Audiences should be ‘shocked and disturbed’ by the impact of theatre, says Schindler’s List and Harry Potter actor
Trigger warnings for theatre audiences should be scrapped because people should be “shocked and disturbed” by what they see, the actor Ralph Fiennes has said.
The warnings are issued before the beginning of a performance to alert audiences to upsetting or distressing content and have become increasingly commonplace in theatres.
Continue reading...The long-awaited 25th outing for Ian Fleming’s superspy is a weird and self-aware epic with audacious surprises up its sleeve
The standard bearer of British soft power is back, in a film yanked from cinemas back in the time of the toilet roll shortage, based on a literary character conceived when sugar and meat rationing was still in force, and now emerging in cinemas as Britons are fighting for petrol in the forecourts.
Bond, like Norma Desmond, is once again ready for his closeup – and Daniel Craig once again shows us his handsome-Shrek face and the lovable bat ears, flecked with the scars of yesterday’s punch-up, the lips as ever pursed in determination or disgust.
Continue reading...As his new film The Dig comes to Netflix, we take a deep dive into Fiennes’s career – from Quiz Show and The English Patient to In Bruges and The Lego Batman Movie
This version of Dickens’s Great Expectations, scripted by David Nicholls, was maybe not groundbreaking but was watchable and featured Ralph Fiennes as the convict Magwitch. He is seen first leaping out and scaring Pip in the churchyard with a convict’s number-one cut and mud all over his face, and later with longish hair, clean-shaven in a mysterious, new respectable guise. It’s a transformation that should perhaps have given Fiennes more of a performing showcase.
Continue reading...Coup 53, which charts MI6’s role in the shah’s restoration, has been blocked by makers of an 1985 show, who say it sullies their names
Coup 53 was heralded by critics this summer as a “powerful and authoritative” documentary “as gripping as any thriller”, and judged by historians as crucial to understanding Britain’s relationship with the Middle East.
Made over 10 years by Walter Murch, the celebrated editor of Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, in collaboration with the Anglo-Iranian director Taghi Amirani, it tells the story of covert British intervention in Iran after the second world war and stars Ralph Fiennes, left, as an MI6 spy in a reconstruction of a key incident.
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