It is the summer of 1967 and the Vietnam War remains troubling. Young Australians are being drafted to serve. Back home, life continues. Tom (Rupert Bevan) and Meg (Cait Spiker) are in a high school production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Tom takes a fancy to Meg and engages her in awkward conversation. When their respective parents…
How It Ends. Well, I’ve never seen a movie title that sounded so ambiguous afterward. They should have added a question mark. I was very enthusiastic in the beginning. Once again a film from the Netflix Originals stable. Moreover, Forest Whitaker is in it. Without a doubt, one of my favorite star actors. When there’s…
It’s been a few years since I’ve read the Millennium series (and watched the Swedish film versions), but having enjoyed them, I was keen to see how a new writer would tackle the series. It’s big shoes to fill, but David Lagercrantz stepped into those shoes with style and clever storytelling. Here’s the blurb: The…
Thomas Bidegain’s tension-filled thriller Suddenly involves a couple marooned on a remote Antarctic island. Their hopes of survival diminish as days turn to weeks and months. Ben (Gilles Lellouche) and Laura (Melanie Thiery) have been together for five years as they embark on a global sailing voyage. Their next populated port of call is a…
A six-month affair with a best mate’s wife is the starting point for a French comedy about deceit, which has been translated into English. The central focus is businessman Michel (Stephen Curry). His bestie Paul (Bert LaBonté), with whom he plays tennis, was unceremoniously dumped from his job three weeks ago. Michel has been with his wife…
After Kingsman: The Secret Service and Kingsman: The Golden Circle, director Matthew Vaughn delivers a prequel. The King’s Man is the origin story, explaining how and why the spy organisation the Kingsman was formed. And it’s jam-packed full of action. The story starts in South Africa in 1902. Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) from the Red…
Denver 1978. 13-year-old Finney (Mason Thames) is a school kid who is a decent baseball pitcher. It looks like he is about to strike out big hitter Bruce (Tristan Pravong), but after two strikes Bruce goes all the way. Clearly happy with himself, while riding his bike home a black van looms ominously and Bruce…
Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet loves playing meta-textual games. And that’s patently evident in his trilogy of crime novels featuring French police detective Geroges Gorski, of which A Case of Matricide is the third and last. The books are purportedly written over forty years ago by a little known French author Raymond Brunet and merely…
Symbolic contrasts abound within The Curators’ stylish production of Angela Betzien’s Children of the Black Skirt, starting from its initial folly of youthful frolic and then soon-after stark at-attention responses of children in-fear. This establishes both the aesthetic sophistication and the narrative premise of the now-iconic work which is set in an abandoned orphanage that…
Set in New York City in 1980, Armageddon Time is a coming-of-age story highlighting African-American and Jewish experiences. And it’s the vehicle to propel two bright young actors onto the world stage. Fourteen year-old Banks Repeta plays sixth-grader Paul Graff, a boy from a middle class Jewish family. Jaylin Webb, 16, portrays Johnny Davis, a…
