Turning Agatha Christie murder mysteries into popular cinema is proving quite lucrative. So it’s not surprising that for the third time Kenneth Branagh has teamed with writer Michael Green to adapt Christie’s late (1969) novel Hallowe’en Party for A Haunting in Venice. The unsettling supernatural thriller follows the success of Murder on the Orient Express…
Omar Sy (The Intouchables) charms as the world’s greatest, most understanding dad in Two is a Family. He’s aided by the equally effervescent Gloria Coulson, who makes her feature film debut. Samuel (Sy) enjoys a hedonistic lifestyle on the sun-drenched beaches of the French Riviera, where he uses his boss’ boat for his own pleasure….
After something of a misstep with the uneven Thor: Love and Thunder, director Taika Waititi returns to the kind of gentle humour that has marked his career with Next Goal Wins. If you like early Taika – Eagle vs Shark, or Flight of the Conchords, for example – you’ll likely warm to this rollicking underdog…
English playwright Jez Butterworth’s first professional play was the corker Mojo. It premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1995, when he was 26 years of age. It won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. Now, Almost Pisces Productions, a female founded theatre company, has reimagined it with an all-girl cast…
Guy Ritchie is a polarising figure in the world of cinema. Just about everyone you care to talk to will say they love his early work – Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000) – but he then blotted his copybook with the widely-panned 2002 misadventure Swept Away, starring then-wife Madonna. But…
Danish star Mads Mikkelsen (The Hunt) virtually plays a lone hand in this grim tale of endurance and survival set in the frozen wastelands of the North Pole. Arctic recalls other survival dramas like All is Lost, in which Robert Redford played a lone role as a stranded sailor, or Cast Away with Tom Hanks…
I am not sure I fully understood, absorbed or appreciated all that The King’s Player was about, even though other patrons seemed to be having a wow of a time. Suffice to say, it is a lone hander and the writer and performer is clearly talented – adept at crafting and playing physical and improvisational comedy….
I was a fan of the UK television series Cold Feet, so when I received this book written by the creator of that series, I was intrigued. Here’s the blurb: ‘Trust wasn’t something you could have in degrees; it was all or nothing…’ When one bad decision sends a happy couple into turmoil and turns…
Can plants talk? Some scientific research suggests they are sentient. A humorous new work by Karla Livingstone-Pardy and Zachary Sheridan (who are the writers and directors) takes this concept quite a few fanciful steps further. It concerns a young woman named Anne (Julia Kok) who was abandoned by her parents when she was a child in the…
Anarchic and visually stylish, T2: Trainspotting has been eagerly anticipated by fans of the original, which was released in 1996. But even if you didn’t see that, director Danny Boyle delivers a gritty experience with the same four degenerates that made the first installment such a favourite. Mind you, it took me a few minutes…
