Latest news with #AMatterofLifeandDeath
Time Out
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
The Phoenician Scheme
Haters look away now because Wes Anderson's twelfth film, The Phoenician Scheme, offers everything we've come to expect from cinema's most meticulous auteur: quirky dialogue, plaid-and-stripe costumes, and a roster of cameos arranged as carefully as one of his colour palettes. He's a director whose visual artistry and hyper-stylised, analogue worlds are celebrated from the Pompidou in Paris to London's Design Museum, why would we expect him to change his immaculate spots at this stage? Here, Anderson doubles down on the vignette structures of The French Dispatch – not everyone's glass of pastis – while giving his pack a shuffle. Benicio del Toro showcases his rarely seen comedic charm as Zsa-Zsa Korda, an arms-dealing entrepreneur seeking funding for his latest project from a motley crew of friends and foes (Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Riz Ahmed, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jeffrey Wright). Korda's past is shady and his Trumpian approach to the art of the deal positions him somewhere between an antihero and an out-and-out villain. In a nod to Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death, there's even a heavenly court where Korda must justify his dastardly existence to God (played by Bill Murray). Mia Threapleton is brilliantly deadpan as Sister Liesl, Korda's daughter and heir, a would-be nun with a deadpan demeanour and daddy issues. Meanwhile, Michael Cera, as a Swede called Bjørn Lund – a mysterious tutor to Korda's nine sons – adds to the film's delightful eccentricities with his odd moustache and enigmatic past. This unholy triumvirate forms the most tight-knit group of protagonists Anderson has created since 2007's The Darjeeling Limited. They join the mission to help Korda persuade his frenemies to back the construction of his dream desert city project, Phoenicia. Wes Anderson blends his signature style with dashes of film noir and action beats That's not to say Anderson doesn't change things up. He blends his signature style with dashes of film noir and action beats. Stravinsky plays over dogfights, hand grenades and ejected pilots filling the air. The film is split into five segments – 'shoeboxes' – and Anderson doesn't mind cramming in more information and A-list turns than we can process. Just as we start enjoying Cranston and Hanks teaming up to play basketball, or Ahmed as a graceful Indian prince, we're off again. Does this overdose of Wes-ness harm the experience? Not when there's Italian costume designer Milena Canonero's wonderful choices to enjoy (look out for Sister Liesl's stockings) or production designer Adam Stockhausen's playful set designs to disappear into. In fact, the question is rhetorical, because watching this Anderson extravaganza is like assembling a meticulously detailed puzzle: at times frustrating, but deeply rewarding when the full picture comes together.
South China Morning Post
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Netflix K-drama Heavenly Ever After: Kim Hye-ja, Son Suk-ku lead afterlife fantasy romcom
Lead cast: Kim Hye-ja, Son Suk-ku, Han Ji-min Advertisement Latest Nielsen rating: 6.1 per cent In the fantasy romance Heavenly Ever After, Korean screen icon Kim Hye-ja (Mother) plays a woman who reunites with her husband in the afterlife – but with a catch. This is the latest series from veteran writer Lee Nam-kyu, who recently drew acclaim for the mental-health-focused Netflix series Daily Dose of Sunshine Heavenly Ever After is pitched somewhere between the British classic A Matter of Life and Death and the more recent US television comedy The Good Place – both of which also imagine administrative snafus in the afterlife – but with a heavy side of K-drama schmaltz.
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Matter of Life and Death – a delightful adaptation of Powell and Pressburger's all-time classic
The 1940s hits, played by on- and offstage bands, cross-fades to cacophony. English bomber pilot Peter is suspended above us. His plane is hit, his parachute in shreds; only his radio still functions. He connects with American ground staff radio operator June (standing before us on the in-the-round stage). During a snatched, crazily bantering exchange before Peter bales out, the two fall in love. Kaylah Copeland and Thomas Dennis, as the couple, calibrate this crucial, tone-setting scene to perfection, delivering an emotional punch with a light touch and grounding fantasy in emotional reality. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1946 film, A Matter of Life and Death, was made with serious intent, as a propaganda piece, to heal divisions in the aftermath of the second world war. It brings the dead of past conflicts into contact with the living via a seemingly whimsical romance – and a seemingly endless, celestial staircase, here magically conjured to our imaginations through the interplay of Alexandra Stafford's lighting and Laura McEwen's designs. Peter survives and meets June; their love blossoms. It's a mistake! A thick fog hid Peter from the 'conductor' sent to guide him to the afterlife (Michael Hugo's French aristocrat walking gingerly as if still conscious of the effect of the guillotine that ended his life during the French Revolution). How will the bureaucracy of the world beyond manage this once-in-a-thousand-years error? A trial is convened. This world and the other overlap. While the white-clad dead debate whether Peter must join his fellow airmen or remain with June on earth, white-clad medics operate on the airman's brain. As in the film, this delightful new stage adaptation by Theresa Heskins, who also directs, plays with ambiguities within the fiction: are we meant to see the other world as 'real' or as a product of Peter's injured brain? A joyous, 14-strong ensemble of actor-musician-dancers tops and tails scenes with life-affirming, period swing jazz rhythms (under Akintayo Akinbode's musical direction), conveying, more powerfully than the film, the message that 'nothing is stronger than love'. A Matter of Life and Death is at the New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 19 April
The Guardian
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Matter of Life and Death review – movie classic resuscitated with songs
The propaganda brief for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger on A Matter of Life and Death was to come up with a film to help smooth postwar relations between Britain and the US. We could certainly do with a bit of that now, although to fix our current impasse would probably take more than a love affair between a fated British fighter pilot and a steely American radio operator. It is a metaphysical story in which the life of Peter Carter (Thomas Dennis in the David Niven role) hangs on a heavenly court case and the love of June (Kaylah Copeland), whom he meets only after falling from the skies without a parachute. If this stage adaptation does not explain why we should revisit a story so deeply rooted in an era of loss, grief and reconciliation, it is no less intelligent and ambitious for it. In a script loyal to the idiosyncratic original, writer and director Theresa Heskins makes one key intervention. Drawing on a large cast of actor-musicians, she punctuates the production with period songs, the better to capture the mood of melancholy and high spirits experienced by a generation stalked by death while being compelled to live in the moment. That, at least, is the theory. Under Akintayo Akinbode's musical direction, the players are more sombre than celebratory, the vocals are often muted and even In the Mood has a maudlin air. The songs, though, are well chosen. The sentiments of numbers such as Blue Skies and When the Lights Go On Again fit the story's theme of hope for better times. 'We kiss and the angels sing,' croons Polly Lister, reflecting the blend of earthly and heavenly. The director's fidelity to the movie includes its switches from Technicolor to monochrome. There is no naked Pan-like goatherd, but there is a foppish French revolutionary official (Michael Hugo) and a stairway to heaven ingeniously suggested by the illuminated spokes of Laura McEwen's rotating set. What is missing is a sense of purpose. It is a reverential adaptation that emulates the strangeness of the original without striking out with a similar boldness of its own. At the New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 19 April
