Unlike boxing, NFL football, horse racing, car racing, or even surfing, golf is not the most cinematic of sports and holds little appeal for adrenaline junkies. However, we have had a few films set against the backdrop of the sport, including the Adam Sandler comedy Happy Gilmore, Tin Cup starring Kevin Costner, and Robert Redford’s…
The Lost City of Z turns out to be a kind of boy’s own adventure story. Based on author David Grann’s non-fiction bestseller, the film follows British explorer Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam). Fawcett journeys into the Amazon in 1906 where he discovers evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilisation that once inhabited the region. His…
Intense and compelling, The King’s Choice is a historical drama is based around Norway’s entry into World War II. Inspired by a book of the same name by Alf R. Jacobsen, it concerns three dramatic days in April 1940. The King of Norway is presented with a monstrous ultimatum from Nazi Germany: surrender or die….
Kindertransport is an English play written in 1993, by Diane Samuels. Samuels has written: In early November 1938 an intensive series of ‘pogrom’ attacks on Jewish property and arrests of people were launched in Nazi Germany. This became known as ‘Kristallnacht’, The Night of Broken Glass, and has subsequently been called “pogromnacht’ or Novemberpogrome’. In…
An intense and visceral experience, Dunkirk is war up-close and personal like few films before it. Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) writes, directs and co-produces the action-packed drama. The picture opens as hundreds of thousands of British and Allied troops are surrounded by German forces. Trapped on the beach at Dunkirk in northern France with their backs to…
A lively French box-office hit, Monsieur Chocolat details a fascinating rise-and-fall story. This is the tale of the first popular Afro-Cuban artist on the French stage. His real name was Rafael Padilla; but he became known as Chocolat. Padilla was only nine years old when sold into slavery. He then escaped to a different life. Set…
Director Terence Davies continues his love affair with the woman he regards as America’s greatest poet in A Quiet Passion. Born into privilege in 1803, Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) spent most of her life on her parents’ estate in Armherst, Massachusetts. In her youth, Dickinson is shown as a fiercely intelligent young woman who exchanges forthright…
Between 1915 and 1923, the Ottoman Empire murdered some 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children in a systematic policy of genocide aimed at wiping out the entire population. It has been recognised as one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. But when the history of WWI is written, this horrific episode is…
Churchill is a fascinating portrait of a man of high intellect who was facing a fight on two fronts in the final months of the Second World War. On the one hand there were the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men whose lives he was about to put on the line and then there…
Pablo Neruda was the pen-name (and later legal name) of Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, who lived from July 12, 1904 to September 23, 1973. In 1971, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Lyrical, poetic and steeped in politics, Neruda is what I would term a “festival” film; one for purists. It’s…
