RETROSPECTIVE: The L-Shaped Room [DVD/BluRay]

Edwardian hypocrisy and post-war deprivation are the order of the day in Brian Forbes’ The L-Shaped Room.

Based on Lynne Reid Banks’ book of the same name, the film follows Jane (an Oscar-nominated Leslie Caron), a twenty-seven year-old French émigré who arrives in early-60s London.…

REVIEW: Paddington 2

 

That adventurous, well-mannered British bear has returned to the big screen… and not a moment too soon!

The first Paddington was, for me, an unexpected delight, delivering one of the biggest laughs of any film in 2014. This sequel is, if possible, even more charming, and all the more comforting in these turbulent times.…

REVIEW: Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express is undoubtedly a grand production, but lacks the elegant simplicity to be a truly first-class entertainment.

Unlike Sydney Lumet’s 1974 adaptation, this is less a starry, lavishly-upholstered murder mystery than a modern-day blockbuster that just seems to be based on an Agatha Christie novel.…

RETROSPECTIVE: Perfect Blue – shades of Hitchcock in animated psychodrama

Twenty years on, Perfect Blue remains an almost perfect thriller.

A Hitchcockian study of identity, desire, and obsession recast in animated form, the film goes to some twisted places that even the Master of Suspense might shy away from.

Mima (voiced by Junko Iwao) is lead singer in the cutesy J-Pop quartet CHAM!,…

REVIEW: Geostorm

To say that Geostorm is as dumb as a bag of rocks is an insult to hardworking geological processes.

It’s not that time and energy, and roughly $120 million, didn’t go into the production – it’s that they did and, despite extensive reshoots, this is what we ended up with; a film, which if not quite putting the “disaster” into “disaster movie”, is certainly, on its own terms, a mess.…

REVIEW: Thor: Ragnarok

It’s hardly the end of the world as we know it.

Let me preface this review by saying, first and foremost, that Thor: Ragnarok is a lot of fun.

That’s the thing most critics seem to have taken away from this latest instalment in the Marvel canon: that it’s fun, funny, loads of fun; just, like, the funnest.…

Little Grey Celluloid: Some Thoughts on Poirot in Film (and TV)

So, Brexit…

When Agatha Christie conceived of perhaps her most iconic creation, her choice of nationality for him carried with it a certain European esprit de corps. It was 1916, though the first novel wasn’t published until 1920, and Belgium was then occupied by the forces of imperial Germany.…