FEATURES
By Elvis Mitchell and Elvis Mitchell,FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM | February 13, 1998
Director Gillian Armstrong has waited 10 years to get her version of "Oscar & Lucinda" on the screen. It seems an odd choice, because her work, such as "Little Women," has shown a marvelous empathy for its characters.In the novel "Oscar & Lucinda," author Peter Carey takes a decided pleasure in dragging his two protagonists through a series of spiritual and physical tortures so baroque that the whole enterprise begins to take on the looniness of a Monty Python sketch.Oscar (Ralph Fiennes)
FEATURES
By Ann Hornaday and Ann Hornaday,SUN FILM CRITIC | August 15, 1998
A few things you might consider doing instead of seeing "The Avengers": Walking the dog.Turning the compost.Re-grouting the bathtub.Starting your 1999 taxes.Buying a dog.Starting a compost heap.By now, the pop-culture literati (meaning people with nothing of substance or meaning to worry about) know that the entertainment media is in high feather over Warner Brothers' decision not to screen "The Avengers" for critics before it opened Friday.The studio gives us far too much credit. The American movie-going public is famously immune to the rants and raves of reviewers, making up their own minds by sallying forth intrepidly regardless of critical opprobrium.
FEATURES
By Kevin Thomas and Kevin Thomas,LOS ANGELES TIMES | July 14, 2000
"Onegin" is an elegantly wrought, deeply felt film based on Alexander Pushkin's 1831 novel in verse, which in turn inspired Tchaikovsky's 1879 opera. The very model of a literary adaptation to the screen, it stars a perfectly cast Ralph Fiennes and marks a remarkably assured feature directorial debut for Fiennes' sister, Martha, and also a splendid opportunity for their brother Magnus, who composed the film's spare yet evocative score. As a period piece the film is breathtaking in its beauty and authenticity, its production design a work of symbolically decayed grandeur.
NEWS
By CHRIS KALTENBACH | December 23, 2008
[Paramount Home Video] Starring Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes Directed by Saul Dibb. $29.98, Blu-ray $39.99. ** dvds The Duchess, in stores Saturday, may be lovely to look at, but even Keira Knightley's best efforts can't shake up this curiously inert film, the tale of an 18th-century British lass who married into the aristocracy, only to find the marriage doomed her to a life of little more than servitude to her vain, pompous husband. Knightley, corseted and wigged beyond any reasonable measure, is Georgiana Spencer, who starts off thrilled that she is to be betrothed to the esteemed Duke of Devonshire.
NEWS
By CHRIS K. KALTENBACH | April 14, 2009
Starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Released by the Weinstein Co. $29.95, ** 1/2 ( 2 1/2 STARS) Since Kate Winslet won her best actress Oscar for The Reader, the party line has been that it was some sort of career achievement award, given not so much for her work in this film as for all the other great films she's starred in over the years. That's nonsense. While the movie itself has some problems, none of them stems from Winslet's performance. As a sullen Berlin streetcar conductor who begins a sexual relationship with a teenager, for reasons that are both more and less than they at first seem, Winslet again demonstrates why she's earned the tag as one of her generation's greatest actresses.
FEATURES
By Ralph Blumenthal and Ralph Blumenthal,NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE | August 7, 1999
NEW YORK -- Long before she started working on an unfamiliar new computer that gave her migraine headaches and long before she learned she had cancer, Jini Fiennes conceived of her sixth and most ambitious novel, "Blood Ties," a cyclical tale of wounded generations and the redeeming power of love.Writing again after years of struggle alongside her husband to raise seven children on little money in England and Ireland, she finished the book in 1989 and then absorbed rejection after rejection from publishers.