It’s gems like filmmaker Colin Clark’s memoir of his personal experience with an icon that make the best screen stories, the ones that delve deeper into the celebrity’s persona to prove, disprove or enlighten our knowledge further and make for a more honest and intimate affair. My Week With Marilyn, the name of said memoir [...]
At first glance, Moneyball will ignite interest among Brad Pitt fans. On second glance, it will turn some away because of its baseball subject matter. Sports films are an acquired taste and will never fully convert those who are not into the sport in question. Therefore, as one of the latter, Moneyball is a real [...]
A comedy about cancer is not something the average person feels comfortable laughing at. But when writer Will Reiser has been through the illness, it makes sense that he has something to say about getting over the ‘Big C’ stigma that the rest of us more fortunate people are inflicted with. Paired with Seth Rogen, [...]
Writer-director Jeff Nichols stays close to his Southern roots again with another intensely powerful look at complex family relationships in Take Shelter, starring his Shotgun Stories lead, Michael Shannon, once more. Admittedly, Take Shelter is one of the most original familiar studies to come to the big screen in a long time, set against an [...]
The closing film at this year’s 55th London Film Festival, The Deep Blue Sea, has more of a touch of the stage than the big screen to it, although it has an implied admiration for the exquisiteness of yesteryear’s silver screen in its stunning cinematography and scene construction. It is also another ode to nostalgic [...]
As wartime dramas go, one begins to feel very much like another. But what debut feature-film writer-director Amit Gupta has created is an alternative 1940s ‘reality’, based on a fascinating novel by Owen Sheers, about what if the Nazis had succeeded with their invasion plans of Old Blighty. Resistance actually reignites our interest in the [...]
As predicted, the next film in The Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn Part 1, breaks box office records for the ‘biggest non-3D’ opening Friday film of all time. Perhaps if it had been 3D, it could have topped even that feat – who knows? One thing is for certain, the love triangle that is Bella Swan, Edward [...]
Believe the stories of disturbed audience members leaving various screenings – there were a few hurried departures when we saw this film at this year’s London Film Festival. Debut feature writer-director Justin Kurzel has co-penned a gripping, ‘car-crash’ account based on a true Australian crime story from the 1990s. However, it’s not necessarily the crime that [...]
No stranger to staging well-paced crime thrillers, like The Bank Job, The Recruit and No Way Out, director Roger Donaldson is about as qualified as any to bring this gritty story of crime and revenge to the screen – all set in one of the most exciting cities in the US, New Orleans. But although [...]