In Escape Room: Tournament of Champions six people are trapped with death awaiting them unless they find a way out. All of them have played this game before … and survived. Now they’re unwillingly thrust back into the same environment. A couple – Zoey Davis (Taylor Russell) and Ben Miller (Logan Miller) – are familiar…
The Cuban Missile Crisis looms in the tense spy thriller The Courier. Based on fact, it tells the story of America’s most valuable source of information about Russia during this tumultuous period. With nuclear war a real possibility, a high stakes cat-and-mouse game plays out. Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) is a high-ranking Russian official. But…
Maxine Mellor’s Horizon is an intense experience … not the type of show to be enjoyed so much as to provoked by. It is a sensibility that is conveyed from before its start thanks to an ominous pre-show soundscape and the gothic shadows of a darkened stage featuring a single white line as video backdrop…
Good Boys is Superbad with 11 year-olds. The film follows the misadventures of Max (fresh-faced Jacob Tremblay), a sixth-grader on the cusp of adolescence. He’s best friends with Thor (Brady Noon) and Lucas (Keith L Williams), who refer to themselves as “the beanbag boys” because they like sitting in bean bags. Max has been invited…
Terrence’s Malick’s The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but it drove me batty because I could not make head nor tail of it. So too David Lowery’s (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) A Ghost Story, which I only understood in the most rudimentary way. It concerns an official ghost. You know the ones,…
A story of forbidden love, societal pressures and a quest for knowledge, Guinevere Glasfurd’s debut novel, The Words in my Hand, is reminiscent of The Miniaturist, one of my favourite books of 2014. Here’s the blurb: The Words in my Hand is the reimagined true story of Helena Jans, a Dutch maid in 17th century Amsterdam,…
Wickedly clever with lots of droll humour, Logan Lucky is a rare treat. Divorced and desperate for money, unemployed West Virginia coal miner Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) hatches a wildly elaborate scheme. He plans to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in neighbouring North Carolina during a NASCAR race. He convinces his one-armed brother Clyde (Adam Driver),…
You don’t have to look hard to see the shadows looming over Lisa Joy’s Reminiscence. The film is essentially a re-working of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, with futuristic elements overlaying the noirish story. What Joy does with the tale is clever, but it never surpasses the original. Joy is better known as a screenwriter, notably for…
The early-20th Century struggle for women’s suffrage in Britain is given earnest, if somewhat pedestrian, treatment by director Sarah Gavron (Brick Lane) in Suffragette. The film ticks a lot of boxes, but never quite elevates itself beyond many other solid British period dramas. The film’s release hasn’t been particularly well-timed. With the aftermath of the…
Warlords of Wyrdwood is the second book in RJ Barker’s Forsaken trilogy. It does what all good middle books do: broadens out the world that readers were given hints of in book 1 – Gods of the Wyrdwood – deepens and complicates the relationships between the main characters and antagonists and sets everything up for…
