Alison Lesley

Porto Buio, a small island in the Mediterranean, is home to an annual Christmas Nativity play, a massive tourist attraction for the isolated community. But this year, the child supposedly playing Jesus has grown up and no longer fits in the manger. What’s worse, a child has not been born on the island for years. With the Nativity in jeopardy, a Baby Jesus must be found. At the same time, there is ...

Set towards the end of her reign, Victoria & Abdul follows the unlikely friendship between Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim, a Muslim prison clerk from India.   The film is inspired by true events and based on the similarly titled book by Shrabani Basu, with some degree of creative license. The film starts off very funny and entertaining, and gradually becomes more heart-warming. Unfortunat...

Frank Adler (Chris Evans) wants his niece Mary (McKenna Grace) to live a normal life. The only problem is Mary is a child genius, and when she struggles to accept the authority of school, they are both draw into a bitter custody battle with Mary’s maternal grandmother, Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan), over how the child should be raised. Gifted is a hard-to-fault, well shot, well paced film about the pres...

Emily Walters (Diane Keaton), an American widow living in Hampstead, forms an unlikely bond with Donald Horner (Brendan Gleeson), the outcast living on Hampstead Heath, beside Emily’s grand flat. When developers threaten to forcibly remove Donald from his self-built home in order to build luxury apartments on the lot, Emily is caught between her high-powered, well-to-do friends, and the ‘homeless ...

Al Gore returns 11 years after his first ground-breaking documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which has been repeatedly criticised, parodied and commended since its release in 2006. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power follows up the predictions of the original film, with harrowing evidence that shows what was criticised as hyperbole has come true in recent years. However, this film takes a positi...

The 2017 Volvo Scandinavian Film Festival got under way last night at the Cinema Paradiso with the preview screening of Sami Blood, written and directed by Amanda Kernell. Sami Blood (originally titled Sameblod) explores the systemic discrimination and oppression of the indigenous Sami people of Sweden, in the 1930s. Elle-Marja, a 14 year-old reindeer herder, is sent to a boarding school that enfo...

Most audiences won’t be sure what to expect from a film with such a quirky title. After the sudden loss of his mother, a young boy is sent to a foster home, where he joins other similarly displaced children. With the help of some new-found friends, the children learn how to trust, love and be loved. My Life As A Zucchini (originally Ma Vei De Courgette) is a short film, at only 70 minutes lo...

After dying in a tragic accident, a man returns to his house as a ghost in a white sheet and attempts to reconnect with his bereft wife. A Ghost Story, written and directed by David Lowery, and starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, explores life after death, legacy and loss. The film is a beguiling meditation on the enormity of time and the universe, and our place within it. The film’s immense s...

A young woman shows up at the workplace of her much older former-neighbor to confront him about their shared past. Ray’s (Ben Mendelsohn) new life is threatened by Una’s (Rooney Mara) abrupt arrival, as their confrontation dredges up painful memories, unanswered questions and hidden longings. Una is an adaptation of David Harrower’s play that shocked the world, Blackbird. This filmic version still...

Voyage of the Southern Sun follows the journey of Michael Smith, the man who brought Yarraville’s Sun Theatre back to life, as he retraces the historical Qantas, Imperial and Pan Am airmail routes, in search of the glory days of 1930’s aviation, visiting cinemas along the way. Smith was awarded the 2016 Adventurer of the Year from the Australian Geographical Society, and became the first (and only...

Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) discover a sarcophagus beneath a ruined city in Iraq, and take it to London to be studied, unknowingly unleashing a long dormant evil in the form of a mummy. Once awoken, the Egyptian heiress, Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), sets about regaining the power that was wrongly stolen from her, bringing forth ancient horrors into the m...

After his father’s murder, Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) is raised in a brothel, unaware of his royal heritage and birth-right. When the sword of Excalibur resurfaces after years of being lost beneath the sea, Arthur’s uncle and his father’s usurper, Vortigern (Jude Law), scours the kingdom to find the true heir to the throne and destroy him. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is the latest reboot o...