Make sure you eat before seeing French kitchen drama Haute Cuisine otherwise you will be drooling like the Alien, so enticing is the parade of French delicacies on display here. In fact, this film is closer to a cooking programme than a traditional drama and may not appeal to those who regard spending hours in the kitchen as a tedious
Read moreFollowing Quartet and Performance, Song For Marion is the third recent film about older people finding solace, meaning and fulfilment through music. Like those films, Song for Marion makes some sobering and touching observations about ageing and mortality although it’s often unsubtle in its emotional manipulation and veers awkwardly into the world of quirky comedy. Terence stamp and Vanessa Redgrave
Read moreBy 2008 the Marvel Comics adaptations weren’t looking too healthy. The Fantastic Four films had been turkeys and the overlong and confusing Spiderman 3 had skittled the high expectations raised by the sensational Spiderman 2. Iron Man, however, was like a 50,000 vault surge of electricity to the ailing Frankenstein corpse of superhero movies. The film combined powerful dynamic action
Read moreNo Many films centre on political campaigns including Robert Redford’s fascinating slow burn The Candidate and the overrated George Clooney/ Ryan Gosling spin doctor drama The Ides of March. No, which focuses on a campaign to oust Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s is one of the stranger additions to the political film genre. In 1988 international pressure forced Augusto Pinochet to
Read moreDespite its minimalist plot and the fact that it is set within the crucible of Arab-Israeli tension on the West Bank, French film The Other Son manages to deliver a warm, sensitive and moving family drama that lingers in the memory. When Israeli teenager Joseph (Jules Sitruk) applies for military service he discovers that his blood type does not match
Read moreKon Tiki has nothing to do with drunken Aussies on package overseas holiday tours. Instead, it’s a dramatisation of the amazing journey taken across the Pacific Ocean in 1947 by Norwegian archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl. Thor believed that, a thousand years ago, the descendants of present day Polynesians journeyed to the pacific islands from South America rather than from Asia as was
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