Tag: Film Reviews

Two Jewish cousins who were once as close as brothers meet at the airport for a trip to Poland in honour of their grandmother who, “thanks to a thousand miracles”, survived the Holocaust. They join a tour group and plan to break off on the last day to seek out their grandmother’s old house. It…

A Western starring Viggo Mortensen promises a lot. The Danish-American actor skirted around mass stardom playing Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, but mostly stays below the radar in films like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2009), the hard-core Eastern Promises (2007) and the almost perfect small thriller A History of Violence (2005). Mortensen wrote, directed…

Each year, cinema is meant to die and never does. But there were dark clouds this past 12 months, with audiences down and production companies pulling back so tightly that Clint Eastwood’s likely final film, Juror No.2, went unceremoniously to streaming. One of the problems in 2024 was lack of product. The long tail of…

At a fort city on the coast of Africa in about 200 AD, a young couple kiss and play among the freshly washed sheets hanging from the line. It’s a movie set-up that signals trouble on the horizon. Cue the arrival of an attack armada that is so clearly CGI the boats glide like ghosts…

In early 19th-century France, the owner of a textile business in Reims who has a small sideline in winemaking, Phillipe Clicquot, marries his son François (Tom Sturridge) to Barbe Nicole Ponsardin (Haley Bennett), the daughter of a neighbouring industrialist. This arranged marriage grows into love, even as François shows himself to be a volatile man…

The heavy journey from rock-bottom addiction into something approaching normal life is infinitely individual. This memoir of landscape and redemption is based on the real Amy Liptrot, who escaped her alcoholic London life and returned home to the Scottish Orkneys, and from there to Papay, a tiny rugged island on the north-west tip of the…