Film

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP Having seen the film poster countless times on my way to work each day, and seeing the image of the boy next to the large tree-like monster, I couldn’t help but think that A Monster Calls was simply going to be a retelling of The BFG. Yet as the lights dimmed and the film began comparisons to Roald Dahl and other childhood favourites disappeared, as a very different monster awakened. A Monster Calls is the story...

La La Land was more than welcomed on the Red carpet at Hollywood Town, during the Golden Globe Awards. Not one or two, but 7 nominations were there for the musical movie La La Land. It looks like this movie is set to dominate the 74th edition of this Awards Ceremony. And some of the nominations are for best actress in a comedy or musical, best actor in a comedy or musical, best comedy or musical and best director. This movie...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric Top 5 lists are never easy to compile and it’s almost impossible to please everyone, so as the yearly debate rumbles on about what constitutes a Christmas movie and whether Die Hard is one of them, here’s a list of my recent and all time favourite holiday movies. 5- Bad Santa (2003)      The recent sequel to this 2003 box-office hit might have been a huge disappointing mess, but the original remains one of the...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP We have all tried to make a good impression before. Whether it’s a job interview, the first day of school, or meeting a significant other’s parents the prospect can be rather daunting. Why Him? is interested in the latter and follows the old family meets inappropriate boyfriend structure, but this time the premise has been updated to fall in line with today’s standards – or lack of – with crude jokes fitted in at any available...

By Michael McNulty The representation of immigrants, diasporas, and conflict of cultural identity has, in the latter half of the century, slowly found footing in recent cinema, under the moniker of migration cinema. These films, which often blend or reimagine the generic conventions and production modes and practices typically associated mainstream cinema with less conventional methods, are often the products of filmmakers who are themselves a product of either post-colonial or post-war displacement. They tell the stories of immigrants and...

By Linda Marric @Linda_Marric Taking place some time in between Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), the new movie in Disney’s Star Wars franchise revival is every bit as exhilarating and as thrilling as The Force Awakens. Directed by British director Gareth Edwards (Monsters 2010), Rogue One may not be a fully fledged Star Wars “episode”, but it is however packed-full of all the familiar themes...

By Linda Marric @Linda_Marric Directed and produced by Otto Bell, The Eagle Huntress is a beautifully executed documentary account of how a teenage girl from a nomadic khazkh minority in Mongolia broke thorough a gender barrier upheld by hundreds of years of tradition, to become the first female to ever hunt with a bird of prey on the Altai mountains. Bell used his life savings to fund the film after coming across the story online, relying only on a few...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric Sharing the title of D.W Griffith’s 1915 racist ode to The Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy, Nate Parker’s The Birth Of A Nation’s message couldn’t be more different. The film tells the little talked about story of a slave rebellion in 1831 lead by Nat Turner, a literate preacher who was born into slavery and singled out as a child by his master’s wife to learn to read and write. As well as writing and...

By Anna Power @Powerpops No stranger to controversy, Oliver Stone continues his exploration of personal conflict enmeshed with the political, in his latest film Snowden. Bringing fresh perspective on Edward Snowden – the man, and his whistleblowing on covert civilian data monitoring by the NSA (National Security Agency), the film casts a paranoiac shadow over labyrinthine, secretive government operations resulting in a tense, dramatisation of events. Building on Laura Poitras Oscar winning documentary Citizenfour, the film starts at the now...