John Hyams’ psychological thriller Alone has twists aplenty. This two-hander set in the Pacific Northwest kept me engaged throughout. Six months ago, Jessica (Jules Willcox) lost her husband in tragic circumstances. Now she’s decided to move away. Her parents were going to help her pack, but she decided to do it alone and avoid especially…
While a largely enjoyable romp, The Mystery of Henri Pick becomes too convoluted for its own good. Henri Pick made pizzas for a living in France’s Brittany region. No one could have guessed was a gifted author (so much so that he could juxtapose Russian novelist Alexander Pushkin with the last throes of a relationship)?…
Leonardo da Vinci’s The Mona Lisa is world’s most famous painting by the world’s most famous artist in the world’s most famous museum. And it’s just one of the works featured in the remarkable, insightful documentary A Night at the Louvre: Leonardo da Vinci. The film is based around an exhibition that closed at the…
A mind-numbing comedy for senior citizens, Never Too Late relies on fanciful nonsense to move the story forward. A voice-over by Jacqui Weaver as Norma McCarthy sets the scene. Norma once met a handsome soldier Jack Bronson (played as an elderly gent by James Cromwell) the day before he shipped out to Vietnam. If he’d…
In Curtis Vowell’s comedy Baby Done, outdoorsy Zoe (Rose Matafeo) works as an arborist, alongside her boyfriend Tim (Matthew Lewis). Theirs is a happy union. All their coupled-up friends seem to be having babies, but the thought of being tied down makes Zoe shudder. And then she discovers she’s pregnant. Shellshocked Zoe doesn’t tell Tim…
Liam Neeson brings his Taken persona to the lead role in the action-drama Honest Thief. He plays ex-marine, Tom, who went on to become a successful bank robber. Tom looted 12 small-town institutions of more than $9 million over eight years. But a year ago he stopped – because he met Annie (Katie Walsh), who…
Greta Thunberg is a piercingly direct and effective communicator and yet she’s a teenager and has Asperger’s syndrome. She’s both admired and loathed (more than that, belittled) by world leaders and is single-handedly responsible for a movement. The fascinating documentary I Am Greta plots her path from a lonely figure outside Stockholm’s parliament in 2018…
She, Grace (Annette Bening) is intelligent, strong willed, heavily opinionated, volatile and fearsome – a force of nature. He, Edward (Bill Nighy) is intelligent, introverted and averse to confrontation. He likes to be left in peace. Married for 29 years, both are unhappy. She wants to work through it, believing they are a couple for…
Savage is brutal, devastating, powerful. It features a war of attrition borne of a tyrannical upbringing in New Zealand told in three time-frames over 24 years. Savages is the name given to a patched-up gang started by a couple of cell mates from juvenile detention. But let’s go back a step, Danny – known in…
In New York, a crotchety, chain-smoking Chinese-American grandmother gets lucky after leaving a casino … and then all hell breaks loose. Sasie Sealy’s black comedy, Lucky Grandma, places granny in the middle of a turf war between rival gangs. It all starts when Lei Lei the Fortune Teller (Wai Ching Ho) tells Grandma (Tsai Chin)…
