Exploitation and heartache are at the centre of Indivisible, a gritty story about attractive, singing 18-year-old conjoined twins. Connected at the hip, Daisy (Marianna Fontana) and Viola (Angela Fontana) are gifted. They have beautiful voices and often sing at local weddings, family functions and communions. Their father, a seedy, small-time businessman, has turned them into an…
Respectful, determined and humble. That is the picture that emerges of Australian tennis great Evonne Goolagong Cawley in Sunshine Super Girl, a moniker given to her by the British press. Goolagong picked up a tennis racquet at an early age and immediately showed impressive hand/eye coordination. She grew up without the home comforts many of us took…
Dark Pines, the debut novel for Will Dean, is set in Gavrik, a small town in the county of Värmland in Western Sweden. Tuva Moodyson, the main character, is the chief reporter for its weekly newspaper, the Gavrik Posten. Although she grew up in Sweden Tuva has spent a number of years abroad and has…
The trashy Fatale is a latter day noir thriller that’s part Fatal Attraction and part Basic Instinct. But the longer it goes the more convoluted its plotting becomes and some plot twists become a little too unbelievable. Derrick (Michael Ealy) is a sports agent who has built a successful business with his best friend Rafe…
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…
This biopic of athlete and WWII survivor Louis Zamperini is something of a labour of love for Angelina Jolie. This is her second fiction feature as a director following 2011’s drama In the Land of Blood and Honey, which was set against the backdrop of the Bosnian war, and Unbroken shares a number of similar…
This quirky, comedic cross cultural drama, set in New York, concerns a serious, hard working driving instructor who has a second job as a taxi driver and a book reviewer that has just found out her husband is leaving her. The instructor is Darwan (Ben Kingsley) an Indian Sikh who was granted political asylum and…
Damon Galgut’s ninth novel The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize. Not having read all of the shortlisted novels it is hard to determine whether it was the best of the five. But there is no doubt that The Promise is a towering yet often intimate novel combining family drama and incisive character observation set…
I love streaming. It offers so many choices for you to enjoy at your leisure. I also hate streaming. I mean, it offers you just so many choices to enjoy at your leisure. The convenience is great, but the deluge of shows and movies means things – great things – can slip right by you….
An intense and claustrophobic alien creature feature that fails to reach any great heights, Underwater takes its sweet time to bite. More than 10 kilometres below the ocean’s surface, something has awakened. The crew of the Kepler mining operation understood there would be hardships on their mission. Thirty days confined to the narrow corridors and…
