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BROOKLYN (2015)
Brooklyn is a period drama adapted from Colm Tóibín’s novel of the same name that follows Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), a young Irish woman who leaves her quiet seaside town on the Emerald Isle for the brave new world of America to make a new life for herself. After finally settling across the Atlantic, Eilis…
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THIS IS ENGLAND ’90 – ‘Autumn’
Sunday night, 9pm, is a TV timeslot made for the warm bubblebath that is Downton Abbey. It’s a time of the week that demands comfort and distraction in equal measure. “Keep me warm! Don’t remind me of what’s really out there!” Before you roll into bed, the flickering screen should make you crave the kind…
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DOCTOR WHO, 9.2 – ‘The Witch’s Familiar’
Perhaps it was inevitable that Missy (Michelle Gomez) and Clara (Jenna Coleman) would escape the ‘maximum extermination cliffhanger’ by using those vortex manipulators so kindly pointed out with alacrity last week. What I wasn’t expecting was a monochrome flashback where Missy showed how clever The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) is at getting out of impossible situations.…
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Trailer: POINT BREAK (2015)
People always have the same conversation whenever a beloved film or cult hit gets remade: why redo something that wasn’t bad to begin with? It’s a silly question. Nobody complains when a Shakespeare play is re-staged or re-interpreted, and some films almost demand to be remade every 20 years because they play differently with other political and social backdrops.…
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5 New U.K TV Shows to Watch this Autumn
The British television industry doesn’t work to the seasonal schedules of our American cousins, strictly speaking, but it remains true autumn is a time when lots of new drama and comedy tend to debut. It’s much trickier knowing exactly when new shows are due, because UK television’s not very willing to ‘plant a flag’ in the schedule…
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EVEREST (2015)
When a film’s based on a true story, it often means it’s telling such an incredible story that it’s hard to believe it’s actually true; or it can occasionally mean it’s tragic and sad enough to remind you about the harsh realities of our lives. Everest is the latter kind of true story. This is…
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THIS IS ENGLAND ’90 – ‘Summer’
It couldn’t last, could it? The relative breeze that was the opening episode of This is England 90 has proved, as expected, to be a false flag—making way for something altogether more familiar and frightening in this compelling second episode. Now in the summer of 1990, this instalment sent the young and reckless members of the gang—Harvey…
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DOCTOR WHO, 9.1 – ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’
Would you leave a child to die on a battlefield? Well, you might have second thoughts if that child was Davros (Joey Price), the future creator of the Daleks. That’s the dilemma for The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) when he inadvertently drops in on the Thousand Year War between the Kaleds and the Thals in “The…
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RICKI AND THE FLASH (2015)
I intended to begin this review by commenting on how infrequently Jonathan Demme’s in the director’s chair these days, but a quick look at his IMDb page proved me wrong. For a man in his early seventies, Demme is actually quite prolific, spending much of the past several years directing shorts and TV episodes in…
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THE MESSENGER (2015)
Labels can be a tricky thing for a film to come lumbered with. Genre is an ever-flexible thing and films don’t always fall unequivocally into one group or another. For instance, Wikipedia describes this new Robert Sheehan vehicle The Messenger as a “supernatural mystery horror”, but that’s not right at all. Whatever film those three adjectives suggest…
