A family is traumatised by the tragic death of a child in Vaughn Stein’s Every Breath You Take. Philip (Casey Affleck) is a psychiatrist and lecturer, his wife Grace (Michelle Monaghan) a real estate agent. They have a young son, Evan (Brenden Sunderland) and he has a senior school age daughter, Lucy (India Eisley) –…
David Lowery is a hard director to pin down. His versatility means he’s equally at home in a bleak crime drama (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), a supernatural love story (A Ghost Story) or a family-friendly adventure (Pete’s Dragon). Now he brings us The Old Man and the Gun, a kind of family-friendly crime drama and…
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,…
With overtones of the George Clooney action adventure drama The Perfect Storm, The Finest Hours is a slow moving story of courage and endeavour based upon fact. It starts out as a 1950s romance between a shy, respectful member of the US Coast Guard and the “say it as it is” love of his life,…
Urgent help needed – officer down. That’s the meaning behind the title of Triple 9, a gritty crime thriller directed by Australian John Hillcoat (The Road). Set in Atlanta, Georgia the film concerns a cadre of criminals conspiring with crooked cops (as portrayed by the likes of Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anthony Mackie) to rob a…
