Author: Ed Rowe
Faith no more: Why Scorsese’s Silence is a haunting work of art
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ The desolate words of Jesus Christ on the cross offer one way into Martin Scorsese’s new film, Silence. The film inhabits the character of a 17th Century Jesuit missionary to Japan who is forced to recant his faith. The ‘silence’ being referred to in the film’s…
A good man playing bad: Alan Rickman (1946 – 2016)
Alan Rickman, who has died aged 69, was an actors’ actor. The rich voice, sardonic gaze and languid manner of Harry Potter’s Severus Snape made him seem the epitome of the English stage-trained ‘luvvie’. But his backstory was more complex. Rickman started on the stage aged 26 after running a graphic design company. He was a…
Cinema and the Art of Looking
This last New Year’s Eve I stood on a cliff above a beach in North Cornwall, England. The wind was up and wild, and it was cold, but I hardly noticed. I was transfixed by a pair of lesser black-backed gulls that were darting along the shoulders of a huge rolling wave, surf spraying above…
Down on the Street: London Road and the Music of Fear
It can’t be the easiest way to write. Go out, find people who’ve been through something bad, interview them and then spend months working the material into a script. In the case of London Road, it may have been worth it, as first a hit stage musical and then a movie came out of it.…
Reconciling with Cinema: Never Enough Time for Catching Up
Sometime in the late 1990s, cinema and I came to terms with the inevitable. We’d been drifting apart for some time and now it seemed that the distance between us had become too great. It should have been a painful wrench. I’d grown up with movies; they’d been a still point in a peripatetic childhood.…