Jack Thorne

Dirt Music

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Luther and Georgia up close

A popular and critically acclaimed novel somehow just doesn’t make it to the screen in Dirt Music, an Outback tale about people with broken lives trying to find romance. It’s the slushy sort of story often associated with women’s fiction – chick lit, if you like. Georgia (Kelly Macdonald) is out swimming naked in the sea one hot, hot night when she spies a boat stealing crayfish from her husband’s fishing grounds. She says nothing but the poacher sees her and they exchange a couple of meaningless words and some more meaningful looks. Sparks would fly if she weren’t so damp. Some days later they do, when Georgia’s car breaks down and Luther … Read more

Radioactive

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Marie Curie in the lab

Radioactive is a biopic, and Marie Curie is its subject. An interesting proposition – most people know the name Curie but who knows anything about the actual woman? She discovered radiation, or radium, or X rays, or something, the general level of ignorance about Curie’s life making the default of the biopic – leaping from one headline event to the next – impossible. It sets writer Jack Thorne, director Marjane Satrapi and, to a slightly lesser extent, actor Rosamund Pike free to do what they want. And what they want to do is celebrate the woman as a force of nature, a scientific marvel, a tireless worker and an iconoclast who took on the … Read more

The Secret Garden

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Mary and Dickon climb a tree

The world may not need yet another version of The Secret Garden, but here’s one anyway. The latest adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s story is in a crowded field and to cut through has to compete with two very respectable adaptations, the much lauded one from 1993 directed by Agnieszka Holland and the one from 1949 starring cute child star Margaret O’Brien. There are plenty of others, going as far back as 1919, and what all have in common is the same roster of character names – one sign of something achieving classic status is that no one dicks about with the names as written on the page. See Harry Potter, Elizabeth … Read more