Romance
No Hard Feelings Review
No Hard Feelings is Sony Pictures latest “raunchy” comedy from the mind of director/writer Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys & Bad Teacher). With a trailer promising a plethora of foul language, sexual references and full-frontal nudity, here’s hoping Stupnitsky can go 3 for 3 and deliver another laugh-out-loud comedy. Facing the imminent loss of her beloved childhood home in Montauk, Long Island, 32...
Book Club: The Next Chapter Review
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 Review
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...
What’s Love Got to Do With It? Review
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...
Emily Review
My love for this movie “resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary”, to quote Emily Brontë’s most famous work Wuthering Heights. Emily, directed by Andrew Dominik, spins us a creative interpretation of the titular author’s short life and the deeply personal motivations behind her most famous work. Emily, portrayed by Emma Mackey (Maeve in Sex Education) ...
Bones and All Review
Definitely do not have meat for dinner if you’re going to see the new coming of age thriller Bones and All, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Set in the 1980s Midwest, it is an adaptation of a novel with the same name by Camille DeAngelis. It follows two beautiful and oddly relatable young cannibals as they seek out the secrets of their pasts that lay hidden across a myriad backroads of the Midwest, a...
Ticket to Paradise Review
Ticket to Paradise promises escapism, tropical paradise and a return to the Roberts/Clooney era of big blockbuster films. While upon first glance, it might look like a cliché tropical romance curated for the ‘mum’ crowd looking to while away two blissful hours imagining staring into George Clooney’s big brown eyes, (or hey, Julia Roberts’ too, its 2022), and well… it is. Our heroine Lilly (Kaitly...
Cyrano Review
Little did he know that when he made his 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, Joe Wright would be cementing his place in my bubble bath cinema of joy. Having rewatched his version countless times from the warm, sudsy confines of someone else’s bathtub, I feel the same sense of calm and contentment each time that only a two-hour massage or beta blockers bring. With his new film Cyrano (an adap...
The Hating Game Review
THE HATING GAME is a really fun film. I enjoyed it a great deal. If you don’t like rom-coms, you’re not going to like THE HATING GAME. But if you do like – or even love – rom-coms, it’s a really fresh take, with an engaging story. Great comic timing, glorious romance, and some very pretty lead actors. Lucy works for a prestigious book publishing company that has recently merged with a ...
Annette Review
“So may we start?” sing Sparks and the cast at the beginning of Annette, a film that asks its audience’s permission before proceeding with surely one of the most unique cinematic experiences they’ll have this year. It is the English language debut from bizarro French auteur Leos Carax (Holy Motors) that Wikipedia describes as a ‘musical romantic drama film’ but that IMDb classifies as a documentar...
Reminiscence Review
REMINISCENCE is set in a near-future Miami, that is a dying, semi-flooded city. The United States is in political and economic trouble, with corruption being an everyday reality. The poor are struggling, and the rich have bought-up the best places to live, literally known as the Dry Lands. Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) is an investigator who helps clients find missing objects and remember importan...
In The Heights Review
I just love IN THE HEIGHTS. Right from the beginning, I was hooked! That opening number, ‘In the Heights’? It’s a whirlwind of a song. We meet Usnavi (our hero, played by Anthony Ramos), most of the people in the neighbourhood, and of course, Washington Heights itself. The real star of IN THE HEIGHTS is Washington Heights. It’s a Latino American neighbourhood in New York City. And always under thr...
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