In Contention

Tag: Red Riding: 1974

  • Andrew Garfield is Spider-Man

    Yes, the franchise reboot — to be helmed by Marc Webb of “(500) Days of Summer” fame — has finally settled on a leading man, and it’s the 26 year-old, red-haired Brit Andrew Garfield.

    I can’t say I saw that coming, but it’s a welcome surprise. I’ve been predicting big things for Garfield for some time: he came fourth on my list of the industry’s best under-30 actors last year. This, however, should accelerate that progress big-time.

    Some of you will know him from “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” or “Lions for Lambs,” but Garfield’s most impressive work so far has come in British TV projects (that were nonetheless released theatrically Stateside) “Boy A” and “Red Riding: 1974.”

    This year should really announce him as a big screen presence, with hefty roles in both “Never Let Me Go” and “The Social Network” waiting in the wings. It’s interesting that the studios have once more opted for actorly credentials over teen-idol status: Tobey Maguire’s CV was similarly high-end (if a little more advanced) when he first donned the suit in 2002.

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  • BAFTA win for Rebecca Hall

    I wouldn’t ordinarily mention the BAFTA Television Awards — generally treated as the ugly sister of February’s film awards ceremony — which were dished out in London tonight, but one win in particular strikes me as worth noting.

    You know by now that I’m a great admirer of Julian Jarrold’s “Red Riding: 1974,” which was released theatrically in the U.S. a few months back, and of Rebecca Hall’s remarkable performance in it. Hall just won a well-deserved Best Supporting Actress BAFTA, and since it’s almost certainly the only awards hardware she’ll end up taking for her work, I thought it worth celebrating. (The whole series, incidentally, did less well than one might have expected, taking only two other craft trophies for cinematography and costume design.)

    Other film-related wins include Samantha Morton’s strong directorial debut “The Unloved” — also treated as a theatrical feature outside the UK — for Best Single Drama, and a triple trophy haul for “The Thick of It,” the sitcom that mothered 2009 Oscar nominee “In the Loop.” Huzzahs all round. Full list of winners here, if you’re interested.

  • INTERVIEW: ‘Red Riding: 1974’ director Julian Jarrold

    Julian JarroldNearly a year after they first landed on UK television screens, the three feature-length films that comprise the “Red Riding” trilogy have reached American audiences – and in the theatrical environment where they belong, no less.

    IFC is marketing and distributing “Red Riding,” an adaptation of David Peace’s decade-spanning quartet of crime novels inspired by the real-life Yorkshire Ripper murders, as a single theatrical event. The truth, however, is that these are three very distinct, even self-standing, works from three dissimilar directors: Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker.

    Where “Man on Wire” director Marsh’s documentary chops are evident in a film that takes on the nuts and bolts of police corruption, and Tucker (“Hilary and Jackie”) takes a straightforward character-based approach to tie up loose ends, Jarrold’s film, the opener, is the most boldly stylized of the three.

    Following young journalist Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) as he probes the disappearance of a young girl and becomes ill-advisedly involved with her grieving mother (Rebecca Hall), the film consciously fuses the languages of film noir and social realism to striking effect.

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  • Mea culpa, ‘1974’

    Andrew Garfield in Red Riding: 1974With a resurgence of talk about the “Red Riding” trilogy of films ahead of their U.S. release next month, I’ve been reminded of a critical omission I made in my Best of 2009 list a few weeks back.

    As I wrote when the films premiered on British TV around 10 months ago, they are wholly cinematic works and deserve to be considered (and distributed) as such — but because they were introduced to me as television, my mind keeps skipping over them when I think back on the year in film.

    All of which is terribly unfair on Julian Jarrold’s “1974,” the first of the three tonally and structurally separate films, which I described as follows in the spring:

    Following Andrew (”Boy A”) Garfield’s swaggering rookie journalist as he investigates the link between three missing girls and rapidly finds himself in over his head, it’s an astonishingly textured, sensory film, awash in dusk-coloured light and a gorgeous Northern soul soundtrack, that recalls “Zodiac” in its measured narrative approach and even shades of “Twin Peaks” in the alluring strangeness cast over its very ordinary locale.

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