It has been a remarkable 12 months for director Richard Linklater. Novelle Vague, his behind-the-scenes dramatisation of Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless was a triumph and now, in Blue Moon, a film about another iconic artist, this time lyricist Lorenz Hart, the Before Midnight director reminds us of his talent for dialogue-driven personal dramas. Lorenz Hart famously collaborated with songwriter Richard
Read moreLike a strange mash-up of Misery, Survivor, Horrible Bosses and The Admirable Crichton, horror maestro Sam Raimi’s latest film Send Help,, mixes the gleefully perverse and the predictable in a comic thriller with feminist overtones. Rachel McAdams plays smart, dedicated but socially awkward corporate slave Linda. Promised a major promotion by the former but now deceased CEO, she’s shocked to
Read moreIn this media-saturated world no organism could be unaware that a new version of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights starring two of the most Hansel-approved ‘so hot right now’ Hollywood stars, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has hit our cinemas. Wuthering Heights is one of the most adapted novels in the English literature canon with more than 30 film or TV
Read moreFrench auteur Jean Luc Godard’s films are not for all tastes. His approach and subjects vary wildly, some of his movies are undoubtedly revolutionary, some feel like intriguing yet pretentious film school experiments while political works like Sympathy For The Devil, which features the Rolling Stones, contains some insufferable polemic hectoring. Godard no doubt enjoyed infuriating some viewers but no
Read moreChloe Zhao’s Hamnet is a Shakespeare biopic of sorts that, on one level explores the story behind the Bard’s writing of Hamlet, possibly the most famous work of English literature but also deliberately displaces Shakespeare to the sidelines to examine the plight of his wife Agnes. Rather than retelling a famous person’s story, this is a stark, striking looking, but
Read moreThe charming, erudite but undercooked British film The Choral from director Nicholas Hytner and playwright Alan Bennett, is part of that subgenre of films in which music is a redemptive and healing force for a community. Like Brassed Off, the recent My Brother’s Band and The Commitments, The Choral features a group of average folks uniting and transcending their lives
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