Creatures of the night – Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals

As almost every review has commented, its been seven years since fashionista Tom Ford tried his hand at movies with his debut film 2009’s A Single Man. That movie seemed like a perfect distillation of Ford’s style, a measured, elegant character piece adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel. A Single Man followed a suicidal college professor George Falconer (played by Colin Firth) bereft following the death of his partner Jim over a single day. The film addressed issues of sexuality, and the repression and uncertainty of early sixties American culture. It was not anything if not elegant, meticulous in its period detail and fashions (especially the distinctive glasses worn by Firth). The film met significant acclaim, but there was the suspicion that it was a definitive filmic statement by Ford, a one-off dip in an artistic pool made by a man who could afford to dabble. 

Favourite films – The Master

With the first trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s eagerly awaited film of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice hitting the interwebs today, this seems as good a time as any to dust off my review of his previous masterpiece The Master. Still a relatively young director Anderson has a near unbroken track record of films that are at their least, merely excellent, but The Master proved to be his most divisive film since 2002’s Punch Drunk Love.