A highly-charged thriller, Everybody Knows is intoxicating cinema. It’s the work of brilliant Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi who has woven some of the finest stories in recent years including The Salesman, The Past and A Separation. In Everybody Knows, a vital and beautiful girl disappears. Suddenly family threads start to unravel as a shadow of…
[7:00 pm] I’m sitting with a drink and snack ready for Captain Marvel. The crowd at the (full) preview screening is buzzing. [7:02] Trailer for Avengers: Endgame. Seems appropriate. [7:05] Oh, they’ve done something cool with the opening credits. Nice. [7:15] Okay so Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) is known as Vers (pronounced “veers”) and is…
Neil Jordan was a big name in the 1990s. Movies like The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire made him a household name. Since then his output has been a little patchy, but now he’s back with Greta, a film with a crafty premise and a great cast. The problem is that Jordan’s direction…
There’s no honour among thieves in the heist movie King of Thieves. A group of senior citizens plan and execute the perfect robbery. But then they get greedy and distrustful of one another. Most of them are old and infirm men who should know better, but the lure of riches is overwhelming. They’re led by…
A Dog’s Way Home is a family-friendly and heartwarming animal adventure that combines elements of classics of the genre like Lassie Come Home, Homeward Bound, and even 2017’s A Dog’s Purpose. As a pup Bella was raised in the crawl space beneath a dilapidated house in Denver. She was rescued by Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King), who…
Using harsh reality and pop culture as its backbone, Vox Lux is a hard-hitting drama about the price of fame. The film takes place between 1999 and 2017. After tragedy strikes at a US high school, Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) sings at a subsequent memorial service, which touches the hearts of mourners and Americans in general….
This laboured, overlong comedy inverts the premise behind What Women Want, the 2000 rom-com starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. In What Men Want, Taraji P Henson plays Ali, a self-absorbed and ambitious agent working in the male-dominated world of sports management. While she represents a number of Olympic athletes, she hasn’t got an NBA,…
For a while there, they were the most popular double act in the world. Laurel & Hardy were superstars of slapstick during the 1930s and ’40s. But all good things have to come to an end sometime; and director Jon S. Baird takes a warm-hearted look at the twilight of their careers in Stan &…
Danish star Mads Mikkelsen (The Hunt) virtually plays a lone hand in this grim tale of endurance and survival set in the frozen wastelands of the North Pole. Arctic recalls other survival dramas like All is Lost, in which Robert Redford played a lone role as a stranded sailor, or Cast Away with Tom Hanks…
A deeply distressing reality piece, Capharnaum pulls at the heart strings. The title translates to chaos and that’s what this film is about – surviving amid chaos. Zain (Zain Al Raffa) is a mistreated 12-year-old Lebanese boy. After being jailed for committing a violent crime, Zain sues his parents – mother Souad (Kawthar Al Bankole)…
