Although it has some delightful elements, Last Christmas is an uneven mix of silliness and fun. Kate (Emilia Clarke) hasn’t exactly got her life together. She’s personable, but far from stable. She doesn’t see eye to eye with her overbearing mother, Petra (Emma Thompson), an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia. Nor is she disciplined enough…
I love a good psychological thriller so I was keen to get stuck into Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica (author of The Good Girl). Here’s the blurb: She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away….
From the earliest days of rock & roll, there’s been a special place for power trios, like Cream, Rush, Nirvana, Husker Du, The Jam, King’s X, The Police, and plenty more. These are bands that relied on the essential less is more formula, often just guitar, bass & drums, and one or more sang, they…
A story of spirit and determination, but above all passion, Harry & Snowman chronicles the life of Dutch-born American Harry deLeyer and the horse he rescued from certain death. Snowman was a white plough horse literally bought off the back of a truck where it was bound for a glue factory. DeLeyer was the purchaser…
The latest film from Mia Hansen-Love (the semi-autobiographical Goodbye, First Love) is a character study that looks at the early development of garage and house dance music in Paris in the 90s, and will probably appeal more to people who love that kind of thing. I found it something of a bore. Paul (played by…
Justice or revenge? If someone close to you was murdered, what would you want and what would happen if you didn’t get what you wanted? That conundrum is at the heart of this thriller. I like a good police whodunit, an involving mystery that entangles you until the final frames. You might think you have…
In the Indiana Jones wannabe, The Lost City, Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) is a writer struggling to find a suitable ending for her latest potboiler. She writes Mills and Boon-like fancies, featuring long-haired hero Lothario Dash. The model she’s used on 20 front covers is Alan (Channing Tatum), who is invariably asked to rip off…
It’s easy to automatically reject that which the Internet deems as being worthy of our time and attention. I had peripherally been made aware of Frank Ocean’s impending release and all of the buzz surrounding it. Appreciating his earlier work but not totally in love with it, I was skeptical of the actual merits of…
The fourth of the great Stephen Sondheim musicals that Victorian Opera has tackled since 2013, A Light Night Music remains as charming and funny as when it was first conceived nearly 50 years ago. With music and lyrics by Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler, the musical was inspired by the 1955 Ingmar Bergman film…
Geostorm has to be one of the most ridiculous disaster movies in a pantheon of clunkers in the genre. Even the special effects are severely underwhelming. After an unprecedented series of natural disasters threatened the planet, the world’s leaders came together to create an intricate network of satellites to control the global climate and keep…
