At Eternity’s Gate dramatises the last years of Vincent Van Gogh’s life. The film, directed by Basquiat’s Julian Schnabel and starring Willem Dafoe as Van Gogh, sees the artist living in poverty and tortured by mental illness in the French provincial town of Arles in the late 1880’s. Despite his desperate circumstances he produces astonishing work but his fractured mental
Read moreMexican director and cinematographer Alfonso Cuaron is renowned for his startling looking films such as Children of Men and Gravity not forgetting his superb contribution to the Harry Potter franchise, The Prisoner of Azkaban. In his latest film, the remarkable and apparently semi-autobiographical, Roma he turns his astonishing aesthetic talents to both his home country of Mexico and what appears
Read moreApart from a general awareness that he was a renowned fashion designer I knew almost nothing about Alexander McQueen prior to the documentary simply entitled McQueen. The film provides fascinating insights into McQueen’s life and career revealing him to be a brilliant but deeply troubled, maverick artist. Lee Alexander McQueen was a rebellious but artistically-inspired lad who left school with
Read moreA film that focuses on the period in which Mary Shelly wrote her sci-fi horror classic Frankenstein should be a thrilling prospect for anyone with a literary bent but director and co-writer Haifaa al-Mansour has transformed the biopic, Mary Shelley, into a slightly steamy, mildly gothic romance between two Derek Zoolander-approved really really good-looking people. Elle Fanning plays Mary Wollstonecraft
Read moreGaugin is one of the more descriptive titles in recent cinema as it sums up much of this film. This is a dramatisation of the life of famed French post-impressionist artist Paul Gaugin or at least the part he spent in the pacific island of Tahiti painting iconic images of the locals. Set in 1891, the film sees poverty-stricken artist
Read moreDarkest Hour, the latest film for Atonement director Joe Wright is the second Winston Churchill biopic and the third Dunkirk-related film in the last 12 months. This film focuses on Churchill’s tumultuous appointment as Prime Minister, his struggle with his war cabinet and his personal demons in deciding Britain’s course as Europe succumbs to Hitler. Gary oldman, who looks as
Read more