In these days of endless sequels, prequels, re-boots and re-imaginings, it often feels odd to encounter something out of left field. But you can always trust French cinema to deliver something out of the ordinary – and director Bertrand Bonello delivers just that with The Beast. Bonello and his screenwriting partners Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin…
Shake & Stir’s adaption of Mary Shelly’s classic gothic horror novel Frankenstein is thrilling in both pace and spectacle. From its beginning, the company leans into the scale and theatrical potential of the epic story of young scientist Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a sentient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. The colossal storytelling starts aboard…
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…
Told in flashback, Blueback is a feel-good story with a strong environmental message about protecting the reef. Abby Jackson (Mia Wasikowska) is a marine biologist researching coral bleaching. Unexpectedly, she learns that her mother Dora (Radha Mitchell) has just had a stroke and can’t speak. She quickly returns to her childhood home on the Western…
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia seems determined to write a book in every sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy and horror. She has taken on vampires in Certain Dark Things, powers in The Beautiful Ones and the gothic tradition in Mexican Gothic. Now Moreno-Garcia takes on and reinvents The Island of Doctor Moreau, one of the slightly less famous…
Arrogance, entitlement and indulgence meet desert justice in The Forgiven. This rich and textured movie by John Michael McDonagh (Calvary) is based on Lawrence Osborne’s eponymous 2012 novel. Medical specialist David Henninger (Ralph Fiennes) and his wife Jo (Jessica Chastain) spend a lavish weekend with old friend Richard Galloway (Matt Smith) in Morocco. The location…
Hercule Poirot step aside; for Chief Inspector Jules Maigret is on the case. In director Patrice Leconte’s Maigret, Gerard Depardieu takes on the title role as an ageing, unwell cop trying to track down a murderer. It’s Paris, 1953 and a young woman has been found dead. The victim, Louise Louviere (Clara Antoons), is no…
As cultural touchstones go, few are as storied – or problematic – as Dune. Frank Herbert’s dense 1965 novel was (and is still) regarded as a breakthrough in the sci-fi genre, spawning a sometimes-fanatical following. The book was often considered unfilmable – something reinforced by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed attempt at it in the 1970s. Then…
Twist is contemporary take on Charles Dickens’ classic Oliver Twist. Dickens’ tale followed a poor orphan boy lured into life of crime under the control of the elderly rogue Fagin. Twist updates the setting from the grim and bleak streets of Victorian era London to the sleek glass and concrete structures of modern-day London. In…
In the introduction to Nick, Michael Farris-Smith talks about his relationship with its “source material”, the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby. That relationship shifted over the years and his response to that novel changed as he grew and changed. As this happened the character who he found himself most fascinated with was…
