Return to Montauk (PG ) Max (Stellan Skarsgard) is a writer from Berlin. He’s doing a promotional book tour in New York. Seventeen years ago he had a brief romance with Rebecca (Nina Hoss). Neither of them realised how much they cared about each other at the time. He meets her again now. You don’t have to be Einstein…
Reese Witherspoon could probably have phoned in her performance in this romantic comedy about a woman with two precocious daughters trying to make a new start in life as an interior decorator as she approaches the big four-oh. It won’t tax your brain unduly but if you like Witherspoon, who tends to hoover up the…
The break-out from the Maze prison in 1983 was ultimately unsuccessful – most of the 38 prisoners who escaped were either captured or killed – but it could be argued that it galvanised the powers-that-be towards the Good Friday Agreement which occurred more than a decade later. This brilliant film is set in the aftermath…
Ever since January, when this independent film about a struggling rap singer premiered at Sundance – ‘indie’ works tend to shine there – it’s been the talk of the industry. It was taken up by the distributor Fox Searchlight and the rest is history. Not being a great lover of rap music – I’ve never…
Everything Everything (12A) Maddy has spent most of her 18-year life cooped up in her custom-built California home. Her world is the internet. She can’t go outside the door because she suffers from a rare condition SCID (Severe Combined Immuno Deficiency). Translated into English, that means her immune system doesn’t work. Any virus could kill…
A bullet rings out in the night sky. It’s been discharged from a toy gun by a black man in a hotel room. Shortly afterwards the room is stormed by policemen. The people in the room are thrown against a wall. For the next hour they’re insulted, assaulted and threatened with death. Then murder occurs…
An Inconvenient Sequel (PG) He walks like John Wayne. He talks like Dr Phil. Who is he? He’s Al Gore, the man who once said, “I used to be the next President of the United States.” That didn’t happen but something else did. He found a life outside politics. A life of lecturing on ecology,…
“Romantic England’s dead and gone,” says Steven Patrick Morrissey, deliberately misquoting Yeats in this engrossing biopic, “it’s with Jane Austen in the grave”. Elsewhere his mother makes a wallpaper joke about his hero Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s reputed last words, remember, were: “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” These are just two of the (unexplained)…
When someone in a film says, “it’s going to be the best time ever!” you know they’re in for a nightmare – even (especially?) if they’re in an idyllic Mexican holiday resort where all the beautiful people cavort. The ‘wine doubling as blood’ prologue in a swimming pool sets us up for a Jaws-like scare-athon.…
Science fiction has become science fact. In the clock of history, man has gone from relative ignorance of the movements of the planets (viz. Ptolemy) to Galilean/Einsteinian enlightenment. Many people think the acme of this psychic evolution occurred in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon but a more fascinating – if less…