Fifty years ago, The Exorcist rewrote the rule book. It was the first horror film nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. The loosely connected The Exorcist: Believer starts in colourful style in Haiti. Pregnant Sorenne Fielding (Tracey Graves) and her photographer husband Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) are on holiday. Then, all hell breaks loose….
The sci-fi adventure The Creator questions whether artificial intelligence is the big bad bogey or not. A war is raging between humans and robots possessing artificial intelligence. But, at first, it’s not clear which side is wearing the black hats and which the white. Joshua (John David Washington) is an American special forces soldier operating…
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…
For those not in the know, Paw Patrol is a Canadian computer-animated children’s TV series that has been running on Nickelodeon for a decade. The show focuses on a 10-year-old boy named Ryder who leads a crew of search and rescue dogs in Adventure City that call themselves the PAW Patrol. A feature film called…
The charming Last Film Show centres around Samay (Bhavin Rabari), a cheeky and intelligent 9-year-old boy who lives in a remote, impoverished region of northern India. His father makes chai for the passengers of the trains that stop briefly at the local railway station. But after a visit to a cinema in a nearby town…
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…
Although the title of the French/Portuguese co-production Everybody Loves Jeanne may remind many of the popular TV series Everybody Loves Raymond, this slight and underwhelming comedy/drama is far from a laugh out loud crowd-pleaser. Jeanne Mayer (Blanche Gardin) is in the midst of a midlife crisis. Seemingly self-assured and successful on the surface she is…
Are you an adventurous moviegoer? Did you go to Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and think, “yeah, but it could be a bit weirder”? If so, my friend, then you need to seek out Biosphere; Mel Eslyn’s quirky but provocative film about the end of the world (or is it?). As the title suggests, Biosphere…
For anyone who’s ever had a dream, Theater Camp (yes, it’s the US spelling) is essential viewing. This wildly entertaining mockumentary from co-directors Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman pays homage to Christopher Guest, but with more heart and less snark. Gordon and Lieberman have specifically referenced Guest’s films as a major influence. Indeed, you can…
