The History of sound is an evocatively shot, wonderfully acted but slow-moving story of musical anthropology, grief, fragile identity and queer romance. Paul Mescal stars as Lionel Worthing, a young man from a dirt-poor farm in Kentucky who, as a musical prodigy, wins a scholarship to a Boston conservatory. There, in 1917, he meets musician David White (Josh O’ Connor)
Read moreThe Avatar film franchise, which depicts the battle between the giant blue indigenous Na’vi people of the planet Pandora and us greedy humans, holds the number one and three positions on the list of highest grossing films of all time. This is a remarkable feat that seems due to a combination of a novel science fiction concept (in this case
Read moreThe Nuremberg war crimes trials are in many ways seen as the culmination of the Allied Powers’ grand moral victory over the Nazi regime. The trials, which took place in the German city of Nuremberg from 1945 to 1946, laid bare the Nazis’ crimes of aggressive warfare, genocide and the horrors of the Holocaust. The occasionally riveting but sometimes clumsy
Read moreDo we really need remakes of b-grade 80s slasher films? Halloween had enough cultural cache and Gen X nostalgia value to justify the reboot but ultra-violent Santa Claus movie Silent Night Deadly Night from 1984 did not have ‘essential remake’ written all over it. The new version, a goofy slasher comedy is, however, a little more watchable and a little
Read moreZootopia from 2016 was one of the cleverer, wittier and more charming animated films of the last decade. Set in a world entirely populated by talking animals who managed to live together without eating each other, it mixed family friendly crime caper adventure with dash of political corruption and had us cheering for its two likeable heroes, intrepid rabbit junior
Read moreLast year’s Wicked, the first in a two-part film adaptation of the smash hit stage show, was a pop cultural sensation; a fun frothy musical fantasy that seemed to fill the void in major event escapist cinema left by the conclusion of the Harry Potter films. It was also a remarkably effective vehicle for the prodigious talents of its leads
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