If you ever wondered just how quirky and delusional (off the planet, in fact) billionaire recluse Howard Hughes was, after watching Rules Don’t Apply you will be in no two minds. Set in 1950s Hollywood, Rules Don’t Apply follows the burgeoning romance between aspiring actress Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins) and her ambitious driver Frank Forbes…
Dour and affecting, The Innocents is a historical drama inspired by little known events that happened in Poland immediately after WWII. It concerns the story of nuns that were raped and thereby shamed by their so-called liberators, the Russians. Many of these God-fearing samaritans were knocked up as a result and they were instructed to…
Subtle is the key word in describing Things to Come; a sometimes tortuously slow-moving slice-of-life drama. Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) teaches philosophy at a college in Paris. She’s passionate about her work and particularly enjoys passing on the pleasure of thinking to the next generation. Married with two grown up children, she devotes her spare time…
The word “embarrassment” is far too praiseworthy for Table 19, a decidedly unworthy cinematic offering. Just what were or weren’t the filmmakers thinking in compiling this mother-lode of tripe? Ex-maid of honour Eloise McGarry (Anna Kendrick) – having been relieved of her duties after being unceremoniously dumped by the best man via text – decided…
We’ve seen a number of films recently about elderly people behaving badly and refusing to go gently into that good night, although the nadir of this sub-genre would have to be last year’s awful Dirty Grandpa. We even had the British comedy Golden Years, in which an elderly couple, fed up with the way their…
A story within a story, set at the height of the Second World War, Their Finest has drama, pathos, humour and subtlety. With increasing numbers of men drafted to fight for their lives on the front line, bombs continued to drop relentlessly on London. Those left behind, made up predominantly of women, children and the…
Visually effusive, with the look and feel of a futuristic video game, the storyline of Ghost in the Shell is an all too familiar one. Based on the Japanese manga of the same name by Masamune Shirow, Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman) directs from a screenplay by Jamie Moss (Street Kings) and William…
There is excess, and then there is The Fate of the Furious, the eighth incarnation of one of the world’s most successful movie franchises. In short, this is stunt heaven, with a surfeit of fast cars in exotic locales (all of which are beautiful to behold) and fiery explosions. As we keep getting told from…
Some mad movie scientist has spliced together the DNA of Alien, John Carpenter’s The Thing and Gravity, and the result is Life, a slick claustrophobic sci-fi thriller. This extra-terrestrial creature feature is familiar stuff and ticks all the right boxes, and it fills a void and will suffice until Ridley Scott unleashes his Alien Covenant…
Disney has turned the classic animated feature Beauty and the Beast into a memorable live action adaptation, adding three new songs written by Alan Menken and Tim Rice in the process. Emma Watson is a fine choice as The Beauty, while Dan Stevens (TV’s Downton Abbey) is the fully digital character The Beast, created through…
