Category Archives: Favourite Films

A section devoted to some of my favourite films in the English language!

Outlaw King

Bloody Battle Scenes and Gutsy Heroes Come Together in a Visual Feast. Medieval Scottish History gets the Hollywood Treatment Yet Again. Outlaw King neatly sums up the adage that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. The eponymous king is Robert the Bruce, a thorn in the side to the English but a hero […]

Film Review: Pride

With the NHS currently under attack and junior doctors forced to go on strike, I thought I’d take a look at Pride, a recent British film set during the crushing of the miners’ strike and which examines the importance of unions and solidarity even with the most unlikely of partners! Pride joins a select group […]

Film Review: Casablanca

What makes a film a classic? In a nutshell it’s a film that you don’t mind seeing again and again; you can probably hum music featured in the movie, albeit most likely out of tune, and you can at least quote several of the lines. Casablanca fits easily into this classification. Even people who haven’t […]

Film Review: Calvary

Calvary is a gem of a film. For starters, it has the eminently watchable Brendan Gleeson as its star, portraying the linchpin of the film, Father James Lavelle. It also benefits from a wonderfully intelligent script by John Michael McDonagh who adeptly deals with complex issues with a great deal of humour and manages to tell […]

Film Review: Behind the Candelabra

If you watch Behind the Candelabra and find it hard to believe that during his lifetime no one seemed to cotton on to the fact that Liberace was gay, then you clearly didn’t live through the 70s. Behind the Candelabra harks back to that seemingly more innocent time and ends at the point in time […]

Film Review: Love is All You Need

Love is All You Need is a gem of a movie. On the one hand it would seem to be a deceptively simple rom com but there’s a lot more going on. For starters, the film also deals with the repercussions of someone having to deal with cancer. Now, in theory that should be a […]

Film Review: Ides of March

Ides of March is an apt title for a political movie dealing as it does with the shenanigans required to become a presidential candidate in 21st century America. Symbolic, as the date is, for the day when Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC. The film shows that over 2,000 years later nothing in politics […]

Film Review: Argo

Argo takes us back to the 4th November 1979 and the Iran hostage crisis. And just like the political thriller Day of the Jackal before it, Argo manages to pull off the nigh impossible – that tricky paradox of being able to create suspense in a story whose ending we already know. It’s a difficult […]

Film Review: One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of only 3 films to have ever won the 5 main Academy Awards (the other two being It Happened One Night and Silence of the Lambs); with Jack Nicholson’s performance in the film recently being named the greatest movie performance of all time by Total Film Magazine. […]

Film Review: The Third Man

This is one of my favourite films. In it Orson Welles shows what real star quality is by dint of the fact that he’s hardly in the movie yet still manages to dominate it. The film is set in Vienna, a city for which, admittedly, I have a particular soft spot for. But that aside, like […]

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