Sienna Miller – Chris Barsanti

Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise is opening this week in limited release and is already available on VOD. My review is at PopMatters:

Setting High-Rise in 1975, Ben Wheatley takes full advantage of what we remember from that time, the macramé, matted hairdos, condo living, and marital infidelity. But more important, the movie—based on J.G. Ballard’s bloody skewer of a 1975 novel and now available on VOD in the US—underlines the era’s capacity for antisocial mischief. Without today’s surveillance culture and social media, it’s easier for viewers to swallow the story’s basic conceit, that the inhabitants of a brand new luxury high-rise can, in mere months, whip up a self-contained, brutally violent maelstrom without anybody on the outside being any the wiser…

Here’s the trailer:

Alfred Hitchcock had his issues, no question about that. But although his obsessions with guilt, control, and particularly various of his leading ladies have been well documented in print, outside of the cineaste world those proclivities are not well known. That might change somewhat with the release of The Girl.

Premiering in late October on HBO, The Girl is about the legendary campaign of intimidation that Hitch waged against his star Tippi Hedren on the set of The Birds. Hedren herself has talked about what a miserable experience it was, calling him an “unusual, genius, and evil” filmmaker.

The film about the film stars Sienna Miller as Hedren and (applause) the great Toby Jones as Hitch himself. The director is Julian Jarrold, who directed the first and best of the Red Riding films back in 2009.

Check out the trailer here:

Chris Barsanti

Tag: Sienna Miller

Screening Room: ‘High-Rise’

Trailer Park: ‘The Girl’