Film

By Linda Marric Last week I had the chance to meet with Billy Howle, star of a new film adapted from Julian Barnes’ Booker Prize winning novel The Sense of An Ending. The film is directed by the brilliant Ritesh Batra and stars Billy as the younger version of Tony, who also played by Jim Broadbent in later years. We spoke about the casting process Billy went through and a number of other things relating to his character in the...

By Linda Marric After the success of highly acclaimed 2013 film The Lunchbox, and the accolades showered on him from film fans and critics alike, Indian director Ritesh Batra is back, this time with this brilliantly accurate and honest adaptation of Julian barnes’ novel The Sense of An Ending. This long awaited production, which stars amongst others, Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling and the excellent Harriet Walter is released this week. The film is sure to attract the attention of fans...

As inevitable as getting old and paying taxes, there is another instalment in the Fast and Furious franchise. Seemingly unstoppable, the latest adventure represents the eighth outing in 16 years, with a sense that after years of trying the series had finally hit its groove. The last three films have not just created excitement at the box office but also garnered some surprisingly good reviews. Impossible as it may have seemed a few years ago, Fast and Furious 8 opens...

By James McAllister If Stoker served to showcase how devilish director Park Chan-wook could be, his new film, The Handmaiden, proves he’s equally as devious. It’s a heated, and handsomely mounted period potboiler that has been adapted by the Korean wunderkind with a gleeful sense of stylised excess, from British author Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith. Transplanting the story from Victorian England to 1930s Korea, when the country was still under Japanese rule, Chan-wook – working with his regular co-writer...

By Linda Marric Book adaptations can often be problematic, but when the book in question has won one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, a whole new set of issues can find themselves attached to the project. Luckily, The Sense Of An Ending manages to cleverly avoid all of those problems. Staring Jim Broadbent and directed by the brilliant Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox, 2013), the film presents its audience with one of the most memorable and thoroughly...

By Michael McNulty It’s time to leave the badlands of work and turn to the badlands of the screen. This Friday’s Forgotten Film is a classic. Badlands is Terrence Malick’s Bonnie and Clyde. It went on to influence the later films True Romance and Natural Born Killers. This is Terrence Malick first film, who before dipping his toe into filmmaking had been a Rhode Scholar recognized for translated Heidegger. He directed it at the age of 30, it kick started...

Review by Leslie Byron Pitt What can we say about a film called Tomboy? We can say that this transgender switching revenge flick is as offensive as it is boring. What’s more frustrating is that it’s co-written and directed by the great Walter Hill whose stripped-down features of previous eras were brilliant examples of both social commentary and economical entertainment. From The Warriors (1979) to 48 Hours (1982) this is a filmmaker who not only has something to say but...

By Linda Marric The main issue with Pete Travis' new film City Of Tiny Lights isn’t its lack of an interesting story to tell. With a great premise and a fantastic cast, this could have easily become one of this year’s greatest British success stories. However, the film is largely let down by a huge dose of schmaltz coupled with a jarringly meandering screenplay which ultimately leaves you wondering what went wrong. Riz Ahmed, is Tommy Akhtar, a private detective...

By Linda Marric In Going In Style, director Zach Braff opts of a rather generic style of filmmaking to bring us a less than exciting heist movie featuring three of Hollywood’s most respected veteran actors. This remake of a Martin Brest’s 1979 movie of the same premise and name, sadly falls short of convincing on all accounts, and in absence of an interesting story to tell, resorts instead to cheap laughs to make up for its shortcomings Joe (Michael Cain),...