Arctic

I thought I’d visit the arctic before it all melts away, and who better to accompany me than the estimable Mads Mikkelsen. That said this is not a film to watch in shorts and a tee shirt (as I did) because the cold somehow seeps off the screen and into your bones – whilst the…

Vox Lux

Brady Corbet’s first film “The Childhood of a Leader”, was an intriguing, patient and cautionary mini-masterpiece. His second “Vox Lux” isn’t. It is a film in three acts called respectively “Genesis”, “Regenesis” and “Finale” which irritated me from the start and got progressively weaker . It begins with a Columbine style school shooting in 1999,…

Woman at War

A strange and rather marvellous offering from Iceland’s Benedickt Erlingsson which taught us a number of important lessons. First; if you’re a foreign national do not go sight seeing around Reykjavik unless you’re prepared to suffer multiple arrests. Second; the rain in Ukraine is hard to explain. Third; if you hear a Sousaphone on the…

Styx

Imagine a slightly dishevelled Ingrid Bergman in a feminist remake of All is Lost and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the look and feel of Wolfgang Fischer’s thoughtful water feature. But put aside the adventurism and survival aspects of the story and you’ll find a quietly seething contemplation on the fate of refugee…

Tolkien

Well my pressssssious what have we got here? Director Dome Karukoski’s account of the early life and times of JRR was fitfully engaging, occassionally revelatory, contained some apt cinematic flourishes and even had the confidence to make at least one deliciously arch joke. But it was also just a smidgeon dull and contained too many…

Loro

I’m in the middle of reading “The Dark Heart of Italy” by Tobias Jones, where the core of that country’s political and commercial life is laid bare in the most uncompromising of ways. The economic system in particular is shown to be intrinsically corrupt and don’t even get me started on organised crime, the Catholic…

Long Shot

What to do if, like me, you love and admire everything about Charlize Theron but are indifferent going on antagonistic towards Seth Rogan, whose brand of gross-out, man-child humour you have studiously managed to avoid for over a decade? Well fear not because you can go and see this secure in the knowledge that she…

Red Joan

For a spy drama set during the war containing sex, murder, blackmail, deep dark family secrets and the race to produce an atomic bomb this was (astonishingly) about as tense as a gentle punt down the Cam on a Sunday afternoon. In a fictionalised version (why?) of the true story of ‘Granny’ spy Melita Norwood,…