Chruchill (PG) I interviewed Gay Byrne once and asked him what he thought was the main reason for his success in broadcasting. He replied tartly, “Events, dear boy, events!” What he meant was that he’d simply been in the right place at the right time. Perhaps the same could be said of Winston Churchill. Churchill…

The Shack (12A) In Paradise Lost John Milton tried to “justify the ways of God to man”. Stephen Fry did the opposite in more recent times on The Meaning of Life with Gay Byrne, castigating him for what he saw as his cruelty to, among others, children. The latter is a theme that’s apposite to…

Baywatch (15A) “I don’t mind being called a dumb blonde,” Dolly Parton likes to say, “because I’m not dumb – and I’m not a blonde.” Pamela Anderson has parlayed a similar trajectory in her career, playing into the sexist stereotypes that proliferate around her.  One joke goes: “The longest anything stayed in Pam’s head was…

Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge (12A) Johnny Depp has just come through a messy divorce. In addition he’s suing his management team for fraud so he could probably do with the ridiculous amounts of money they tend to offer him for twaddle like this. He’s also embroiled in a so-called ‘scandal’ about allegedly having…

King Arthur: Revenge of the Sword (12A) That Arfur bloke wasn’t a bad old geezer, wuz he? No, mate. Okay, so it done his head in trying to get the hang of – whaddya call it, Excalleybur? – but the job was Oxo in the end, innit? There’s a joke told about John Wayne when…

Miss Sloane (15A) Think General Schwarzkopf in a trouser suit. Failure isn’t an option for her. She’s Madeleine Elizabeth Sloane and she’s going up against the top dogs of the Senate, Samson-style, in a pitched battle about gun regulation. As we all know, this is a heavily divisive issue in America. The ‘doves’ say the…

Lady Macbeth (18) People usually talk about Shakespeare’s ‘Big Four’ – Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Macbeth – as his pre-eminent works. I wouldn’t argue with that. If the first three have a fault it’s that few members of their casts can hold a candle to the main character. Not so with Macbeth. Lady Macbeth matches…

Fast and Furious 8 (12A) The two most popular types of books on the market these days, I’m told, are cook books and diet books. I’m thinking of writing one called Cook It But Don’t Eat It. That should corner both markets. Our society is beset with contradictions. Every night on TV – justifiably –…

Handsome Devil (15A) ‘The love that dare not speak its name,’ to quote Oscar Wilde’s famous phrase about homosexuality, has become very vocal in recent times. So much so that we’re almost in danger of replacing homophobia with heterophobia. I say this because most of the ‘nice’ people in this film from writer/director John Butler…

Going In Style (12A) What else can Hollywood do with the elderly? It’s made them into dolts. It’s made them into geniuses. It’s even, for goodness sake, put them into space (in Space Cowboys). Now, in a re-make of a 1979 movie, they’ve turned them into bank robbers. Enter Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan…