Ever since my mid-teens, the music of Pink Floyd has had an immense impression on me (I thank my older brothers David and Paul for their encouragement). So this post is really just an excuse to talk about their music through the largely tenuous, but admittedly relevant, link of films - films, of course, that … Continue reading Absolutely Curtains: The Movies of Pink Floyd
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018, Warner Bros. Pictures and Heyday Films) Directed by David Yates. Written by J.K. Rowling. Featuring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Don Fogler, Ezra Miller, Zoë Kravitz, Jude Law and Johnny Depp. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the second in an expected series of five films set in … Continue reading The One Review: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018, 20th Century Fox and New Regency) Directed by Bryan Singer (completed by Dexter Fletcher). Featuring Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Ben Hardy, Gwilym Lee, Joseph Mazzello and Mike Myers. Bohemian Rhapsody is a very credible biopic of Freddie Mercury and the rock band Queen - from simple beginnings to global popularity. I don’t … Continue reading The One Review: Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
Venom (2018 Marvel Entertainment, Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures) Directed by Ruben Fleischer, featuring Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed. This recent addition to the Marvel superhero/monster-menace series of films is a great box office success, but critics are harder to please. First of all, there is no doubt that Venom contains a comic-book … Continue reading The Two Reviews: Venom and Early Man
C’est La Vie (2017, France) Directed by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano. Featuring: Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jean-Paul Rouve, Gilles Lelouche, Eye Haidara, Benjamin Lavernhe and Hélène Vincent. This light French comedy (with subtitles) is set in a single day as it follows the preparations and mayhem of a troubled wedding celebration at a grand Chateau. Writer-directors … Continue reading The Two Reviews: C’est La Vie and The Breaker Upperers
Mission: Impossible – Fallout Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Produced by J.J. Abrams and Tom Cruise. Featuring Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Henry Cavill, Simon Pegg, Michelle Monaghan, Ving Rhames, Sean Harris, Vanessa Kirby and Alec Baldwin. The Mission Impossible series has become impossible. Impossible to comprehend. Impossible to keep up with. Impossible to reason with. Impossible … Continue reading The Two Reviews: Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018 Christopher McQuarrie)
Did you know there is going to be a sequel to Braveheart (1995)? I know! If ever there was a movie which needed a sequel. So many questions were left unanswered. Did Scotland’s nobles universally accept Robert Bruce? How did the writing of the ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ effect the legal position of the Scottish royal … Continue reading Dramatis Scocie – The Effective Use of the Scottish Landscape in Film
Solo: A Star Wars Story is a good film. It isn’t great. It won’t change your life. It won’t make you a better person. Or a deeper thinker. Or a more considerate lover. But it WILL pass a couple of hours of entertaining escapism – set in the Star Wars Universe but not relying on … Continue reading Solo: A Star Wars Story – Stuck-up, Half-witted and Scruffy-looking But Still A Pretty Good Movie
Avengers: Infinity War (2018, Marvel Studios & Walt Disney Studios) Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, featuring Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Josh Brolin (and a heap of others). Avengers: Infinity War is a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superhero film, and a sequel to two previous Avengers films. This is a long … Continue reading The Two Reviews: Avengers: Infinity War and Solo: A Star Wars Story
I put together this piece (about cities and how they are presented in film) from a number of notes and emails I wrote some years ago. Someone I know was giving a course in the Middle East on that very subject and they asked if I had any ideas, so I managed to collate a … Continue reading The Cinematic City: An Overview
Momentary Cinema 