In 2002, the tense thriller Phone Booth (2002) was centred around, you guessed it, a phone booth. Now, 22 years later, Robert Zemeckis’ new drama Here is centred around a lounge room. It’s about the people who lived and roamed in that space dating back to the formation of Earth. It features a volcanic eruption,…
The consummate stylist of the American cinema is back and in top form. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is another excellent entry in the director’s canon and is probably his most accessible work since Rushmore. As I’ve said in these (digital) pages before, Anderson is a love-him-or-hate-him proposition. If you’re in the “hate-him” camp, you can…
Hollywood has a habit of remaking popular European films, rather than merely releasing the subtitled original and thus broadening the audiences’ horizons and cultural experience. The latest film to undergo the bland Hollywood treatment is the 2015 Swedish comedy/drama A Man Called Ove, which was the highest grossing foreign language film for 2016 in the…
Elvis lives. Well, not quite. But Baz Luhrmann has breathed new life into the legend around consummate performer Elvis Presley, the best-selling solo recording artist of all time. Elvis the movie unfolds as a hero and villain story. The hero is obviously Presley (Austin Butler), an artist with a prodigious talent and the villain is…
In Paul Greenrass’ new film, News of the World, a veteran of the Civil War travels across the country reading the news from papers he collects. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) shares stories of disasters, politics and gossip for audiences in every town he visits. He’s mainly talking to people who are illiterate or…
Tom Hanks both stars in and scripts Greyhound. And with his writer’s hat on, he does a pretty solid job in adapting C. S. Forester’s novel The Good Shepherd for the screen. Aaron Schneider – whose last film was the far more unconventional Get Low (2009) – steps into the director’s chair. And the result…
A sad and angry man is rescued by a most unlikely source in the moving A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. For more than three decades (1968 to 2001) Fred Rogers was the most beloved figure on US television. He imparted words of kindness and wisdom to millions of children on PBS’ long-running program Mister…
How’re you feeling? Winter getting you down a little? Yeah, I know the feeling. All you want is a big warm hug, right. Well, I can’t give you that, but I can suggest you seek out the cinematic equivalent, Toy Story 4. The latest installment in the wildly successful animated franchise is like pulling on…
Steven Spielberg’s latest drama, The Post, looks at the Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers. These leaked documents showed the full extent of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War over four decades. They also revealed how successive administrations had lied to the public and covered up the truth. This is a tense thriller about government…
