Armageddon Time, which was the opening night feature at this year’s Jewish Film Festival, is a wonderfully poignant rites of passage drama based on the experiences of its writer/ director James Gray. (Michael) Banks Repeta plays a slightly fictionalised version of Gray named Paul Graff, a decent but precocious and trouble-prone 12-year-old living in Queens, New York in 1980. A
Read moreAs any film fan who has seen the trailer would realise, The Hustle is a remake of 80’s comedy classic Dirty Rotten Scoundrels which starred Michael Caine and Steve Martin and was itself a remake of the 1964 film Bedtime Story which featured David Niven and Marlon Brando (in an intentional comic role). Notably, The Hustle has a gender flip
Read moreThe Ocean’s 11 etc movies are one of the less likely film franchises. Conceived in the 1960’s as a Vegas lark for the Rat Pack, the concept was resurrected in the 2000’s for George Clooney and a gaggle of his bros to play criminal hepcats ripping off casinos. With Ocean’s 8, the Ocean’s concept, like Doctor Who has reappeared in
Read moreColossal from writer director Nacho Vigalondo is a strange beast mixing downbeat personal drama with quirky comedy and a Kaiju monster movie; it’s an odd but mostly successful combination. Recalling Charlie’s Theron’s character from Young Adult, Anne Hathaway plays Gloria a once successful writer whose life has spiralled into drunken chaos. When her prat of a boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens)
Read moreAlong with David Fincher, Chris Nolan (The Dark Knight Trilogy, Memento, Inception) has been the most exciting Hollywood filmmaker of the last decade. James Cameron may have made a bundle with Avatar but Fincher and Nolan have given us something darker, more cerebral and ultimately more satisfying. Consequently, Chris Nolan’s latest film, space epic Interstellar, has been the subject of
Read moreThe problem with many film musicals is that, removed from the artificial world of the stage, the site of people bursting into song seems ridiculous. This becomes a bigger problem when the film goes for a gritty, realistic look as opposed to the deliberately staged look of the classic film musicals from the 1940’s and 50’s. Les Miserables, a screen
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