Tag: drama
The Children Act
Thursday, December 6th, 2018 Film Reviews,It’s a big year at the movies for Ian McEwan, a novelist who seems to enjoy pulling the carpet out from under his protagonists. In August we had On Chesil Beach, adapted by McEwan from his own novel of 2007. Now he has written a screenplay for The Children Act, published in 2014. McEwan is […]
Shoplifters
Friday, November 30th, 2018 Film Reviews,Everyone knows George Santayana’s famous line: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. This is axiomatic, most especially in an age when attention spans are shrinking to the size of a mobile phone screen. The philosopher’s second-most-popular quotation is rather more problematic. When Santayana wrote: “The family is one of nature’s […]
Widows
Friday, November 23rd, 2018 Film Reviews,When Steve McQueen won the 2013 Academy Award for Best Picture for 12 Years a Slave, it was a testament to his choice of subject matter rather than his skills as a director. With a background in video art – a medium in which boring and pointless exercises often enjoy critical acclaim – McQueen has […]
The Old Man & the Gun
Thursday, November 15th, 2018 Film Reviews,There was an old man with a gun Who spent his whole life on the run His favourite prank Was to hold up a bank He said it was his kind of fun If The Old Man & the Gun is the swansong of Robert Redford’s acting career he’s not going out with a bang […]
Suspiria
Thursday, November 8th, 2018 Film Reviews,Most remakes leave one pondering the wisdom of Oscar Wilde’s line: “each man kills the thing he loves.” If a filmmaker feels so attached to a movie that he or she wants to make it again, surely that remake should be an insightful re-imagining of the original. I don’t need to stress how rarely this […]
Bohemian Rhapsody
Friday, November 2nd, 2018 Film Reviews,When a film spends eight years in production, from first announcement to opening night, it doesn’t augur well, epecially if that same film changes directors when two-thirds complete. After such a painful birth perhaps we should be pleased Bohemian Rhapsody made it to the cinema at all. Dare we hope that it’s any good? Bryan […]
A Star is Born
Saturday, October 20th, 2018 Film Reviews,One learns to mistrust the movie that is hyped to the skies – whether it be “critically acclaimed” or simply a “box office sensation”. The box office is the worst guide to quality because popular taste is fixated on superheroes, brain-dead action films, lame comedies and sentimental mush. As for the critics, they couldn’t stop […]
1%
Friday, October 12th, 2018 Film Reviews,On first impressions one wouldn’t imagine Matt Nable to be the literary type. Covered in tattoos, muscle-bound, mo-hawked, and prone to a bit of ultra-violence, Nable, who plays bikie leader, Knuck, in Stephen McCallum’s 1%, is also responsible for the screenplay. Although most of the dialogue is a stream of expletives, it’s more convincing than […]
The Seagull
Thursday, October 4th, 2018 Film Reviews,Although Anton Chekhov’s plays were considered radically naturalistic when first performed, they feel like period pieces today. The saving grace is that the period to which they belong was one of the most fertile in world literature, with Chekhov’s brief span of 44 years intersecting with the lives of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Leskov and Bunin, […]
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
Thursday, September 27th, 2018 Film Reviews,Consistency is not a word to be used too freely in relation to Gus Van Sant. Like Steven Soderbergh he has oscillated between arthouse and mainstream, so one never quite knows what’s coming next. For every bleak, existential drama such as Last Days (2005), there’s a heart-warmer like Good Will Hunting (1997). One of Van […]