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Skylight
Carey Mulligan is as good onstage at the John Golden Theatre as she is in the movies. As Kyra, the passionate teacher in David Hare‘s SKYLIGHT, she seems, quite simply, settled into the modest flat and routine, hard-nosed realism of the character. It is her place, her home, her way of being. Echoing what I…
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The Great Gatsby
I saw Baz Luhrmann’s THE GREAT GATSBY through 3D glasses, and I would not have seen it any other way. The whimsical unreality of it, the whole cinematic pop-up book of staggered planes and optically induced kinesthetic illusion, translates not only the novel’s style but its thematic essence. Gatsby is a novella of memory, of…
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Shame
In the most memorable scene in Steve McQueen‘s SHAME, Carey Mulligan sings a version of “New York, New York” stripped of romanticism and false promise, utterly resigned to the fact that she will probably not make it, here or anywhere. The close-up on her is punctuated by two or three perfectly positioned cutaways to the…
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Drive
The restrained and atmospheric DRIVE, which stars both Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, was the perfect fix for my addiction to a certain type of offbeat thriller. There is familiar and seductive formula to it. Find an actual profession (in this case stunt driving) and transpose it to the world of criminal enterprise (in this…
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An Education
Of the much admired British film AN EDUCATION I am become one of the admirers. Carey Mulligan is a charismatic new talent (winsome, witty, smart), and the movie, directed by Lone Scherfig with a script by Nick Hornby, really has something to say about education and of what it ought to consist. In tandem with her formal…