Much as I admired La La Land I never like to see one film sweeping the boards at the Oscar ceremonies – as Damien Chazelle’s film seems set to do this year – any more than I like to see the Lotto being won by one person instead of a syndicate. At the time of…
Fences (12A) ‘Good fences make good neighbours’, wrote Robert Frost. The present – heavily symbolic – film re-writes that epithet to read, ‘some people build fences to keep people out and other people build them to keep people in’. Based on August Wilson’s Pulitzer pize-winning play of the same name, it deals with the efforts…
Hacksaw Ridge (16) There are so many Christological echoes in this blistering World War II tale, by the end you expect messianic doctor Desmond Dos (Andrew Garfield) to say something like, “I am who I am” as he’s being stretchered off the battlefield. A pacifist from the outset, he enlists in the army on an…
Jackie (15A) If you get the accent right, the part usually takes care of itself. Natalie Portman does that to an exemplary degree here – right down to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s tendency to pronounce ‘r’ as ‘w’ – and ends up giving a performance of such quality that the film, like its title, truly belongs…
Manchester by the Sea (15A) If there’s a more natural actor than Casey Affleck working in films today I’d like to hear about him. I wait for his films to come out like I once waited for those of Robert de Niro. He’s our new James Dean, our new Montgomery Clift. He understands the conflicts…
Live By Night (15A) The ‘myth kitty’ – if I may borrow Philip Larkin’s famous phrase – of this atmospheric crime flick ranges from The Godfather and Goodfellas through Scarface, The Road to Perdition and Chris Cooper’s Black Mass. A more immediate reference point might be Ben Affleck’s The Town, which mirrors it in its…
La La Land (PG) If you told me last year that Ryan Gosling would be playing the romantic lead in a musical, I’d probably have called for the men in the white coats to take you away. On second thoughts, though, this actor has been nothing if not diverse in his career thus far. Why…
Silence Martin Scorsese, who studied for the priesthood as a young man, has divided his directorial career between mainstream dramas and revisionist religious works like Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ. Silence falls into the latter category. It’s been in gestation for many years and chronicles the fortunes of a 17th-Century Jesuit missionary called…
In a world where commercialism rules OK, Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village – ostensibly a documentary about the Marian shrine in Knock and the people who visit it but ultimately a commentary on the state of religion in Ireland today – was never going to wipe the more mainstream releases off the screen.…
The Birth of a Nation (15A)