Nearly 25 years after Gladiator, Ridley Scott has gone back to the well… and this time there are sharks in the Colosseum. In Gladiator II, Russell Crowe, who played Maximus in the original, is only seen in a couple of quick throwback scenes. But even with the focus squarely on his son, Lucius (Paul Mescal),…
There’s Always Tomorrow is a bittersweet story about a family of six. The film is set in Rome in the mid-1940s, after the Liberation. But the war has left misery in its aftermath. The primary focus is on wife, Delia (played by Paola Cortellesi, who has co-written and directs the film). She and her family…
I am faced with a predicament that I can’t say I have confronted too many times after a few decades of reviewing. I have just seen a compelling piece of theatre, which I am about to highly recommend, but I will resist going into detail about the plot. I choose not to do so because…
The supremely talented Washington family come together to keep the legacy of the late August Wilson alive with The Piano Lesson. And in the process, they’ve created one of the most extraordinary films of the year. The Piano Lesson is the third in patriarch Denzel Washington’s ambitious ongoing project to produce films of all Wilson’s…
I must confess that I haven’t seen the first two films in the Terrifier series. But I was drawn to check out the third film in the slasher franchise out of curiosity due to news reports from the US about people fainting, vomiting and fleeing from the cinema due to the intense level of graphic…
In 2002, the tense thriller Phone Booth (2002) was centred around, you guessed it, a phone booth. Now, 22 years later, Robert Zemeckis’ new drama Here is centred around a lounge room. It’s about the people who lived and roamed in that space dating back to the formation of Earth. It features a volcanic eruption,…
Just how far can artificial intelligence take us? Can it deliver genuine companionship and more for the lonely, elderly and ailing? Those questions are answered in the resounding affirmative by playwright Jose Rivera in his dramatic and comedic work Your Name Means Dream. Aislin (Caroline Lee), of Polish Irish extraction (and whose name means dream…
A whip smart dramatic and comedic script and a couple of stellar performances characterise a seedy story set in Singapore. Singaporean Chinese Girl (Merlynn Tong) is 14 and her brother Boy (Charles Wu) is 21. Boy moved out of home seven years ago and became a gang member, which he regards as a badge of…
Greedy People is a blackly comic and atmospheric low budget crime-drama from director Potsy Ponciroli (Old Henry) and writer Mike Vukadinovich (TV series Runaways). Set in a picturesque coastal town in Rhode Island, it very much has a similar vibe to the Coen brothers. Ponciroli juggles a great cast of eccentric and amoral characters, all…
Body image is a hot topic at the moment, something The Substance recently tapped into with great success. But while The Substance leaned more into a particular kind of body horror, Aaron Schimberg goes in a different direction with his intriguing but perplexing A Different Man. In the film, the main character has neurofibromatosis. Basically…
