Retired Film and Media teacher
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
The Brutalist 2024
I'm watching The Queen's Gambit at the moment on Netflix, which is about a female chess player in 50s/60s America. With it's outsider viewpoint and themes of addiction, it is perhaps a surprising bedfellow of The Brutalist, with its Jewish holocaust-surviving architect finding himself an outsider in post-war USA.
The film is beautifully shot (was there a nod to the Seventh Seal at one point?) with a great soundtrack and some stand out performances,
particularly from Adrien Brody as the…Translated from by -
Conclave 2024
Whatever you feel about stories involving helicopter-piloting, sky-diving, wannabe-popes obsessed with dark matter, most of us secular souls are probably aware of what a Conclave is because of the book and film Angels and Demons. And, after all that excitement, what sort of storyline could you get out of a procedural film about the election of a new pope?
Having read the Robert Harris book Conclave, there weren't any narrative surprises for me watching this film, though this didn't spoil…Translated from by
Popular reviews
More-
Lee 2023
This isn't the right place to conjecture on why us Brits, including me, are obsessed with all things WWII. But, this was a story I wasn't aware of at all, despite studying Roland Penrose as a great collector of modern art. Lee Miller was his wife and a war photographer, who famously set up a photo of herself in Hitler's bath.
I found this film stunning and its all about performance. It is such a brave piece of acting from…Translated from by -
Napoleon 2023
Film is such a collaboration of people much more talented than I, so reducing an epic like this to a pithy paragraph or two feels wrong. But, film is about reaction in the end, so here goes.
Napoleon is spectacular, particularly with the battle scenes that feel like every old war oil painting you've ever seen in galleries distilled onto film. But, in the end I wasn't too sure what I was supposed to come away with from Ridley Scott's…Translated from by
