Brady Corbet, The Childhood of a Leader, 2015
This seems to have got badly mauled by the IMDbeciles, but I found it quite compelling, with the exception of the final section (how come Pattinson ended up playing the older Prescott? go figure). Based on a Sartre story and set in the aftermath of WWI, during the discussions leading up to the Treaty of Versailles, which as we all know basically fucked up the rest of the century, it's a rather chilling tale of how a young boy (Tom Sweet, bravo) learns how to manipulate those around him - the seeds of future disaster are sown early. Unlike many IMDb punters, I thought Scott Walker's soundtrack was terrific - not at all subtle of course (his lyrics are but his music rarely is, post-Tilt) but used effectively to underpin the disturbing story.
). I'll own up right away and admit I've yet to read The Tempest all the way through, and have not seen it performed, so I'm certainly not qualified to pass judgement on its merits as a Shakespeare adaptation. But as a film, whoo.. Sacha Vierny's cinematography is simply stunning, but as one writer put it, I'd have loved to have been present at some of the director's pre-shoot meetings ("I need those three peacocks to sit still!"), and wonder if the quoted $1.5m budget is way under what it cost to make this extraordinary spectacle. Every shot is so utterly jampacked with visual information - and if that isn't enough, several layers of screens are overlaid, showing the extraordinary detail of Greenaway's imagined 24 books (some of which themselves contain animated images) - added to which there's an intricate mix of sound ("natural" and Nyman's harmonically convoluted but not always unattractive music) and a mille-feuille of spoken text, most of which is enunciated (magnificently) by 87-year-old John Gielgud. You may not like it - many apparently don't - but I can't for one minute imagine being bored by it.
