Rural noir being the big thing at the moment, it’s sad that many seem to have forgotten that there have been superbly talented authors like Garry Disher telling beautifully crafted, intelligent, and informed stories of the urban fringe, and the rural regions for many years. Peace is the second book now to feature Constable Paul…
Duplicity, comedy and crime make for a heady mix in the clever caper film, Game Night. Jason Bateman (Office Christmas Party) and Rachel McAdams (Spotlight) star as Max and Annie, a couple with a competitive streak. Their weekly game night with friends gets kicked up a notch when Max’s charismatic brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) arrives. Always looking…
If ever a movie perfectly represented director Peter Berg’s style, it’s Spenser Confidential. This Netflix film has all Berg’s stylistic fingerprints. It’s brash, nostalgic, violent, utilises a pumping soundtrack and features Mark Wahlberg. And while I admit I haven’t really warmed to some of his recent efforts, I enjoyed it. Those old enough might recall…
Both these films are in very limited release. 1945 On a summer day in 1945, an Orthodox Jewish man and his grown son return to a village in Hungary. The villagers are preparing for the wedding of the town clerk’s son. The townspeople expect the worst and behave accordingly. The town clerk fears the men…
Joseph O’Connor fictionalises a true story from World War 2 in the first of a planned trilogy, My Father’s House. The tale revolves around the work of Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty who used his position at the Vatican, a neutral territory within Rome, to help Allied prisoners of war escape. The tale involves the recollections…
“If it’s all you got, yeah, it’s all you gave, I got a problem with it. If you can’t do better than that, babe, I got a problem with it.” This is the catchy chorus you hear in Plains single, “Problem With It,” and it is incredibly hard to get out of your head. This…
Funny, irreverent, with more than a touch of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang about it, The Nice Guys is an action-crime comedy that has the same director and writer – Shane Black – at the helm and stars Russell Crowe (Gladiator) and Ryan Gosling (The Big Short). Black also wrote Lethal Weapon and Iron Man 3,…
While a largely enjoyable romp, The Mystery of Henri Pick becomes too convoluted for its own good. Henri Pick made pizzas for a living in France’s Brittany region. No one could have guessed was a gifted author (so much so that he could juxtapose Russian novelist Alexander Pushkin with the last throes of a relationship)?…
If only I had more time to live my life? Perhaps the catch cry of many as the years go by and as regrets build. But what if that were, indeed, possible? In this provocative psychological science fiction thriller, director Tarsem Singh explores the consequences of living on for an eternity. Billionaire industrialist Damian Hale…
This fascinating insight chronicles the adventures of an eclectic group of young pioneers who … well … changed the world. These were Canadian hippie journalists, photographers, musicians, scientists and American draft dodgers who set out to stop Richard Nixon’s atomic bomb tests in Amchitka, Alaska and end up creating a worldwide green movement. Greenpeace was…
