Anyone who enjoyed Jeffrey Archer’s seven volume Clifton Chronicles will lap up his latest rags-to-riches tale which contains all of the familiar elements of his novels. It is his first stand-alone novel in a decade as the Clifton Chronicles has taken up most of his time. There is a virtuous young hero who makes his…
Epic in scope and set against the backdrop of the Cold War, Never Look Away spans some thirty years of German history and dramatic social change. It is loosely based on the life of renowned German artist Gerard Richter, widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary artists. The film opens in Dresden in…
It’s rare that we get to see a film from Paraguay. It’s even rarer that this deeply conservative country would produce a film about two elderly lesbians whose relationship is undergoing something of a crisis. But that’s what we get in The Heiresses from writer/director Marcelo Martinessi. Chela (played by veteran theatre actress Anna Brun…
In 1613 William Shakespeare (played in All is True by Kenneth Branagh) was the most famous writer in England. But then his beloved Globe Theatre burned to the ground during a performance of his final play Henry VIII after a prop misfired. Shakespeare retired following that disaster and returned home to Stratford-upon-Avon. There he pottered…
Recently we’ve had a number of female-centric remakes of films with the likes of Ghostbusters, Ocean’s 8 and the atrocious What Men Want hitting cinemas, all of which were vastly inferior to the original. Now we get this female centric remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the hilarious 1988 comedy that teamed Michael Caine and Steve…
Oscar winning filmmaker Hal Ashby was something of an uncompromising maverick who preferred to work outside the studio system because he believed they valued commerce over art. “Studios are the enemy of the artist,” his friend and mentor Norman Jewison told him rather frankly. Ashby won an Oscar for his work on editing Jewison’s In…
Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a dedicated kindergarten teacher. But she seems stuck in a sort of midlife crisis. Her homelife is rather dull, and to try and add some spark she has enrolled in an adult poetry writing class in New York, run by the handsome Simon (Gael Garcia Bernal). But he’s initially dismissive…
Maverick filmmaker Terry Gilliam finally brings his long-gestating passion project about Don Quixote to the big screen. The struggles he faced have been well detailed in the fascinating 2002 documentary Lost In La Mancha. That film told of the storms that destroyed sets, the lack of financial support and the ill-health of its star, all…
The painfully unfunny Little is a variation on the body-swap formula that drove films such as Big and Suddenly 30. There’s little about this dud to recommend it to audiences. Jordan Sanders (Regina Hall) was a nerd when at school. But twenty years later, she’s a high-powered millionaire. Jordan has become a ruthless, work-obsessed executive…
Eccentric Danish auteur Lars Von Trier makes controversial and deliberately confronting films. His latest is likely to be divisive as well. Despite the title, The House That Jack Built is not a family-friendly fairy tale. Rather this is Von Trier’s portrait of a sadistic serial killer. But the film isn’t as illuminating nor as insightful…
