Expectation can be a curious animal. One one hand it can fill you with joyful anticipation, your mind and pulse racing as you consider how wonderful the show you’re about to watch/the album you’re about to listen to/the book you’re about to read etc will be. The possibilities seem limitless, Continue Reading
Movies
Review: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is the sort of movie I am supposed to love. It has the handsome but geeky married fisheries expert, Dr Alfred Jones (the ever delectable Ewan McGregor) whose marriage died long ago, who deserves a second chance at love. The driven but likeable investment consultant, Continue Reading
Review: “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”
To paraphrase Dickens, old age can be the best of times, it can be the worst of times. And so it is for the members of an intrepid group of of British seniors, previously strangers saved for one married couple, who journey to India on the promise of Continue Reading
Review: “The Vow”
The Vow is a story about love triumphing in the most dire of circumstances, and by all rights it should be deeply moving. Movies with that kind of theme always are right? Well, they should be. Taken at face value, The Vow hits the bills perfectly. It is a heart Continue Reading
Review: “My Weekend With Marilyn”
My Weekend With Marilyn, manages against the odds, to say something fresh about Marilyn Monroe, surely one of the most documented figures in modern pop culture. That in itself is an achievement. That it manages this, and is a warm, rich and engaging movie into the bargain, (something that eludes Continue Reading
Review: Harvest (Stadt Land Fluss)
I need to say from the outset that I normally like slow-burning indie dramas. In fact, it’s the greater bulk of the movies I see. I like to watch them because they take the time to craft a rich and fulfilling narrative, and create fully-formed characters that you care about, Continue Reading
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (Review)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is grief writ large, and yet also taken down to it’s most raw and intimate. And you don’t get much more raw and intimate than the 11 year old boy at the centre of the absorbing drama, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), who loses his much Continue Reading
Review: "The Artist"
The Artist is one of the best movies I think I have ever seen. Granted, that is always a risky thing to say since I will no sooner declare that and another immensely creative, well-acted, beautifully shot and realised movie will come along and I will be in love all Continue Reading
"Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol" (review)
I got Blockbustered tonight! It’s not as uncomfortable as it sounds, trust me. Well ok sometimes it is torturously awful, like every last gram of life force has been sucked from you molecule by molecule. You despair of ever gaining back those hours lost to entertainment so vapid, it makes Continue Reading
"Women on the 6th Floor" (review)
Women on the 6th Floor is a movie obsessed with class, race, money and power. But wait, it’s not as grim as that sentence makes it seem. In fact, the movie is a delight focusing on the great changes that many Western societies saw take place in the early 1960s, Continue Reading