Having opened the Moro Spanish Film Festival earlier in the year and now screening in general release is the movie industry satire, Official Competition. The film, which stars two of Spain’s most famous actors, Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, is largely a dig at weird, egotistical actors and the slightly ridiculous world they inhabit. Penelope Cruz plays lauded arthouse director
Read moreHi folks. Here’s the review of latest film for writer/ director, Scott Derrickson, The Black Phone, starring Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw, as heard on ‘Built For Speed’ on Fri 15th July 2022.
Read moreThe Cannes Grand Prix award winning Finnish film Compartment No. 6 is a surprisingly and impressively gritty and moody take on the romantic drama genre. Here, young Finnish woman Laura (Seidi Haarla) leaves her lover, Russian academic Irina (Dinara Drukarova) in Moscow to travel to Russia’s frozen north in Murmansk to view ancient petroglyphs (i.e. rock carvings). The train journey
Read moreFrench drama, Haute Couture is an admittedly sentimental but genuinely charming and at times moving story of second chances and reconciliation. Set amid the highly skilled dressmakers of the elite French fashion house, Dior, the film also reveals a more working class element to the lofty elite world of high fashion that we don’t normally see. The film centres on
Read moreTaika Waititi’s previous instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor: Ragnarök was, at least for a while, a strikingly odd experience and refreshingly different flavour in what had become the bland cinematic equivalent of a fast-food franchise. Suddenly, droll, pisstaking Kiwi humour had entered the overblown Wagnerian Marvel superhero fantasy universe. At first, it felt quite subversive but the film
Read moreFrench film, After Blue is one of the weirdest movies of the year and one that shows that weirdness alone does not necessarily equal fascinating art or entertainment. In what might be glibly dubbed eco-feminist science fiction, it’s set in a future where humanity has fled an environmentally devastated Earth to the planet, After Blue where only women have survived
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