspiration for storytellers from Shakespeare to Calvino, the long-overlooked 17th-century collection includes the oldest known written versions of some of...
Phyllis Nagy: Carol and me
Yes, there was a scheduling conflict. That’s often code for somebody got dumped, but this time there really was a scheduling conflict, and again I thought, “OK, here it goes again, terrible, terrible.” And then Todd agreed to do it. I don’t think anyone was certain that he would because he’d never directed anything he...
Shoot the writer
As the BFI London Film Festival attracts the focus of the capital’s critics and movie buffs, and superstar actors crowd the red carpets, we spare a thought for the source novels, biographies and fables that inspired some of this year’s most anticipated main features – including a handful of remastered classics. Brooklyn Adapted by Nick...
Abi Morgan gets our vote
There also seems to have been something about the wider context of the here and now that encouraged their work. “What was exciting for us all was that there was a growing momentum around the film when we started working on it, which ran parallel with global awareness and growing social activism highlighting the huge...
The cemetery
He had a bad night. On waking, he remembered he was due to follow Madeleine and was mortified by the joy he felt at the prospect. Try as he would, however, he couldn’t rid himself of it. It clung to him, humble but obstinate, like a dog you haven’t the heart to chase away. He...
High life and dirty boulevards
The films in this list may range widely in style and subject, from brooding dramas to spectacular action movies, from French New Wave masterpieces to slightly dated 80s thrillers; some are French productions while others are American movies filmed in Paris, but one thing is true of all of them: they couldn’t have been set...
Damaged hero
Based on Jussi Adler-Olsen’s award-winning novel Mercy, the first in the bestselling Department Q crime fiction series, The Keeper of Lost Causes is a powerful and gripping thriller starring Nicolaj Lie Kaas (The Killing), Sonja Richter (The Homesman) and Fares Fares (Zero Dark Thirty, Safe House). Carl Mørck (Kaas) is a troubled detective who is...
Sonata no.3
Gayle Forman’s best-selling novel If I Stay is now a major film starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Mia Hall, a talented cellist whose life hangs in the balance after what should have been a carefree family drive. We present an eerie extract from the opening chapter that sets the scene. You wouldn’t expect the radio...
