For a while now, Glen Powell has largely traded on his (very) good looks. His recent cinema outing Anyone But You, proved a box office hit. But the actor spreads his wings somewhat as an undercover agent in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. I say “somewhat” because he still can’t entirely escape his genetic gifts in…
You remember that guy… You know, from that show… Oh, you mean Kramer? No, no, the other one… George? No – the other one What, Jerry? Yeah, yeah; that’s him. Of course – Jerry. After changing the face of television with Seinfeld (1991 – 98), Jerry Seinfeld has spent the next 25 years or so…
K-dramas (from South Korea), have been making a huge impact on Netflix in the past few years (e.g. Squid Game), with one of them, The Glory, making it into the top 10 for 2023. Gyeongseong Creature arrived with much hype, with the irresistible pairing of a couple of well-loved actors – Park Seo-Jun and Han…
The story made world news. On 15 May 2010, 16-year-old Jessica Watson became the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo, non-stop and unassisted. It was just her, a 10-metre-long boat named Ella’s Pink Lady and the elements. In the Netflix movie True Spirit, Teagan Croft plays Watson. Her mentor is a Ben Bryant (Cliff…
The church, religion and medical science have a lot to answer for in The Wonder. This is acclaimed director Sebastián Lelio’s first feature since Gloria Bell (2018). In 1862, nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) travels from England to small-town Ireland to watch an 11-year-old girl Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Cassidy). The reason soon becomes clear….
This generic globe-trotting action thriller comes across like James Bond on steroids. The Gray Man is based on the 2009 thriller written by Mark Greaney, who was a frequent collaborator with the late Tom Clancy and is credited with writing some of the recent Jack Ryan novels. The Gray Man introduces us to Court Gentry…
I’m starting to suspect at some point during the 2020 lockdowns, a bunch of screenwriters all had the same idea: a highly trained assassin is redeemed through a connection with a child. Cut off from regular contacts, they all pitched this same idea – and many were accepted. That could explain the slew of movies…
Despite perceptions to the contrary, art and crime are never far apart. Dark deeds plagued Renaissance painters like Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi. The artist Walter Sickert has been accused (posthumously) of being Jack the Ripper. And the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre is one of many “crimes of the 20th Century”….
The “wrong man” trope has a long cinematic history. It provided the basis for at least three Alfred Hitchcock classics – The 39 Steps, North by Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much. But it probably found its most intriguing form in the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, like The Conversation. Now director Ferdinando…
Fight for what you believe in. Fight for decency. Fight for who you are. In fact, just fight. That is one, perhaps uncharitable, representation of Malcolm & Marie. This black-and-white two-hander focuses on an African-American filmmaker Malcolm (John David Washington) and his live-in partner Marie (Zendaya), a former drug addict. It’s 1 a.m. and they’ve…
