I’ve heard it said that movies come into our lives for a reason, bringing something we must learn, and Wicked (Part 1). From the director that brought us In The Heights and the masterpiece that was Step Up 3D, Jon M. Chu, comes the much anticipated silver screen adaptation of the beloved musical of the same name. While part of the success of In The Heights comes from the raw and realistic slant to...
Releasing today, mostly French production Mr Blake at Your Service! is an odd one. Starring John Malkovich (Red, Burn After Reading), this endearing and quirky comedy drama shirks genre tropes and fails to realise the stakes it takes an hour and fifty minutes to set up. In order to unpack this film a little some spoilers are ahead. Fair warning, it’s a little désordonné. Director Gilles Legardinie...
The United States’ Apollo program was established in 1962, when President Kennedy announced that men would walk on the moon by 1970. At the time of that announcement, America was already engaged in what the media termed the Space Race. This had started five years previously, in 1957, when the Soviet Union had launched the world’s first unmanned space vehicle, Sputnik 1 and it became more intense i...
Tashi, an ambitious and former tennis prodigy is married to a champion (Art) on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband’s redemption takes an unexpected turn when Mike faces off against former best friend Patrick, who is also Tashi’s former boyfriend. Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers brings a ménage à trois to the tennis court, bouncing fast paced romantic drama and comedy across th...
The four 70-something women of BOOK CLUB (2018) return in BOOK CLUB: THE NEXT CHAPTER. Vivian (Jane Fonda), Diane (Diane Keaton) Sharon (Candice Bergen) and Carol (Mary Steenburgen) are still in the book club they established 45 years ago. The movie begins with the challenge of Covid-19 forcing the quartet to shelter in place and go through the uncertainty of that process. The book club goes on Zo...
Spoiler Alert: stories of good men dying young will always make you cry, but sometimes they can leave audiences looking for more. It feels oddly harsh to critique Michael Showalter’s Spoiler Alert as it is based on a true story of the same name, written by Michael Ausiello. It tells the story of how he lost his husband to cancer, and follows their relationship from its inception, through their gro...
I’m not too sure about you, but it has been a very long time since I thoroughly enjoyed a modern rom-com, but What’s Love Got to Do with It? certainly broke that streak. What’s Love’s director Shekar Kapur takes a clichéd rom-com formula and many over-done tropes, that have historically centred on white characters, and attempts to reframe them for a modern multicultural audience. While at times au...