Tolkien is the literate, sophisticated but occasionally lacklustre biopic of The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit author JRR Tolkien. Directed by Finn, Dome Karukoski (The Grump) the film sees Tolkien as a young officer (Nicholas Hoult) in the hell of the trenches in First World War France. Wounded and delirious he recalls his early life in which he
Read moreThe Chaperone is a charming but underweight and oddly creaky story of self-discovery and the emergence of a star amid the rapidly changing world of 1920’s America. The chaperone of the title is Norma Carlisle (Downtown Abbey’s Elizabeth McGovern) a rather prim and proper woman from Kansas who surprisingly offers to chaperone 15-year-old Louise Brooks (Haley Lu Richardson) while she
Read moreAt Eternity’s Gate dramatises the last years of Vincent Van Gogh’s life. The film, directed by Basquiat’s Julian Schnabel and starring Willem Dafoe as Van Gogh, sees the artist living in poverty and tortured by mental illness in the French provincial town of Arles in the late 1880’s. Despite his desperate circumstances he produces astonishing work but his fractured mental
Read moreMexican director and cinematographer Alfonso Cuaron is renowned for his startling looking films such as Children of Men and Gravity not forgetting his superb contribution to the Harry Potter franchise, The Prisoner of Azkaban. In his latest film, the remarkable and apparently semi-autobiographical, Roma he turns his astonishing aesthetic talents to both his home country of Mexico and what appears
Read moreApart from a general awareness that he was a renowned fashion designer I knew almost nothing about Alexander McQueen prior to the documentary simply entitled McQueen. The film provides fascinating insights into McQueen’s life and career revealing him to be a brilliant but deeply troubled, maverick artist. Lee Alexander McQueen was a rebellious but artistically-inspired lad who left school with
Read moreA film that focuses on the period in which Mary Shelly wrote her sci-fi horror classic Frankenstein should be a thrilling prospect for anyone with a literary bent but director and co-writer Haifaa al-Mansour has transformed the biopic, Mary Shelley, into a slightly steamy, mildly gothic romance between two Derek Zoolander-approved really really good-looking people. Elle Fanning plays Mary Wollstonecraft
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