Mother’s Day ★★★½ FORGET about recent female action heroes played by the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Charlize Theron or Angelina Jolie. Ex-NATO Special Operations agent Nina, played by Polish actress Agnieszka Grochowska, would have them all for breakfast. In Mateusz Rakowicz’s Mother’s Day, Nina despatches adversaries with every manner of weapon, […]

Nina’s happy Mother’s Day

Hillwalkers ★★½ IT NEVER ceases to amaze how many first-time directors also write and edit their offering. Irish drama Hillwalkers is the debut from Tom Cosgrove and it’s a mixed bag. The story is derivative and there are problems with both the structure and pacing, but it does demonstrate a good […]

Hill walkers lose way

Blood and Gold ★★★ KEEP an eye out for German director Peter Thorwarth. I haven’t seen any of his early films but 2021’s Bloody Red Sky was an exciting blend of horror, action and thriller pitting plane hijackers and a vampire. In his 2023 film Blood and Gold, Thorwarth opts […]

Bloody fight for gold

Influencer ★★★ AS YOU flick through the mountain of material available on your film streaming services it’s hard to know where to start. Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and pin the tail to the donkey, as it were. One of my last ‘blind’ stops, that didn’t end […]

Influencers beware

Gladiator ★★★★½ AFTER a decent practice run in the historical drama sub-genre with 1492: Conquest of Paradise, the great British director Ridley Scott sought to bring the Roman gladiatorial age back to mainstream cinema. Sword and sandals films, most notably the Oscar winning religious epic Ben Hur, were staple viewing […]

When Crowe was King

Oppenheimer ★★★★½ “AND now I have become death…the destroyer of worlds.” The words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, as portrayed by Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, present the awful moral quandary that haunts the man known in history as the father of the atomic bomb. Nolan’s stunning new film is […]

Nolan delivers another epic story

Barbie  ★★★ NO DOUBT a 60 year-old man’s opinion isn’t the best indicator of whether Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is any good. But here it is anyway. While the film is entertaining, well-acted and wonderfully imagined, the script and messaging is unfortunately a little muddled. The film starts in a beautifully […]

Barbie message a little muddled

Salvador   ★★★★ PUT Oliver Stone and James Woods together for the same film and there is no guarantee what the result will be. It’s happened three times to date – the sports drama Any Given Sunday, the biopic Nixon and Salvador, the only one of Stone’s films in which Woods […]

Stone and Woods an incendiary combination

Women Talking  ★★★½ WHILE I dislike when film critics say ‘I wanted to like it, but…’, I understand what they mean. Sarah Polley’s 2022 drama Women Talking had been drenched in praise by the time I caught up with it, so expectations were high. Generally it delivered, but there were […]

Talking women take action

The Novice  ★★★ ISABELLE Fuhrman isn’t a household name…yet. The American actress has been around since the early 2000s and is best known for portraying the lead in the 2009 horror film Orphan and its sequel. But the best performance I have seen from her is in the 2001 psychological […]

The Novice showcases Fuhrman

Sicario  ★★★★½ DENIS Villeneuve is one of the best visual directors working in film today. His last three achievements have all been in the sci-fi genre – Dune Part One, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. Early in his career he concentrated on dramas, like the astounding Incendies, but it was […]

Sicario fires on all cylinders

Deliverance  ★★★★½ IT’S hard to believe that two of the four main cast members of 1972 survival classic Deliverance hadn’t acted in a film before. Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds were the established names that director John Boorman was mainly relying on. Both deliver great performances with former stunt man […]

Survival classic delivered