Word: mckellen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...goal," he says, "is to bridge that gap between the independent and the mainstream film." Apt Pupil, a big subject compacted into a wee space and a tidy $15 million budget, may fall between the two. A bright high-schooler (Brad Renfro) learns that an old Nazi (Sir Ian McKellen) is living in his small town. The two strike up a symbiotic suspicion, each playing nastier games than the other knows and revealing more of his disease than he knows himself. If Apt Pupil is never so cagey as its characters, it's smart about displaying the evils of which...
...MCKELLEN Apt Pupil; Gods and Monsters...
...ordinary moviegoer, Richard II and Richard III might be obscure sequels to Oliver Stone's Nixon biopic. But theater lovers know them as showcases for definitive roles--the stunted man of thought, the malefic man of action--played by Ian McKellen, the prime Shakespearean actor of our time. Now, with leading roles in two ambitious thrillers, Sir Ian, 59, must face the inconvenience of movie stardom. In Gods and Monsters, he is James Whale, the director of Frankenstein, who in his last days seeks a young man to ease his roiling soul. In the Stephen King tale Apt Pupil...
...film wants to be a Minnelli musical. Three of the new gay dramas, all about artists in extremis, are traditional in another sense. They locate the not so divine decadence--all that is theatrical, naughty, self-destructive--in gay sex. Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters stars Ian McKellen in a parable about '30s Hollywood director James Whale (Frankenstein, Show Boat). Like Billy, he is consumed with sexual longing, but here it is the ultimate form of masochism: a desire to be killed. The erotic charge sizzles in Lisa Cholodenko's High Art, a pensive throwback to the drug...
...getting a plethora of iambic pentameter. Last Christmas saw a stolid Othello (with Branagh and Laurence Fishburne) and the brutal, enthralling Richard III (Ian McKellen). This week three Shakespeare films will be on view: Romeo and Juliet, Al Pacino's Looking for Richard and the British Twelfth Night, or What You Will, directed by Trevor Nunn, the former Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director who has been named boss of the Royal National Theatre. Branagh has his four-hour Hamlet ready for Christmas. Filmmakers are trying every tactic--cultural intimidation, lavish spectacle, frenzied camerabatics and the casting of young stars...