Peter Hoskin

Bookends: A man less ordinary

The joy – and danger – of these extended conversations with film-makers is that they will skew your critical faculties.

issue 01 January 2011

The joy – and danger – of these extended conversations with film-makers is that they will skew your critical faculties.

The joy – and danger – of these extended conversations with film-makers is that they will skew your critical faculties. So it is with Amy Raphael’s book Danny Boyle (Faber, £14.99). Until sifting through its pages, my opinion of the director’s work was, like many film fans, given to snobbishness: that he squandered the ferocious promise of Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996), sinking to such insipid depths as A Life Less Ordinary (1997) and The Beach (2000), before — even worse — winning Oscars galore for the mawkish Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

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