Set on the eve of WWII, Six Minutes to Midnight is a moderately engaging spy thriller. The film is set mainly in the Augusta-Victoria College, situated in a sprawling old mansion in Bexhill On Sea, near Brighton. It’s an upmarket British finishing school for the daughters and goddaughters of high-ranking Nazis. The girls are learning…
A family is traumatised by the tragic death of a child in Vaughn Stein’s Every Breath You Take. Philip (Casey Affleck) is a psychiatrist and lecturer, his wife Grace (Michelle Monaghan) a real estate agent. They have a young son, Evan (Brenden Sunderland) and he has a senior school age daughter, Lucy (India Eisley) –…
Like the recent Judy (about the tragic Judy Garland), The United States vs Billie Holiday is a biopic featuring a talented but self-destructive singer who shone briefly and died too early. This film follows many of the familiar tropes of this rich sub-genre. The product of a turbulent childhood Billie Holiday was a jazz singer…
Brutality, cynicism and tongue-in-cheek humour mark Mortal Kombat – a video game franchise turned big screen fight night. The story thread begins with an ancient fight to the death. It is 1617 in Japan. A warrior and father of two carries a tattoo of a dragon. He confronts an opponent who can literally freeze people…
In Harry Macqueen’s Supernova, Sam (Colin Firth) is a classical pianist, and his partner Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is a writer. Now middle-aged, the couple have been together for decades. They know how to press each other’s buttons, but are still very much in love. One day they decide to dust off the old camper van…
Raja (Mariya Belkin) and Victor Frankel (Vladimir Friedman), a couple in their 60s, were the unsung heroes of Russian cinema. For several decades they had dubbed Hollywood epics into Russian for cinema audiences. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, the couple left Russia and migrated to Israel. But like thousands of…
If you want to see basically every space-movie trope collected in one neat package, Neil Burger’s highly derivative Voyagers could be it. This outwardly beautiful but shallow film tries hard, but ultimately falls short. The obvious starting point – as it often tends to be – is Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey. From…
The astounding Romanian documentary Collective exposes corruption on a scale I haven’t seen. The immorality reaches into the highest echelons of the health system, killing patients who would otherwise survive. This happened recently – in October 2015 to be more precise – and it took an investigative reporter, Catalin Tolontan, and two of his colleagues,…
Two by Two Overboard follows mischievous animal best friends Finny and Leah as they navigate living on Noah’s Ark, with their misadventures implicating every other species during the flood. This family-friendly sequel to the 2015 predecessor Ooops! Noah is Gone…, is a left-field approach to the biblical tale as it illustrates how the animal kingdom…
The Moro Spanish Film Festival 2021 brings you a sensational selection of new and recent Spanish language films. The films feature some of Spain and Latin America’s leading stars along with exciting new acting talent. The festival opens from April 20 at Palace Cinemas around the country. The rich program consists of 20 feature films…
