Film reviews and more
★★★☆☆ Just in case you thought fears of nuclear apocalypse were confined to the 1980s like leg warmers and aerobics, Tom Harper’s War Book (2014) presents a tense reminder of the risks we run with the nuclear stockpiles in the […]
★★★☆☆ This was supposed to be the year of Al Pacino’s big comeback. Instead, the lamentable The Humbling (2014), which saw the venerable actor indulged as an unstable monologuing thesp, snuck straight onto DVD in the UK as The Last […]
★★★★☆ Harking back to the taut psychological thrillers of the late 1980s, where multiplex screens were littered with films calibrated towards adult audiences, Australian actor/director Joel Edgerton’s feature debut, The Gift (2015) is a welcome slice of intelligent entertainment. Produced […]
★★★☆☆ Largely due to its popularity in the Indian sub-continent, cricket is now the second most popular sport in the world. In 2011, two journalists, Brit Sam Collins and Aussie Jarrod Kimber, united by a love of the game, set […]
★★★☆☆ The discovery of sexual identity propels Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays (2013). A woman struggles to impose masculinity on her body during a gender reassignment, while her adolescent daughter is overwhelmed by her own burgeoning womanhood. Formally striking, discussion will […]
★★☆☆☆ There are always drawbacks to adapting and projecting real life events onto the big screen. In the case of British director’s Simon Curtis’ Woman in Gold (2014), it’s not just that an odd-couple legal dramedy about art restitution can’t […]
★★★★☆ The latter part of that old adage about never working with children or animals has been taken on and smashed beyond all recognition in the strikingly original Hungarian parable White God (2014). What starts off as what could be […]
★★☆☆☆ In 2002 the CIA employed an armed drone in a targeted killing in Afghanistan and since then they have been used thousands of times. To their advocates they are a way of defeating a dangerous enemy without risking the […]
