The charming if rough-edged coming-of-age drama Scrapper taps into that unique British genre – the kitchen sink drama. Twelve-year-old Georgie (newcomer Lola Campbell) lives all alone in her apartment on a council housing estate outside London following the recent death of her mother. Self-reliant and resourceful, she pretends to social services that she is living…
There’s barely a moment’s let-up in the tense, action thriller Retribution. Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) has worked as a financier for Nanite Capital for 18 years under its CEO Anders Muller (Matthew Modine). Work drives Turner. He and his family live in luxury in Berlin and he drives a luxury car. He has little time…
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…
It is the future and Earth Seven is becoming uninhabitable. Too many people, too few resources. It is time to get out, but the opportunity is not there for everyone. In fact, even amongst “the chosen”, everything has to be just right … and it isn’t for Hon, otherwise known as Panther (Melanie Audrey) and Tee (Sodi…
Myra in Space is a dramatic comedy from independent theatre company Baggage Productions, which is dedicated to producing original scripts written by women. It concerns female agency, unfulfilled potential and, possibly, mental illness. Myra Foreman (Kelly Nash) is a 65-year-old married woman with two grown children, who is at the crossroads. For as long as she can…
Anthony Lapaglia and Alison Whyte shine in a superb rendition of one of the finest plays of the 20th century, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. It won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in the same year. It is an incendiary look at the American Dream, which relates to…
The genuinely creepy horror-thriller The Nun II harks back to The Nun (2018), in which a demonic sister named Valak ran riot. Well … now she’s back, at her malevolent worst. Valak terrifies adults and children alike. And, again, the Vatican prevails on Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga), now entrenched in the work of the church,…
The best storytelling comes from showing not telling… that is using action (or lack of, as the case may be) to reveal the emotions intended to be interpreted by the audience. Awareness of this is at the core of Hannah Belanszky’s mainstage debut work Don’t Ask What the Bird Look Like from its very outset…
The Camorra is in the sights of mysterious former government operative Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) in the violent, action-filled The Equalizer 3. The third and final film in the Equalizer trilogy, you can watch this one in isolation and make sense of it even if you haven’t seen the others. It’s directed by Antoine Fuqua,…
Writer-director Celine Song delivers a stunning debut with Past Lives. This thoughtful, compelling film gives a fresh voice to the migrant experience, while also working as a contemplative character study. Song’s previous experience was as a staff writer on the fantasy TV series The Wheel of Time. This film bears little relationship to that series….
