YOU DON’T HAVE to speak Japanese to get completely hooked into the maverick possibilities cast out by the story of Isle of Dogs. You don’t even need to speak ‘dog’. This Wes Anderson animated tale of a society gone anti-dog is a fantastic spoof on the political idiosyncrasies […]
THERE IS AN unequivocal boldness to the premise suggested by Rungano Nyoni’s film I am not a Witch, which was chosen to open this year’s European film festival on the art film circuit. By dint of its title, it ticks a number of boxes which are geared to […]
SALIYA KAHAWATTE (KOSTYA Ullmann) has everything. He’s 15 years old. He knows what he wants out of life and he’s completely focused on being the best he can be. He’s also extremely presentable and is loved by many. And then disaster strikes, in the form of a genetic […]
WHAT DO YOU do after 40 years of marriage to a man with a social standing, when you find he’s been canoodling with someone else for long enough to make it serious? If you’re Lady Sandra Abbott (Imelda Staunton), you furiously and tearfully tootle off to your big […]
LET’S FACE IT: our inimitable icons of stage and screen are aging. They’re still beautiful, they’re still sexy and they still have what it takes. Thank goodness the film industry is capable of recognising this and of granting performers such as Judi Dench, Meryl Streep, Annette Bening, Julie Walters […]
IT’S A GREAT rarity for a child actor who wows his audience to go away and come back to the industry all grown up and wow some more. This is exactly what you get in Paul McGuigan’s film Film stars don’t die in Liverpool, which features Jamie Bell […]
IT TAKES A special kind of perspective and balance to be able to tell a story involving a child as adorable and articulate as young Will Tilston, without ramping up the cute factor and drowning in saccharine. Simon Curtis, director of Goodbye Christopher Robin achieves this significantly well, […]
THE FACT THAT James Ivory’s screenplay for Call Me By Your Name got this year’s Oscar nod seems like the Academy Awards was trying to bend over backwards for LGBTI issues. The irony is that this pretty, pretty film, which goes under the guise of being LGBTI-sensitive, nay […]
IT’S MID 17TH century Amsterdam and the money making pastime of predicting the rarity of a tulip from its bulb is all the rage. Picture the hustle and bustle and noise of a 20th century stock exchange, or a nineteenth century auction, toss in a bit of Victorian […]
PICTURE THE VISUAL clichés of Victorian England with all its beautiful costumes, complicated pathways and wooden buildings. While you’re doing this, don’t forget to add in its dire poverty, abject filth and propensity toward child labour. It’s a complicated series of images which this filmic team, headed by […]
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