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 moreThe Father is an extremely moving, sometimes distressing depiction of the ravages of dementia. Adapted from his stage play, director Florian Zeller has fashioned, not so much a medical story but one of vanishing identity and the tragic impact this has on a man and his family. Anthony Hopkins plays a man also named Anthony who it appears is living
Read moreApparently based on a true story, Kidnapping Mr Heineken is, like Snakes on A Plane, a film summed up by its title. In 1983, a group of young small-time Dutch criminals led by Cor Van Hout (Jim Sturgess) and Willem Holleeder (Sam Worthington), decided that the best way to a quick buck was to kidnap someone with the means to
Read moreThe novelty of Red was that the gun-totin’, fist-fightin’ action stars, Bruce Willis, John Malcovich and Helen Mirren were all well past 50. This casting lent some senior-citizen empowerment, sophistication and philosophical reflection to the testosterone-fuelled world of the action movie. Red was still pretty silly and implausible but it was clever enough to stand out from the usual action
Read moreHitchcock, is a prosaic but still engrossing biopic of the legendary director Alfred Hitchcock (played here by Anthony Hopkins). Based on the critically acclaimed Stephen Rebello book “Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho”, the film doesn’t provide an overview of Hitchcock’s life but instead focuses on a pivotal segment of it, in this case the making of what is
Read more