Showing posts with label Emily Blunt. Show all posts

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Oppenheimer review / Nolan’s atom bomb epic is flawed but extraordinary

Oppenheimer review – Nolan’s atom bomb epic is flawed but extraordinary

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 19 July 2023

Christopher Nolan’s account of the physicist who led the Manhattan Project captures the most agonising of success stories

The wartime Soviet intelligence services had a codename for the Manhattan Project, the US’s plan to build an atom bomb: Enormoz. Christopher Nolan’s new film about it is absolutely Enormoz, maybe his most enormoz so far: a gigantic, post-detonation study, a PTSD narrative procedure filling the giant screen with a million agonised fragments that are the shattered dreams and memories of the project’s haunted, complex driving force, J Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant physicist with the temperament of an artist who gave humanity the means of its own destruction.

Posters

Oppenheimer

A film by Christopher Nolan

Crush of the week / Why I love… Emily Blunt

Emily Blunt

CRUSH OF THE WEEK

Why I love… actor Emily Blunt

My favourite thing is her ‘steel magnolia’ voice: on first impression, slightly tremulous, but carrying an undercurrent of something hard

Bim Adewunmi
Saturday 25 March 2017

here do we stand on revamps? I can’t help but feel somewhat fatigued by the idea that Hollywood is so devoid of new ideas that it has to pilfer its past. Sometimes, though, you hear of a “reimagining” that makes you hopeful: the cast feels so right, you think: it would take a miracle to balls this up. I’m thinking of next year’s Mary Poppins sequel and its star, English actor Emily Blunt (who is joined in the reboot by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Meryl Streep).

London-born Blunt, 34, started on the stage, but I first paid attention to her in the 2006 film adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada (she was Bafta-nominated). Her character (also called Emily) is a delightful tyrant: a dead-eyed bitch with lashings of eyeliner and a drolly wicked tongue.

My favourite thing about Blunt is her “steel magnolia” voice: on first impression, slightly tremulous, but carrying an undercurrent of something hard. Her CV is a mix, with some baffling choices (romantic sci-fi The Adjustment Bureau), some bad ones (horror The Wolfman) and some real corkers (crime thriller Sicario). But my favourite Blunt performance is in Edge Of Tomorrow, in which she plays a war hero who repeatedly kicks Tom Cruise’s ass – and you never doubt she could do the same in real life.

It’s a wonderful duality, because in real life Blunt (along with her husband, US actor John Krasinski) projects a supremely chilled-out vibe: appealingly down-to-earth, self-deprecatingly funny and, above all, staunchly practical, in a very British way.

And since that is basically Mary Poppins in a nutshell, I have faith. Don’t let me down, Emily.

THE GUARDIAN

Saturday, December 2, 2017

The 50 best films of 2015 / Sicario / No 45

The 50 best films

of 2015

in the US

No 45

Sicario

Sicario review – Emily Blunt at the sharp end in war on drugs

****

Denis Villeneuve’s gruesome and intelligent white-knuckle thriller features a terrific star turn from Blunt as a determined FBI agent

Peter Bradshaw
Thursday 8 October 2015 15.30 BST

hen I saw Denis Villeneuve’s stomach-turningly gruesome narco thriller Sicario at Cannes this year, it struck me he had pinched Michael Mann’s style – and pinched his crown, too, like it or not. Perhaps it’s impossible to see a convoy of black SUVs speeding across an urban landscape in a film without thinking of Mann, but Villeneuve certainly carries off the borrowing with style.

The resemblance struck me again this week watching this film a second time, along with the thought that Villeneuve was probably taking notes during Kathryn Bigelow’s Bin Laden thriller Zero Dark Thirty – particularly for those extended special-ops attack scenes filmed in night vision, as if on an alien planet. He maybe even did the same thing with the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, though that is maybe because of the presence of Josh Brolin, and the fact that it is also shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins.

The title is cartel slang for “assassin” or “hitman”, evidently derived from the first-century Sicarii zealots of Judea, though the word is never spoken out loud in the script; screenwriter Taylor Sheridan defers the revelation of how it really applies here to the end of drama, and this disclosure ties up its attendant issues of justice versus revenge, idealism versus cynicism and how American justice is to be applied beyond US borders without anything as quaint as a formal declaration of war.

Emily Blunt plays Kate, a young FBI agent specialising in the relatively uncontentious field of kidnap-victim recovery. She finds herself co-opted into the US Homeland Security war on drugs: a new war on terror whose strategies have been repurposed and relegitimised. After a truly horrendous experience uncovering a cartel-owned safe house full of corpses in Arizona, Kate is asked if she wants to go after the guys ultimately responsible. She agrees, and admits deeply disturbing new men into her life.

Her boss for this mission will be swaggeringly irresponsible and studiedly obnoxious special agent Matt Graver, played by Brolin. There is also a second man, who appears to be Matt’s boss, though he is a civilian consultant from Colombia: Alejandro, played by Benicio Del Toro, courteous and even fatherly towards Kate, solicitous for her well-being, quietly traumatised by some event in his own past. When Kate asks Alejandro what’s going on, he coolly replies: “You’re asking me how a watch works. For now, let’s just keep an eye on the time.”

The plan seems to be to “dramatically overreact” to the safe house situation, in Matt’s words, by arresting a known cartel member with maximum publicity, in order to provoke the drug moguls into high-tailing it back to Mexico and thus revealing who the real players are and making valuable intel gains for arrests. Straight-arrow Kate is fine with all this, until she suspects that Matt and Alejandro are CIA, and what they are actually planning is a deniable multiple-murder attack raid over the border into Mexico itself, and also suspects that these acts of violence against the Mexican enemy are theatrical displays conducted partly to gain trust with the home team and see how operatives are going to bear up under fire. And there is a second level of duplicity and bad faith behind even this, relating to Alejandro’s background.

The tenor and texture of the movie are established with that truly horrible scene at the very beginning where the FBI storm the house. It has its own sheen of horror, aided by the groaning orchestral chords in the musical score from composer Jóhann Jóhannson. The scene lays down a marker for the film’s status as something like a forensic thriller and in its way a procedural thriller, in which the covert procedure itself is the crime.

When Blunt first comes on in all the tough-guy hard-body gear, it is a bit implausible. But she brazens out any possible absurdity with great acting focus and front. She delivers a real star turn, mixing confidence, bewilderment and vulnerability: all the more difficult being up against Brolin and Del Toro, who themselves give huge performances with bells and whistles hooting and clanging.

For me, Sicario is a step forward for Villeneuve: it is less discursive, less reflective than movies such as Prisoners (2013) and Incendies (2010), although I always thought the cerebral content of these pictures was a little supercilious. This is a real white-knuckle thriller, with screeching feedback notes of fear and paranoia, which plays out in a very satisfying atmosphere of pure nihilist ruthlessness.

THE GUARDIAN

The best 50 films of 2015 in the US
01. Son of Saul

02. 45 Years
03. The Revenant

04. Anomalisa

05. Bridge of Spies

06. The Look of Silence

07. Carol

08. Amy

09. Joy

10. Mistress America

11. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
12. While We're Young
13. Paddington
14. Mommy
15. Chi-Raq
16. Diary of a Teenage Girl
17. Taxi Tehran
18. Appropriate Behaviour
19. Salt of the Earth
20. Beasts of No Nation

34. Mad Max: Fury Road

35. Inside out

36. Room

37. Creed

45. Sicario

Emily Blunt is tracking a murder in first trailer for The Girl on the Train

A first look at the adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ best-selling mystery suggests a Gone Girl-sized hit

Benjamin Lee
Wednesday 20 April 2016 10.56 BST

The first trailer for mystery thriller The Girl on the Train has arrived, and with it a heavy cargo of expectation, given the record-breaking sales of its source novel.

Emily Blunt / The Girl on the Train

Emily Blunt: 'mummy cult' leads to cruelty between women

The actress, who plays Rachel in the adaptation of the international bestseller The Girl on the Train, says film captures the social pressure on women

Press Association
Tuesday 20 September 2016 22.27 BST

Emily Blunt has been describing the “mummy cult” that she believes leads to cruelty between women. In The Girl on the Train, Blunt stars as a recent divorcee and alcoholic, Rachel Watson, who is infatuated by the seemingly perfect couple she sees daily through her train window.

Rachel has been through fertility treatment and is in mourning for the pregnancy that never happened, while Megan Hipwell (Haley Bennett) – one half of that perfect couple – does not want a baby at all.