The opening hour of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy takes its sweet time—way too much of it, in fact. We meet Bridget several years after Bridget Jones’s Baby, where she and Mark had a son and got hitched. In Mad About the Boy, Bridget has become a widow and single parent to Billy and his younger sister, Mabel, after Mark died while on a humanitarian trip four years prior. This new reality ...
Sometimes films set out to be unpleasant and unsettling – putting their audiences in a state of discomfort ultimately drives them to a greater understanding of the overall subject matter, and for many art house films that works. However for Queer, an adaptation of the unfinished novella of the same name by the famed William Burroughs, the lack of follow through leaves the audience feeling well, ju...
There is nothing that quite compares to a tear-jerker or a good romance and We Live in Time seems to be already demonstrating its prowess in both categories. While it isn’t reinventing the genre, honestly it’s almost a cliché – the determined beautiful-but- quirky heroine marries the quiet, bookish male lead but shockingly develops a terminal illness somewhere in the narrative. However, the ...
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...