Tag Archive | Andrea Riseborough

Riseborough saves a sluggish Shadow Dancer

Journalist Tom Bradby’s 1998 debut novel gets the big screen treatment in James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer.  Set in the months prior to the 1994 ceasefire, this British thriller is rooted within an influential Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) family in Belfast.  Quietly rising star Andrea Riseborough is the focus of Shadow Dancer’s meticulously-paced web of betrayal, but she’s not alone in secretly pursuing her own best interests.  Distinctly British political intrigue fuels the fire of Bradby’s story, but his screenplay struggles to build up speed.

Shadow Dancer is in UK cinemas 24 August

Shadow Dancer gets off to a quick start, both in its 1973 prologue and the subsequent attempted bombing of a London Underground line twenty years later.  When Clive Owen’s MI5 agent, Mac, hits the scene, things grind to a virtual standstill.  With little dialogue and a fair amount of waiting early on, Shadow Dancer sets into a sluggishness it never quite shakes.  Once Riseborough’s Collette finally strikes a deal, for the sake of her young son, the wick is lit on the slow-burn plot that burns possibly a bit too slowly.  Placing Collette at odds with her family, though unbeknownst to them, is an intriguing premise that is made all the more threatening with the introduction of David Wilmot as the IRA’s head rat catcher.  Calmly menacing, Wilmot’s Kevin acts as something of an internal affairs agent with a license to kill for the terrorist group.  His exchanges with Riseborough are rife with tension and unassumingly become the film’s high points.  Shadow Dancer presents a handful of such suspenseful moments, but fails to sustain the momentum whilst moving from one to the next.

Read More…

Review: W./E.

Madonna makes her long-awaited (by someone, surely… her agent, perhaps) directorial debut (correction: Madonna’s first film was actually Filth and Wisdom, which had a limited run in US and was never released in the UK in 2008) with W./E., a fictionalised account of the romance between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII.  Anyone willing to give the legendary pop star the benefit of the doubt here will be treated to an astonishingly horrid affair, which is pieced together less like a film and more like a cinematic ransom note.

W./E. making audiences wish they were somewhere, anywhere else from 20 January.

The “film” stars Andrea Riseborough as Wallis, yet the focus is primarily on the Simpson-obsessed Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), an unhappily married New Yorker descended from a line of women bizarrely obsessed with Wallis & Edward, hence her name forename.  With an exhibition and auction of the couple’s Windsor estate ongoing locally, Wally takes solace in hours spent at the auction house, as her doctor husband is off working/cheating on her.  While there, she repeatedly encounters Russian (ha!) security guard, Evgeni (a horribly miscast Cuban-Guatemalan Oscar Isaac) allowing for the terribly predictable to unfold in the most uninteresting of ways.  She’s a W, he’s an E, get it?  The subtly doesn’t end there, though, as Madonna goes on to bemoan her unfair treatment by the British press through the suffering of Wallis, as portrayed in the other half of the film, which focuses on the courtship and ensuing relationship between Wallis and Edward (James D’Arcy).  Harping on about what Wallis sacrificed to be with the King, opposing to the traditional focus on his abdication of the throne for her, Madonna plays the poor, misunderstood and “trapped” foreigner card, leaving little doubt as to her self-indulgent intentions.
Read More…