Jude Law

Eden

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Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby

Ron Howard loves a fact-based story and in Eden he delivers a punchy one about romantic and naive people getting a rude awakening – the natural state of humanity isn’t bliss but blood. After recent films about Pavarotti, JD Vance and Jim Henson, Howard turns to the far less famous Margret Wittmer, who along with her husband Heinz and son Harry decamped to a remote island idyll in the Galapagos in the 1930s. There, inspired by the example of atheist intellectual vegans Friedrich Ritter and partner Dore Strauch, the Wittmers hoped to build a new life alongside them, and possibly chart a new course for humanity while doing so. It all went badly … Read more

The Order

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Terry fires a rifle

Masculinity on the downswing meets white supremacism on the up in The Order, a typically unsettling film by Justin Kurzel, who’s never quite topped his devastating debut, Snowtown, though this comes pretty close. The casting is unusual for something set in redneck USA. Nice, pretty Nicholas Hoult as Bob Mathews, head of a white-power outfit that’s broken away from a parent group of Nazis because it wasn’t extreme enough. And nice, diffident fellow Brit Jude Law as FBI cop Terry Husk, whose hopes of a quiet life on a new posting in Idaho are dashed when he realises he’s tangling with guys who are planning the overthrow of the US government. Both are … Read more

Firebrand

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Alicia Vikander as Katherine Parr

Unusually for a film concerning King Henry VIII of England, Firebrand is not interested in wife one (Catherine of Aragon) or wife two (Anne Boleyn). Instead focus is on the last of Henry’s six wives, Katherine Parr. And, no bones about it, she is the focus of this film, not the king. A history lesson. At the time this film is set Henry has broken politically but not entirely religiously with Rome. The Church of England has been established and Henry is its head. But because he’s relied so heavily on Protestants to support his break, Henry’s brand of Catholicism is on the defensive and the Protestants are on the prowl. It’s against … Read more

The Nest

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Allison and Rory in the Elizabethan manor

Suddenly Ingmar Bergman seems to be fashionable again. Just last week I watched Black Bear, a film with a hint of Bergman’s Persona. Now, in The Nest, there’s touches of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Which means that if you’re looking for fireworks, you’ve come to the wrong film. The Nest is a journey into dark psychological territory so muted that it would be easy to miss what’s going on. On the surface things look pretty peachy – Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) is a successful trader who’s moved his family from New York back to the UK, where Rory has used his huge Wall Street bonanza to rent a massive Elizabethan mansion – … Read more

The Holiday

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Jude Law and Cameron Diaz in The Holiday

The rom-com has traditionally featured an alpha couple and a beta couple. This allowed the alpha couple do the serious mooning about, while the beta couple handled the comedy and dispensed sound, often snarky, advice. However, since Richard Curtis’s successful if frequently painful Love, Actually, there’s been an attempt to get more people in on the act. Which brings us to one of those transatlantic rom-coms with a couple of Hollywood stars and a couple of Brits, each side playing to the other’s stereotyped view of what an American/Brit is. The Brits are a journalist at the tweedy Daily Telegraph (Kate Winslet) and a book editor (Jude Law); meanwhile, from California, USA, we … Read more

eXistenZ

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Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh in eXistenZ

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 June Charles Babbage’s difference engine, 1822 On this day in 1822, Charles Babbage presented a paper to the British Royal Astronomical Society. It was called “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables”. What he was proposing was, in effect a mechanical computer. First conceived in 1786 by JH Müller, an engineer in the Hessian army, the difference engine was of interest to governments because it allowed them to produce tables (of whatever sort – tides, for instance) much more economically. To this end, in 1823 the British government gave Babbage £1,700 to make … Read more

Side Effects

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Rooney Mara and Channing Tatum in Side Effects

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 February Damages for thalidomide children, 1968 On this day in 1968, the High Court in the UK presided over a settlement to 62 children born with deformities caused by the drug thalidomide. Thalidomide had been first marketed in 1957 in West Germany as a sedative and was later sold over the counter as a cure for morning sickness in pregnant women. Within months there was a huge increase in the number of babies born with missing and deformed limbs, deformed eyes, bowels, and hearts. Around 40% of these children died. The story repeated itself in the UK, Australia and New … Read more

Enemy at the Gates

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Jude Law takes aim in Enemy at the Gates

Here’s a mixed bag of European war movie that is trying to be Saving Private Ryan in its impressive opening scenes, but looks as if it realises it doesn’t have the budget and so scales back the action to concentrate on two lone snipers. One German, one Russian. It’s set during the battle of Stalingrad, in which more than two million people died – yes, two million – and so the decision makes some logistical sense, even if it shortchanges the Russians and their epic level of sacrifice. The fact that it does that is what got the goat of a lot of historians masquerading as film critics, who suggested that the film … Read more

eXistenZ

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Jude Law in eXistenZ

Combining two fields of interest of director David Cronenberg – the mediated-reality musings of Videodrome and the body horror of almost everything else he’s done – eXistenZ is about a video game designer dropping into the gamesworld she’s created, accompanied by a good-looking marketing trainee, to work out if it still all works after an assassination attempt on its creator. Jude Law is handsome and chiselled and pretty much perfect as the slightly blank computer-game virgin and Jennifer Jason Leigh also scores high as the programmer who’s developed a gaming environment so realistic that it makes real life look lacklustre. This parallel reality where industrial and organic coalesce (a gun that shoots human … Read more