Film Review: The Danish Girl (2015)

Ever since he won the Best Director Oscar over David Fincher, Tom Hooper has been a figure of scorn for a large swathe of cinephilia. It doesn't help that his visual style - a mixture of extreme closeups, excessive use of negative space, and a palette that is muted, to say the least - is easy to pick apart and mock, or that he sticks to pretty safe territory like period pieces or adaptations of immensely popular source material. He's proudly middlebrow in his sensibilities, and his approach has served him well as far as audiences, critics and The Academy are concerned. Hooper's luck runs out and then some with his latest, The Danish Girl, a deathly dull adaptation of the historical novel by David Ebershoff, which at times feels closer to a parody of his oeuvre than an actual addition to it.

Film Review: The Theory of Everything (2014)

There's a potentially interesting story in The Theory of Everything, James Marsh's film about the life of Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) and his relationship with his first wife Jane (Felicity Jones). Unfortunately, it was already told in 2004 and it starred Benedict Cumberbatch. Marsh's film and the BBC film Hawking cover a lot of the same ground; both focus on the physicist's time as a post-graduate at Cambridge, his first meeting with Jane and his initial diagnosis with ALS. The earlier film did what far too few films about real people do, though, and focused primarily on that short window of time. The Theory of Everything, by comparison, tries to encompass all of Hawking's life, and loses its centre of gravity very quickly.