Critic's Notebook

Karen Ballard/Lionsgate

By SARAH MANVEL

The big story in film in Britain in 2010 was the closure by the coalition government of the UK Film Council, the centralized funding body for British films with the caveat that the productions had to be aimed at the people in the region where it was filmed. The resulting movies tended to appeal to no one at all, although there were several glorious exceptions, this year's "Tamara Drewe" among them. The responsibilities are instead being shifted to the British Film Institute, which runs the BFI London Film Festival and an Imax, manages the BFI National Archive, publishes books on cinema and releases DVDs of various classic or neglected films. These responsibilities are so new and vague, the BFI hasn't yet bothered to update its website. And since the government has already developed a history of backtracking on its cultural cuts (eg. the furor over Bookstart, a charity providing free books to underprivileged kids), it's still uncertain what is going to happen.

Continue reading “C.G.I. and Rental Stores, They Were Expendable” »

MOVIE REVIEW
Robin Hood (2010)

By ROBERT LEVIN

David Appleby/Universal Studios

You don’t need to see Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” to know exactly what you’d be in for if you did. For that, one need only look to the director’s “Gladiator” and “Kingdom of Heaven,” or, failing those, any swords-and-sandals Hollywood epic set in medieval England.

The charm and underdog attitude of the bandit of Sherwood Forest and his merry men have been scrubbed out, replaced by Russell Crowe’s intensely serious visage, a glum story about unjust taxation and expertly choreographed large-scale action scenes that are anathematic to the personality-driven legend.

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