The Long Kiss Goodnight ★★★½ IN 1994 Renny Harlin was well and truly considered bankable in Hollywood following the commercial successes of Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger.  But then the Finnish director blew $90 million making pirate adventure Cutthroat Island and sent one of the studios almost broke. A year […]

Harlin and Davis make amends with prototype thriller

The Seed of the Sacred Fig ★★★½ THERE won’t be any premieres of The Seed of the Sacred Fig in Iran. Mohammad Rasoulof, writer and director of this much-praised political drama, fled his home country under threat of eight years in prison. Despite being previously arrested for spreading anti-government propaganda, […]

Prison threat can’t stop Iranian drama’s success

Dirty Angels ★★★ FRENCH actress Eva Green has a great time playing a hard-as-nails soldier in the American action thriller Dirty Angels. Green is one of the actresses who is always very watchable but never seems to choose, or get, that one great role that will take her to stardom. […]

Bond alumni reunite for action thriller

Firebrand ★★★½ JUDE Law has moved into that career period where he either takes the money for anything or concentrates on roles that really interest him. Thankfully he’s gone for the latter. Later this year we will see him playing a veteran cop trying to infiltrate a right wing terrorist […]

History according to Law

Stockholm Bloodbath ★★½ I WONDER what Danish audiences think of Stockholm Bloodbath. Swedish director Mikael Håfström’s 2023 historical drama portrays the Danes in 1520 as absolute murderous bastards and his own countrymen as squeaky clean. In fact his pulpy style of storytelling has the vicious Danish villains poking fun at […]

Danes and Swedes still at it

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl ★★★½ IT’S extraordinary how well stop-motion animation can convey emotions with the slightest of movement. In Nick Park’s latest Wallace & Gromit outing, all we have to see is a slight raising of the eyebrows and shrug from Gromit to know what he thinks […]

Nothing foul about Feathers’ return

Killer Heat ★★½ DESPITE Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s popularity there have been surprisingly few film adaptations of his works. Of the handful, they have ranged in quality from the very good, 2011’s Headhunters, to the disappointing The Snowman from 2017. Killer Heat, based on one of his short stories and […]

Killer Heat a rare Nesbø adaptation

Top 20 films of 2024: 1 The Substance 2 Anora 3 Dune Part 2 4 Zone of Interest 5 Civil War 6 Anatomy of a Fall 7 The Apprentice 8 All of Us Strangers 9 Conclave 10 The Holdovers 11 Furiosa 12 Longlegs 13 Ferrari 14 A Different Man 15 […]

Top 20 of 2024

We Live in Time ★★★½ FANCY a good cry? Look no further than Irish director John Crowley’s We Live in Time. Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield play a couple whose relationship is tested by a life-threatening illness, but this is no ordinary weepie. Nick Payne’s script eschews the standard tropes […]

Pugh and Garfield lift weepie

A Real Pain ★★★½ JESSE Eisenberg’s second film is a nicely observed and quietly funny study of a family relationship. In A Real Pain, Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play cousins David and Benji who embark on a trip to Poland to honour their grandmother who survived the World War II […]

A Real Pain is painstakingly real

Megalopolis ★★½ IT TOOK Francis Ford Coppola 40 years and $120 million of his own money to bring his magnum opus Megalopolis to the screen. But it only took free admission and a few hours for some critics to tear the film apart. Like the baying crowds filling Coppola’s alternate […]

Coppola’s Megalopolis flawed in execution

Better Man ★★★½ MUCH has been made of the decision to use a chimpanzee as the stand-in for a human Robbie Williams in Better Man. The biopic could have gone horribly wrong from the start, and maybe it will for some people. But trust me, it doesn’t take long to […]

The evolution of Robbie