Tag Archives: film

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 […]

Foreign Film Review: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne

Considered a classic, this 1945 French film, directed by Robert Bresson, shows that when it comes to sex and love the French may seem to be more sophisticated than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts; but that nonetheless no one is more determined to wreck revenge than a woman scorned, even a refined and cultured, Parisian socialite. This […]

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 […]

Foreign Film Review: A Royal Affair

A Royal Affair not only tells an engrossing tale of love, passion, politics and royal intrigue but also manages to elicit your interest in the painful birth pains of modernity in Europe (a subject which is not generally known as a crowd-pleaser) while at the same time giving you an insight into a country that […]

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 […]

Film Review: Mr Smith Goes To Washington

If you’re ever feeling like you’re up against it and in need of some welcome reassurance that it will all work out in the end, then you can do no better than watch either one of Frank Capra’s most famous films, It’s a Wonderful Life or Mr Smith Goes to Washington. (Failing that an enormous […]

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