Of all movie sub-genres, the music biopic seems particularly resistant to change. With perhaps a couple of exceptions, they all follow the same basic structure – humble beginnings, meteoric rise, success and inevitable decline (often with a dose of 12-step redemption). Midas Man – Joe Stephenson’s portrait of The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein – is…
Sensitive and affecting, Touch is a love story that spans the ages. The central characters meet at a Japanese restaurant in the UK. On principle, young Icelander Kristofer (Palmi Kormakur) gives up his place at the prestigious London School of Economics to work as a dishwasher at the busy eatery. He meets the restaurant owner’s…
Inspired by real life events, Take My Hand is a heart-wrenching love story that spans decades. Laura (Meg Fraser) is still a schoolgirl – whose father teaches history – when she meets and falls for Michael (Xavier Molyneux), the football-playing son of a Greek greengrocer. She loves riding horses on the family’s country property, but…
There is one way to compromise a dramatic tale of obsession gone horribly askew that features impressive staging. Get the sound mix wrong. Unfortunately, that was the case at the premiere of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The music totally overwhelmed the opening number and did so again during parts of Act II. So much so that…
Writer and director JT Mollner (Outlaws and Angels) crafts a tightly wound, stylish, horror-thriller with Strange Darling. Shot entirely on 35 mm, it’s one of the most compelling movies I’ve seen in a long time. It concerns a serial killer with a kink who operated in the US between 2018 and 2020. More specifically, it…
An esoteric work for selective tastes, as far as I could make out An Organised Odyssey is about finding one’s true voice. According to Greek mythology, Scylla is a legendary, man-eating monster. She lives on one side of a narrow channel of water, opposite her counterpart, sea-swallowing monster Charybdis. Ancient Greek poet Homer described Scylla…
I couldn’t help thinking about the warped Jeffrey Epstein while watching Zoe Kravitz’s psychological thriller Blink Twice. The film concerns billionaire tech mogul Slater King (Channing Tatum), who steps aside after a major error of judgment. He ups his philanthropy, buys a private island and makes a series of very public apologies for his actions….
Writer Benjamin Nichol continues his incendiary anthology series of plays with the double bill Milk and Blood. Each 70 minutes in duration, they concern the trials and tribulations of a single mother and a gay escort. Both are hard hitting and powerful monologues, presenting snippets of the lives of characters simply called Mummy (in Milk)…
If I reference the word “suffragette”, the first name that will pop into many people’s heads will be Emmeline Pankurst (1858 – 1928). In 1903, she was a founding member of the Women’s Social and Political Union in the UK, which adopted the motto “deeds, not words”. Another associated with the movement was Sarah Jane…
Among Alien fandom there’s a broad consensus that the canonical films are the first two: Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). Fede Alvarez’s new instalment Alien: Romulus is perhaps ideally placed between the two. So it serves as a kind of sequel to Alien and a prequel to Aliens. For me at…
