Archive
THE BOYS IN THE BOAT – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Boys in the Boat is an inspirational real life sports drama which tells the story of the University of Washington’s eight-oared rowing crew, who overcame enormous physical and social obstacles – not least the impact of the Great Depression – to represent the United States at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, and win the gold medal ahead of the heavily fancied and Hitler-backed German crew. The film focuses specifically on Joe Rantz, a kid from a poor background who was essentially homeless before he went to university, and initially saw his rowing career as a means to an end to put food on the table more than he did a chance to achieve sporting greatness. The film stars Callum Turner as Rantz, and Joel Edgerton as the college’s rowing coach Al Ulbrickson; it was written by Mark L. Smith, adapting the non-fiction novel of the same name by Daniel James Brown, and is directed by global movie star and filmmaker George Clooney. Read more…
NYAD – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Diana Nyad is an American long-distance swimmer who gained international fame for her remarkable achievements in open-water swimming, particularly for her tenacity and determination in attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida, a feat she eventually accomplished in 2013 at the age of 64. Nyad’s early passion for swimming became evident at a young age, and she quickly rose to prominence as a competitive swimmer in her teenage years. She later turned to long-distance swimming, and in 1975 she swam from the Bahamas to Florida, covering a distance of 102.5 miles, which set a world record for both men and women. Despite her early success, Nyad faced setbacks, including failed attempts to swim from Cuba to Florida in the 1970s, but after more than three decades away from the water, Nyad made headlines with her historic swim from Havana to Key West in September 2013; the 110-mile journey took her approximately 53 hours, and in doing so she became the first person to complete the swim without the aid of a shark cage. This new film tells Nyad’s remarkable life story, concentrating specifically on the events surrounding the 2013 Havana to Key West swim. The film stars Annette Bening as Nyad and Jodie Foster as her lifelong friend Bonnie Stoll, and was directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the Oscar-winning filmmakers of Free Solo. Read more…
GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There have been so many versions of Carlo Collodi’s classic story Pinocchio over the years that it’s hard to keep track of them all. The best known version of the story, at least in English-speaking countries, is the classic Disney musical from 1940; in the intervening years there have been dozens of others, including two different ones directed by Italian filmmaker Roberto Benigni, and a remake of the 1940 version starring Tom Hanks just a few months ago. Given all this, one might wonder what Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio might have to offer that is different from all the other versions, but in actual fact it has a great deal to recommend, from its beautiful and detailed stop-motion animation, its unexpectedly deep and sophisticated screenplay adaptation, interesting voice cast, and appealing music. Read more…
THE LOST KING – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
On August 22, 1485, the English king Richard III was killed at Bosworth Field, in what was the last significant battle of the Wars of the Roses, the civil war between the Houses of Lancaster and York over the fate of the British crown. Richard’s death at the age of 32 marked the end of his Plantaganet dynasty, while his conqueror became King Henry VII, and established the Tudor dynasty that resulted in the subsequent reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. What’s interesting is that, for more than 500 years, the exact whereabouts of Richard’s remains were unknown, until 2012 when an archaeological dig was commissioned, and his skeleton was finally unearthed beneath a car park in the city of Leicester. This new film, The Lost King, tells the story of how a dedicated group of professional archaeologists and enthusiastic amateurs came together to find and pay final respects to this somewhat unfairly maligned king; the film stars Sally Hawkins, Steve Coogan, and Harry Lloyd, and is directed by Stephen Frears. Read more…
THE OUTFIT – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Outfit is the directorial debut of the Oscar winning screenwriter Graham Moore, who took home the golden boy for the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game in 2014. The film is set in Chicago in the 1950s, and stars Mark Rylance as Leonard Burling, an English tailor who runs a store in a neighborhood protected by the Irish mob. Leonard’s store is overrun one night by Richie, the son of mob boss Roy Boyle, and Boyle’s chief enforcer Francis, with Ritchie having been shot by a rival gang. So begins an edge-of-seat thriller involving FBI informants, secret tapes, personal bitterness and rivalries, double-crosses, and murders, as Leonard tries to negotiate his way out of his difficult circumstances, outwit the mobsters who all seem to have hidden agendas, and make it to morning alive. The film is anchored by a bravura performance by Rylance, who has received plaudits from critics, and is ably supported by Zoe Deutsch, Dylan O’Brien, Johnny Flynn, and Simon Russell Beale. Read more…
THE FRENCH DISPATCH – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The French Dispatch is the latest film from writer-director Wes Anderson. Like most of his films, it’s a highly stylized comedy caper, with a cast drawn mostly from his regular ensemble of players, including the likes of Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Elisabeth Moss, Anjelica Huston, Henry Winkler, Liev Schreiber, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, and Saoirse Ronan. Its plot follows several different storylines as the French foreign bureau of the fictional ‘Liberty-Kansas Evening Sun’ newspaper creates its final issue following the death of its editor. Much of the action takes place in a town literally named Ennui, and involves such things as the life of an artist in the local prison, a sexual liaison between a reporter and a subject during a student revolution, and kidnappings and murders during a private dinner, all of which are narrated by a man on a bicycle who charts the history of the town. Read more…
THE MIDNIGHT SKY – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Midnight Sky is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama directed by George Clooney, adapted from the novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton. Clooney himself stars as Augustine Lofthouse, a brilliant NASA scientist who has been searching for habitable planets elsewhere in the universe that humans could colonize. In the year 2049 an unidentified cataclysmic event wipes out most of the Earth’s population; knowing that he is terminally ill, Augustine volunteers to remain behind at an isolated communications base in the Arctic, where he attempts to contact the crew aboard the spacecraft Aether, who are returning to Earth after a successful voyage to a habitable moon orbiting Jupiter, with the intention of telling them not to come back. However, Lofthouse is having trouble successfully contacting the ship, and fears that all may be lost – until he finds a young girl living in the communications base, having apparently been left behind by her family. Inspired by the girl to renew his efforts to make contact, Lofthouse and the girl set out across the icy wastes of the Arctic, heading towards a different radio base, despite the numerous dangers that lie in their path. The film co-stars Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Demián Bichir, and Kyle Chandler as the crew of the spacecraft, and was intended to be released in theaters in the fall of 2020 but – of course – was pushed to Netflix instead, yet another cinematic victim of the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more…
ALEXANDRE DESPLAT: EN FRANÇAIS – PART THREE
Over the past decade or so, Alexandre Desplat has cemented his status amongst the world’s most respected film composers with a series of scores for major studio films in the United States. He has been nominated for eleven Academy Awards – for The Queen (2006), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), The King’s Speech (2010), Argo (2012), Philomena (2013), The Imitation Game (2014), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), The Shape of Water (2017), Isle of Dogs (2018), and Little Women (2019) – winning twice. However, much of his early work in his native France remains relatively unknown to wider audiences – something this article intends to rectify!
In this third installment of Alexandre Desplat: En Français, we take a look at five scores Desplat wrote during the first half of the 2000s, just as he was starting to make in-roads into the international film music scene. Read more…
ALEXANDRE DESPLAT: EN FRANÇAIS – PART TWO
Over the past decade or so, Alexandre Desplat has cemented his status amongst the world’s most respected film composers with a series of scores for major studio films in the United States. He has been nominated for eleven Academy Awards – for The Queen (2006), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), The King’s Speech (2010), Argo (2012), Philomena (2013), The Imitation Game (2014), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), The Shape of Water (2017), Isle of Dogs (2018), and Little Women (2019) – winning twice. However, much of his early work in his native France remains relatively unknown to wider audiences – something this article intends to rectify!
In this second installment of Alexandre Desplat: En Français, we take a look at seven scores Desplat wrote during the second half of the 1990s, immediately prior to his international breakthrough – The Luzhin Defence, from September 2000. Read more…
LITTLE WOMEN – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is the latest big screen adaptation of the classic 1868 American novel by Louisa May Alcott. The story follows the March sisters – headstrong and mercurial Jo, willful and artistic Amy, maternal and meek Meg, creative but sickly Beth – as they come of age in post-civil war Massachusetts. The narrative deals with numerous issues of the day, including the effects of ‘genteel poverty,’ the fallout of the war, sibling rivalries, the entrenched class system, and of course romance and love, the latter of which usually revolves around Laurie, the handsome grandson of the March’s wealthy neighbor. What’s interesting about this version of the story is that Gerwig, acknowledging the social mores of the 2000s, has given her adapted screenplay a healthy dose of modern feminism, which touches on contemporary issues involving women’s suffrage, equal pay for equal work, and bucking the period convention that a woman was not complete without a husband. The film stars Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlan as the four sisters, Timothée Chalamet as Laurie, Laura Dern as their ever-loving Marmee, and Meryl Streep as the cantankerous Aunt March, and is a sumptuous visual feast that looks likely to be a major player at the 2019 Academy Awards. Read more…
ISLE OF DOGS – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Isle of Dogs is the latest film from the quirky hipster director Wes Anderson, and sees him returning to the world of animation for the second time, after Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009. Of all the ‘mainstream’ directors working today, Anderson is one of the only ones who regularly switches between mediums like this – Robert Zemeckis dabbled in animation with things like The Polar Express and Beowulf, and Steven Spielberg had a go with The Adventures of Tintin, but those were exercises in motion capture which still used real actors as reference. Anderson’s animated films are more traditional, featuring stop-motion puppets and models and actors doing voices. It’s a typically idiosyncratic effort from the undisputed king of these things; plot-wise, the film is set in the near-future in Japan, and follows the adventures of a young boy named Atari who embarks on a daring mission to rescue his dog, Spots, from a trash-filled island, after the entire canine population of the city are banished there by a corrupt mayor in the aftermath of an outbreak of ‘dog flu’. Read more…
THE SHAPE OF WATER – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Shape of Water is a science fiction fairy tale written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, starring Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Doug Jones. It’s an odd mishmash of a film – it’s one part romantic drama, one part monster movie, one part spy thriller, and it explores additional themes that range from one character’s closeted homosexuality to another’s love of classic Hollywood musicals – but somehow it all works beautifully. Hawkins plays Elisa, a shy mute woman who works as a cleaner on the night shift at a military research facility in the 1960s. One night Elisa meets a mysterious but highly intelligent amphibious humanoid creature (Jones) that has been captured in a remote part of the Amazon and brought to the facility for study by the ruthless Colonel Strickland (Shannon). Unexpectedly, Elisa and the Amphibious Man meet and begin to bond, and form the beginnings of an almost romantic relationship; however, when she hears of the government’s plans to kill and dissect the Amphibious Man to study it’s biology, Elisa vows to save him, and with the help of her sassy co-worker Zelda (Spencer) and her next door neighbor Giles (Jenkins), comes up with a plan to break him out. Read more…
SUBURBICON – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The idea of taking a peek behind the white picket fences of American society is not a new one, but few have taken it as far as director George Clooney in his new film, Suburbicon. It’s a highly stylized, bizarrely comical drama set in the 1950s in a planned community, the epitome of white middle class utopia, a fantasy of manicured lawns and pristine shopping malls. However, things start to change in Suburbicon when a quiet African-American family moves in; despite them doing literally nothing to provoke any sort of reaction, the town erupts into a frenzy of racially-driven anger and violence. Against this backdrop, the story of Gardner Lodge unfolds – to the world, he is a mild-mannered middle class husband and father, but in private his life is falling apart in an increasingly nightmarish spiral of betrayal and murder. The film stars Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, and Oscar Isaac, and was co-written by Clooney and Grant Heslov with Joel and Ethan Coen. Despite this star lineup, the film was roundly panned by critics, who couldn’t fathom its uneven tone, heavy handedness, and odd mix of genres. Read more…
VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When French director Luc Besson debuted his film The Fifth Element in 1997, it was hailed as a masterpiece of European science fiction, a visual feast for the senses. What people didn’t realize at the time was that, as good as The Fifth Element was, Besson was actually making that film because cinematic technology was not yet sophisticated enough for him to make what was his true passion project: a big screen adaptation of the French-language comic book series Valérian et Laureline, which Besson had grown up reading. Although most people outside of France will not have heard of it, Valérian et Laureline is actually very influential, and many commentators knowledgeable about the subject have noted that the original Star Wars, Conan the Barbarian, and Independence Day all contain visual and conceptual similarities to the comic, which pre-dates all of them. In hindsight, it is clear that The Fifth Element was Besson’s ‘dry run’ for this film, as it too shares ideas and design elements with Valérian. Read more…
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